The Three A's of Metrics: Actionable, Accessible, and Auditable

For metrics to be effective, they must have three key characteristics: they must be actionable, accessible, and auditable.

Actionable

An actionable metric is a metric that demonstrates clear cause and effect. It should be a metric that you can use to make decisions and take action. If a metric does not change your behavior, it is not an actionable metric.

Vanity metrics are often not actionable. For example, if the number of pageviews on your website goes up, it is not clear what you should do to replicate that success. On the other hand, if you run a split-test and see that a new feature increases the conversion rate, that is an actionable metric.

Accessible

An accessible metric is a metric that is easy to understand and access. It should be a metric that everyone in the company can understand, from the CEO to the interns.

One way to make metrics more accessible is to use tangible, concrete units. For example, instead of talking about "website hits," talk about "people visiting the website." This makes the metric much more relatable.

Another way to make metrics more accessible is to make them widely available. At Grockit, for example, the daily metrics report was emailed to every employee in the company.

Auditable

An auditable metric is a metric that is credible and can be verified. It is important that the data is credible to employees, so that they can trust the metrics and use them to make decisions.

To make metrics auditable, you should be able to trace them back to the source. For example, you should be able to talk to the customers who are represented in the data. This will help to ensure that the data is accurate and that you are not being misled by the metrics.