How do you decide if your portfolio is doing ok?

A lot of the dialogue in the dividend growth investing community centers around taking a different view of performance than the dominant view of total return and portfolio valuation. DGI practitioners ascribe to rising dividends exceeding the rate of inflation as the primary metric of success with a stock and/or a portfolio. measuring dividend growth in a stock or portfolio isn't difficult; you simply add up the numbers and compare this year to last.

I'm a little more interested in looking at my portfolio as a business; a conglomeration of holdings that produce income. I have capital expenses, very low operating expenses, revenues and profit. What do I do with my profits? I spend them all on new revenue producing assets. I could spend all my time observing the market value of the assets; more important is how those assets produce revenues.

A share of stock is a discrete fractional claim on the earnings of a company. A fraction of those earnings are returned to owners as dividends; a cash payout that can be reinvested or used for other purposes. If the company earns more per share next year, there's a good chance that the dividend paid per share will also rise. However, you won't have any larger proportional claim on future earnings. To get a higher proportional share of earnings, you need to own a larger share of the company stock. Therein lies the added value of dividend reinvestment. If my portfolio yields 3.5% in dividends per year and I reinvest all of that in new shares. I have a 3.5% larger cash producing engine the next year. If each share captures a higher per-share payout, the cash producing engine grows more, because the dividend payment has risen and even more shares are purchased.

So how would it look if I simply kept track of the number of shares I own in all companies, the total dividends received each year and calculated the rate of share growth, the rate of dividend growth and the rate of dividend/share growth as indicators of overall investment performance?  I wonder if that would be a more simple means of determining how the income generating capacity of my portfolio is changing year to year.