| > a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in. not really it should be what you are competent and proficient at people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't) there are many proxies to know what they like if you want to plan what to publish and when and for how long, website visits are one of the less interesting. a lot of websites such as this one get a lot of visits that drive no revenue at all. OTOH there are websites who receive a small amount of visits, but make revenues based on the amount of people subscribing to the content (the textbook example is OF, people there can get from a handful of subscriber what others earn from hundreds of thousands of views on YT or the like) so basically monitoring your revenues works better than constantly optimizing for views, in the latter case you are optimizing for the wrong thing I know a lot of people who sell online that do not use analytics at all, except for coarse grained ones like number of subscriptions/number of items sold/how many email they receive about something they published or messages from social platforms etc. that's been true in my experience through almost 30 years of interacting and helping publishing creative content online and offline (books, records, etc) |
This isn’t true for all channels. The current state of search requires you to adapt your content to what people are looking for. Social channels are as you’ve said.
It doesn’t matter how you want to slice it. Understanding how many people are coming to your website, from where and what they’re looking at is valuable.
I agree the “end metric” is whatever actually drives the revenue. But number of people coming to a website can help tune that.