Getting Rid of Vanity Metrics in Marketing: The Basics

Most marketing professionals and business leaders agree that tracking the right metrics is crucial to facilitating growth. The more data you collect, the more you should be able to make relevant decisions about how to grow and enhance your brand presence. 

Unfortunately, while there are dozens of data points you can measure in any marketing campaign, they’re not all as relevant as they seem. Vanity metrics, for instance, might look impressive on the surface, but they generally fail to guide your business in the right direction. 

It’s time to get rid of vanity metrics once and for all. 

What are Vanity Metrics, and Why are they Dangerous?

Vanity metrics are to marketing what vanity muscles are to bodybuilders. They may make you look good, but they don’t actually generate any value. 

Think about a social media post that earns 1 million views. This high number of views is exciting, but it doesn’t mean much if you’re getting views on their own. If those views aren’t translating to higher website traffic and conversions, they’re not really delivering ROI. 

Vanity metrics can come in many forms, from social media followers, to email subscribers, impressions, and page views. However, on a core level, they have some overlapping attributes. For instance, they’re often easy to track but lack actionable data or insights. 

Vanity metrics aren’t just a waste of time, they can also be dangerous to focus on, because they give you the impression you’re accomplishing important goals, without any real impact. If you see a post on social media that gets 100,000 views, you might decide you should create more similar posts, without realising that you’re just getting visibility, not conversions. 

Additionally, vanity measures usually only show one side of the story. Many of these metrics can be easily manipulated. For instance, people can (but shouldn’t), buy social media followers and email subscribers. You might even earn more attention from a higher number of customers, but none of them are relevant to your target audience. 

What Should Companies Be Focusing on Instead?

So, if vanity metrics aren’t of any use to your business, what should you be monitoring instead? The unfortunate truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. The metrics you monitor can vary depending on your business, marketing goals, and target audience. 

Perhaps the most important thing to focus on is how “actionable” each metric you monitor is. An actionable metric is something that actually helps you to drive positive changes in your business and marketing strategy. They’re aligned with the goals of your business and provide clear information you can use to drive growth. 

The most important characteristics of actionable metrics include:

• Relevancy to your business goals: Actionable metrics should be tied to the specific objectives of your business. For instance, if you’re an e-commerce business trying to boost retention, monitoring cart abandonment rates and repeat purchases is useful. 
• Specific: Valuable metrics are specific, measurable, and quantifiable. For instance, instead of just looking at how many customers you’ve served since you started your business, you should be looking at how your conversions change from month to month or year to year.
• Useful insights: The right metrics should provide you with useful information about your business performance, your sales strategies, your target audience, or your market. They help you understand how you should adapt your business behaviours to increase sales, revenue, and opportunities. 
• Contextual: Actionable metrics generally aren’t one-size-fits-all measurements. They’re tailored to your specific business, audience, and competitive landscape. For instance, rather than focusing on how many new followers you get on social media in total, you might concentrate on the number of followers you reach relevant to your niche.
• Complexity: Although actionable, valuable metrics are useful for businesses, they’re generally harder to track and monitor than vanity metrics. They require you to dig a little deeper into the data to get the full story. For example, you wouldn’t just assume your email campaign was successful because it drove 10,000 clicks, you’d also look at how many of those clicks converted into sales.

How to Ensure You’re Monitoring the Right Marketing Metrics

Some valuable, actionable metrics are obvious in most business environments. For instance, conversion rates are important for showing you how much ROI you’re getting out of any campaign. Customer lifetime value is important for helping you understand the potential of your audience, and whether you’re connecting with the right prospects. 

However, most of the time, effectively choosing the right metrics to monitor takes a little work. Here’s how you can leave vanity metrics behind, and ensure you’re focusing on the right data:

Step 1: Start with Your Business Goals

Ultimately, the right metrics should always provide you with the insights you need to move forward towards your business targets. Before you start analysing any data, take the time to define what you want to accomplish. Do you want to focus on lead generation or demand generation? Are you concentrating on retaining more customers and increasing lifetime value?

Think about how your marketing activities relate to each of the goals, and which metrics make sense based on the context. For instance, if your focus is on lead generation, you’d concentrate on things like the number of website visitors who connect with your business or engage with your brand.

Step 2: Focus on Metrics that Answer Core Questions

One of the biggest problems with vanity metrics is that they don’t actually answer any of the most important questions you have about your marketing campaigns and strategies. If you want to know how to earn more conversions on your website, looking at social media views won’t tell you anything.

The right metrics should provide you with the information you need to address your current business challenges and goals. Don’t get caught up focusing on specific metrics just because they seem to be valuable to other organisations in your industry.

Step 3: Dive Deeper with Your Metrics

The right metrics tell a comprehensive story about the success of your marketing strategies. The next time you’re looking at a metric like your number of followers on Instagram, ask yourself what the number really tells you. How many of those followers are genuinely interacting with your brand? How many are related to your target audience? How many are just bots?

At the same time, try tying your metrics to every stage of the customer journey, for more useful insights. For instance, a high level of traffic on your website indicates you’re earning a lot of attention, but how does that translate into your conversion numbers and revenue?

Step 4: Go Beyond The Numbers

Many marketing metrics focus on numbers – your number of social media followers, website visitors, impressions on an ad, and so on. These quantitative metrics are useful, but they often only offer surface-level insights. To expand on your data, think about qualitative insights too.

Using surveys, social media listening tools, and customer feedback can give you an insight into the “why” behind your results. For instance, if you earn a high number of conversions for a specific product in one month, you could learn from customers that the reason isn’t your new social media strategy, but your pricing method.

Step 5: Regularly Review and Update

Your business and its goals are likely to change over time. As you introduce new marketing campaigns and strategies, the metrics you need to monitor will evolve. Don’t fall into the habit of reviewing the same metrics every time. Instead, assess your analytical strategy and make sure your metrics are still relevant and impactful. 

Aim to review your metrics every quarter, as well as every time you launch a new marketing campaign, or your customer’s behaviours change. 

Stop Monitoring Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics may make you look (and even feel good) at first, but they’re never as valuable as they seem. If you want to make sure you’re taking positive action with your marketing strategies, you need to ensure you’re focusing on the right, relevant data. 

Leave your vanity metrics in the past, and start focusing on insights that drive your business towards its unique goals.