Reading a portfolio

Most reporting on a large site reaches for an average. Average position, average engagement time, total sessions. Those numbers move slowly, look reassuring, and tell you almost nothing about what to do on Monday.

GrowthOS is built around distribution instead.

Bands beat averages

A site's average position moving from 12 to 11 tells you almost nothing.

50 pages moving from Stable to Declining tells you where to spend the week. Stable and Declining are performance bandsPerformance bandOne of 5 labels describing the direction of a page's traffic against the previous period: **Freefall**, **Declining**, **Stable**, **Growing**, **Surging**. A band describes a direction, not a level. Pages with no traffic sit outside the bands entirely., labels for the direction of a page's traffic against the previous period.

Distribution is the honest read of a portfolio. The mean hides it, which is why performance bands, not averages, are the headline on At a Glance.

"No traffic" is not the bottom of the scale

Pages with no traffic are counted separately from the bands, because they are a different condition rather than a worse one.

• A Freefall page had something and is losing it. That needs diagnosis: open it, read its scores, and refresh it if the content is the cause.
• A no-traffic page never landed. That usually needs a decision about whether it should exist at all.

Folding the second into the bottom of the first would turn a decision into a diagnosis, and you would spend the week fixing pages that should have been deleted.

Worth knowing before you make that call: GrowthOS won't remove a live page. Retiring or redirecting one happens in your own CMS, the same as publishing.

Grouping is where a portfolio becomes strategy

9,000 URLs sorted by traffic is a spreadsheet. The same URLs grouped by personaPersonaA buyer your content speaks to, and what that buyer is trying to find out., a buyer your content speaks to, is a question about who you are neglecting.

• Sorted by traffic, it is a list.
• Grouped by persona, it is a coverage question.
• Grouped by clusterClusterA group of related opportunities built around one topic, worked as a set. Deleting a cluster removes the territory itself (its topics and their questions); opportunities it already produced survive, losing only the cluster link., a group of related opportunities worked as a set, it is a progress report on the territories you committed to.

GroupingGroupingAn axis your content portfolio can be sliced along in the Pages Portfolio, such as funnel stage or product line. is the difference between looking at your content and reading it. It is also why Groupings sits in Context rather than in a settings screen: the axes you choose determine the questions you are able to ask.

The caveat worth holding onto: a grouping that only touches part of the portfolio still renders a complete-looking view. Check the coverage counts before drawing a conclusion from a grouped view.

The same read applies to work in progress

Throughput has a distribution too. 10 cards in Briefing and none in Ready is a different problem from 10 cards in Reviewing. The first is a planning bottleneck; the second is a people one.

Reading across the columns of In Production is faster than any report about velocity.

Where this shows up

• At a Glance for the workspace-level distribution.
• Pages Portfolio, the list of every URL on your site scored individually, for the page-level one.
• Groupings for the axes you read it along.
• In Production for throughput.