You've just succumbed to the X/Y problem. If you "intend to make money", then that is your goal—not the measure of your traffic, and not your ability to stick it the man or whomever you consider to be your competitor. The parent commenter is right; there is no intrinsic value in the measures that you keep invoking. The unrelenting focus on those auxiliary details—to the exclusion of the real goal—is the basis of Goodhart's law.