Metrics Index | Create Getting Started Guide for Metrics

[arun-gupta]

Create a Getting Started Guide for DevRel metrics.

What are the top metrics that should be measured, and how to go about reporting them. KISS it.

Need to define audience, industry, reporting, etc.

[j12y]

What about starting with something easy and within the control of most programs to try and ensure success. I'll take a quick stab at it here to give something to react to.

• define what the metric is
• define any pre-conditions
• define why its impactful (may need to defer to secondary measures)
• define how I'll measure it
• define which tool(s) i can use to collect it
• define how I can automate measuring it
• define what trend i should be looking for
• define remediations or additional actions I could take if I don't like the measurement i'm getting
• define guardrails i should have in place to prevent measurement abuse chasing a number
• capture samples from various programs

Activity Metric

Activity metrics measure team output and effort. This is an excellent place to start a measurement program because activities your team owns and executes on are within your control. It is reasonable and expected to be able to gather analytics and reports from the tools your team depends.

Category: Content Production Volume

Metric: Blog Post Publish Rate

The number of blog posts published relative to time and effort expended preparing them.

This is an impactful metric because blog posts:

• increase brand awareness
• increase discoverability in search
• deliver value to your ideal customer to solve one of their problems

Pre-Conditions

A few things will be needed for successful collection of this metric.

• you need to have a public blog
• you need to have editorial control to publish

How-to Measure It

You'll need to know:

• amount of time spent in production
• number of blog posts created

For example, if you have one person producing 2 articles per week you have a publish rate of 2.0. If you have articles published by four separate people each spending 3 days effort per article you have a publish rate of 3.0.

The time period should be a minimum of seven days. Typically a 90 day time frame is most reliable for demonstrating consistency in a content production program.

Automation

Many blogging platforms support RSS or Atom Feeds. In this repository is a python script you can run that will fetch the feed and calculate the number of authors and number of blog posts delivered over a period of time.

$ drf_blog_publish_rate --30d
found 10 articles
found 3 authors
blog publish rate = 0.111

Put a reminder on your calendar and gather this on the same day of each month and enter it in a data warehouse tool. The Tools Catalog shows a range of these from a simple spreadsheet to complex database and analytics products.

If your team of authors has other responsibilities you may decide to adjust this value by a constant factor. See Overcoming Obstacles section.

Trends

You'll want to combine this productivity metric with other outcome metrics later. Your goal will be to increase the blog publish rate while impacting your secondary outcome measures.

See:

• blog attention hours - maintaining or increasing attention hours indicates content is relevant for audience
• blog conversion rate - increasing conversion rate indicates clear CTA
• blog total volume - increasing total volume indicates good search tuning and content marketing efforts

Guardrails

You'll want to combine this productivity metric with other outcome metrics that ensure you are achieving a desirable outcome. It would be easy to write shorter articles, low quality articles, or take other short-cuts to increase blog publish rate at the expense of these desired outcomes.

Good guardrail metrics to compensate:

• blog conversion rate - decreasing conversion rate indicates CTA is unclear
• blog attention hours - decreasing trend in attention hours indicates content does not engage audience

Overcoming Obstacles

What if I don't have a blog?
Free public blogging platforms exist that your team can leverage. See the Tools Catalog for examples. The best time to start a blog if you don't have one for your program is today.

What If I don't have a blog feed?
If your blog does not support feeds for automatic data collection, you can manually visit the blog and collect the data. Just scroll through the feed and count the number of posts and number of authors for the time period.

What if I don't have outcome measures?
Collecting productivity measures can still be valuable to optimize your workflows around sourcing content.

What if I don't have enough content being produced?
Many programs will increase their publish rate by sub-contracting out to freelance writers or starting a community writing program.

What if my team multi-tasks and isn't always focused on content production?
It is common to make a rough approximation. As long as you apply this constant consistently you can make adjustments in relative terms. You may be able to manage your team in a way to encourage these dedicated periods of time are available.

For example, you may decide your team of five spends on average one day a week on content production. So this counts as one content producer for however many articles are produced per week.

What if my publish rate dropped by half?
It is not unusual for there to be frequent volatility. When there are new product launches or other activities there are many more topics to produce content on. When teams are engaged with technical support, events, or product launches this can pull attention away from content production for a brief time. The measure is a rate, so extend the period of time to a larger frame to smooth the value out if this becomes a concern. It also gives you framing to share with stakeholders on the impact competing programs may have on your content production deliverables.

Sample Metrics

Acme Co
https://acmeco.com/blog
publish rate = 0.758 (from Jan 2025 to Jul 2025)

DevRel Foundation
https://dev-rel.org/blog
publish rate = 1.420 (from Aug 2025 to Oct 2025)

Appendix

Example slides and spreadsheets with sensitive data redacted reporting on this metric.

• https://dev-rel.org/projects/metrics-index/blog-post-publish-rate/attachments/1
• https://dev-rel.org/projects/metrics-index/blog-post-publish-rate/attachments/2

[j12y]

There are almost definitely better metrics but taking retention as another example -- I'm not sure I have access to the systems of record (today) that would allow me to measure it. If the Getting Started used retention, it would prevent me from having any success.

That may also indicate that there should be more than one Getting Started path, ie. maybe there is a tag / category identifying a bunch of metrics based on their ease of data acquisition and measurement. So the guide suggests picking one of the dozen or so that fall into that category. This might overlap with the maturity model, we could pick one metric for each dimension.

• documentation -
• community management
• content strategy - blog content production rate
• events and speaking -
• developer experience
• feedback loops
• cross-team collaboration
• developer advocacy
• partner & ecosystem
• product feedback integration
• education & training
• developer tools & sdks
• crisis communication

collecting at least one metric for each of these moves you from level zero to level one in the metrics & analytics maturity