Why we count revenue, not pageviews

When we ran our last company we had three dashboards open all day. One counted visitors. One counted sign-ups. One, the one that mattered, counted money. None of them talked to each other, so every Monday somebody spent an hour in a spreadsheet trying to work out which of last week's visitors had turned into last week's revenue.

The spreadsheet was always wrong, and it was always wrong in the same direction. It over-credited whatever channel happened to send the most traffic, because traffic was the only number the analytics tool could see. A link on Hacker News that sent four thousand people and one customer looked like a triumph. A newsletter that sent two hundred people and eleven customers looked like noise.

Traffic is a proxy. Revenue is the thing.

Pageviews were a reasonable proxy for success in 2008, when the business model of most websites was advertising and every view was worth a fraction of a cent. For a product company they are a distraction. What you actually want to know is which of the people who arrived became customers, what they did on the way, and where they came from in the first place.

So Current starts from the payment and works backwards. When Stripe tells us a charge succeeded, we already know which visitor started that checkout, which pages they read before it, and which link brought them to the site the first time. The channel gets credit for the money, not for the crowd.

What changes when you can see it

The first thing that happens is that some channels get quieter. Ours did: the launch post that we were most proud of turned out to have paid for one month of one customer. The second thing is that some channels get much louder. A tiny comparison page we had nearly deleted was the first page for a third of everyone who paid.

The third thing is the best one. You stop arguing about attribution models, because you are no longer modelling anything. You are reading a list of receipts.

The question is never how many came. It is how many stayed, and who paid.

That is the number on the top of every Current dashboard, and it is the reason there is only one plan and it costs what it costs. Everything else on the page exists to explain that number.