There is no magic single variable for this, you have to use a mixture of different variables and projections to get it right. The ones you need to track wind u

There is no magic single variable for this, you have to use a mixture of different variables and projections to get it right. The ones you need to track wind up being a mix of the following: 1. Page views: Track overall growth 2. Page views per user: Track engagement 3. Visits: Track overall growth. 4. Unique visitors: largely useless metric since every tool out there disagrees with each other on the number. 5. Revenue per user: Track user segmentation. 6. Revenue per page view: Track infrastructure costs. 7. Active users: Finer measure of engagement and churn. 8. User acquisition/retention cost: Track cost of marketing/outreach. (1) is important if you are selling inventory on CPM. (2) is needed to get the mix of organic growth with existing users to increase, while keeping a different focus on acquiring new users. (3) mostly needed for the ad sales pitch. No point getting a million visitors if you can't retain them, but sales needs inventory. (4) has always been ~10% off between different tools. Can be an indicative measure of engagement. (5) helps you keep ceilings in place for acceptable cost per user (6) can help you make decisions on infrastructure where you need more than what you can buy. (7) possibly the only user-related metric that should matter internally. (8) can help you understand why bidding on that $5 CPC keyword does not make sense when what you make per user is $3.