This weekend, Susan Mernit, the founder of Oakland Local, led a session on online media metrics at the Block by Block Community News Summit. The takeaway? Surface-level metrics can be misleading, so someone at your publication should devote at least one or two hours a week to looking closely at the data. Take pageviews, for example. A seemingly straightforward assessment of an article’s reach– ‘How many eyeballs did we get?’– is, it turns out, shallow, because you no clue as to the quality of the traffic. Instead, look at time spent on site. If you have 20 thousand views, but 19 thousand of those arrived through Google and left within ten seconds of landing (i.e. bounce rate), you’re not getting traction. Watch the click path, which delineates the user’s path throughout your site, and at which gates users … Read entire article »