What we stopped measuring, and why

It is easy to add a metric and almost impossible to remove one, so once a year we go through and ask which of them has changed anybody’s mind.

Last year we dropped individual visitor paths, time-on-page for exit pages, a scroll heatmap and a keyword report that had returned nothing but “not provided” since 2013.

Three of them nobody has mentioned since. The fourth, time-on-page for exit pages, gets asked about roughly once a quarter, and every time the honest answer is that the number was never measurable. There is no second pageview to measure against, so the tool was reporting an estimate as a fact.

If a report cannot change a decision, it is decoration. If it cannot be measured honestly, it is worse than decoration.