Web Metrics

Good metrics for web sites are nearly as ellusive as good metrics in software development. The most frequently used metric in software is probably the lines of code (LOC) count which totally rewards inefficient, bloated, cut-n-paste style coding over well designed and reusable coding styles. Similarly, web metrics like hit counts and page views can similarly reward inefficient web coding styles (such as lots of extra page elements (graphics) to be downloaded, or excessive numbers of pages to be navigated to get the content).

This article has a nice sumary of some metrics like pageviews and reach and how redesigning some populate sites to use newer techniques like AJAX and RSS would significantly change their current metrics. It doesn't offer a solution for a good metric, but demonstrates the need for one.

In the aforementioned article, it has a link for specifically measuring AJAX applications with Analytics which is useful information.