Our Measure Of Success

We want to be a data-driven team, and believe we can measure anything. So we started thinking how we could measure if changes we made improved the Raw Signal experience.

We decided our metric would be transfers/page view.

Transfer = a person clicking from Raw Signal to the original news story.
Page View = how many pages people view on our site.

Our mission is to get people to interesting content as much and as fast as possible. Each time someone comes to our site, and doesn't go to a new story means we failed to present something interesting to the user.

Once we started tracking this metric, we could easily see how changes in our algorithms affected transfer rates over time. This would alert us to when a change was probably hurting user satisfaction.

Here's our current chart below.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that we have our golden metric, we'll start a/b testing various changes to drive up that number. Wish us luck!

http://www.rawsignal.com