Metrics!!

One of my friends runs a site that allows people to share any of their life experience as long as it is women centric. In a focused group meeting to increase the traffic to this particular site, there was a suggestion to highlight the top three articles read by max number of people in the home page to help the visitors to understand what kind of site is it.

I was a silent observer in this meeting because my experience with UX design and marketing is very limited! However something inside me was not convinced because of a few unrelated articles in the site. Though the initiative is all about leadership development, there are also articles on some unrelated topics only because they are all either written by women or there is at least one woman involved in that experience.  It is pretty much like my blog, where I write on topics that represent my ideals, my reflections and my experiences. The only connection between articles is they are all my experiences or views.

So I decided to review the 'performance' of my top three articles to understand if they truly reflect what kind of site is my blog. I took a look at the stats provided by google from the time I started writing blogs. To my surprise and as an answer to my unconvinced feeling, I found two out of the top three articles to be no where close to what I am.

The top most blog is "Can Drum stick grow in a container?".  This is my first ever blog and only one of the two blogs I wrote on gardening. I am not an expert gardener and this article is not a good representative of what I write on. Second top is my reflection on life "Duryodhana vs. Yudhisthira" and is a good representative though it was only a momentory thought I never remembered to follow. The third article is "பயமின்றி வாழும் கலை". This is also a not a good representative of what I write on. This is one of the first few articles. Because I did not know what to write on, I picked up a random article that came in a magazine around that time, wrote it in my style with a few additions from my observations on the translation! I was neither dealing with my own/ anyone else'  fears nor reflecting on the feeling of fear in general!! If the article I read had triggered any thinking about fear, this blog post would qualify to be a representative. this one is a mere translation! 

Hmm… This is another proof that metrics can mislead and/or drive wrong behaviors if not designed or captured carefully!