Most folks in newsrooms across the county seem to be measuring the success of their website in page views (some incorrectly use the term hits). While page views can be helpful and in the end sales typically sells page views (if their are three ads on a page and the page gets 10 page views, sales can sell 30 ads), but not all page views are created equally.
Anyone who has produced a site with page view goals knows that you can increase page views by throwing up tons of photo galleries. Sure, you meet your goal, but the value of a photo gallery page view is no where near that of a story page or a section front (the user is quickly on the page and doesn’t see or click on the ad).
You could also get linked to by FARK.com, digg.com or some other national website, but that draws a national crowd to your local site. Someone from outside of your area isn’t who you local advertisers are trying to target. So you are reducing the value of the ad impression.
By focusing on page views you create lots of photo galleries or worse yet force users to do things in multiple clicks that they should be able to do in one. You also devalue the quality of your ad impression by driving a national audience. All things that I argue hurt your site.
So how do you measure the success of a website? The two best ideas I’ve heard are local visits or the obvious revenue. There are many options out there; time spent, bounce rate, unique visitors, etc. I’m curious, what does your website use to set goals for the newsroom/producers? Does the goal help or hurt the users?