We’ve all been there. Floundering through a sea of numbers in a digital marketing report. Lots of follower counts, impressions, and page views, but nothing that connects to revenue, leads, or any other outcome you care about. Are your digital marketing efforts actually working? Or are all these numbers just a bunch of vanity metrics that don’t mean anything?
Let’s sort it out. We’ll define vanity metrics and give some common examples. We’ll also cover what metrics to track instead and how to recognise a vanity metric.
What are vanity metrics?
Vanity metrics are metrics that can go up or down without your business being any better or worse off. They aren’t related to anything you can control or repeat.
Vanity metrics often appear in marketing reports because they are easy to measure and look impressive on the surface.
Because they lack context and nuance, they can be misleading. But the biggest problem with vanity metrics is that they don’t help you improve business performance because they’re not actionable.
American entrepreneur Eric Ries coined the term in his book ‘The Lean Startup’. He proposed that businesses succeed by focusing on actionable metrics rather than tracking vanity metrics.
Common vanity metrics
Any metric can be a vanity metric if it’s reported without the context of other data points or used as a substitute for meaningful data. The quality of the analysis is everything. That said, here are 5 common vanity metrics examples.
Page views and sessions
Page views and sessions just measure traffic. Without any information about conversions, traffic doesn’t give you any insights about performance. For all you know, that impressive page view number could mostly be bots from overseas.
Page view
GLOSSARYA page view is counted each time someone loads one of your web pages in a browser. Analytics tools like Google Analytics use page views to measure how often people look at your content. The more times a page loads, the more page views it records. If the same person refreshes the page or comes back to it later, each load counts as another page view, which is why page views tell you how often pages are viewed rather than how many separate people visited. To understand visitor numbers, you’d look at users or sessions instead.
See also: Bounce rate, Session
Further reading: Best Free SEO Tools We Use
Social media followers and likes
Social media metrics are easy to inflate – you can literally buy new followers. The number of followers or likes is another vanity metric that doesn’t correlate reliably with revenue. You may see a lot of growth, but have sales improved? Looking at engagement metrics is more likely to lead to data-driven decisions.
Email open rates
In 2021, Apple’s introduced a Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature as part of iOS 15. It protects user privacy by routing content requests through proxies to mask users’ IP addresses and device data. The proxies in effect ‘open’ the email before the recipient sees it, inflating the email open-rate metric for Apple Mail users. To email senders, it looks like every Apple Mail active user has opened and viewed their emails, even if users never interacted with them.
Because of that inflation in the email open rate, other metrics like click-through rates and conversions are more meaningful.
Email Open Rate
GLOSSARYEmail open rate is the percentage of people who open an email out of everyone who received it. If you send a campaign to 1,000 people and 250 open it, your open rate is 25 per cent. Marketers use open rate to gauge how well a subject line and sender name capture attention, since those are the first things a recipient sees in their inbox. It’s worth knowing that open rate isn’t always exact, because it usually relies on a tiny invisible image loading in the email, and some inboxes block or preload these in ways that can over- or under-count opens. For that reason, open rate works best as a guide to trends over time rather than a precise figure, and it’s most useful when read alongside other metrics like click-through rate.
See also: Bounce rate, Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Further reading: KPIs for Copywriters: How do Measure Copywriting Success?
Ad impressions
This metric only describes how many times users viewed an ad. It tells you nothing about user interests, clicks, or conversions. Anyone can spend a lot of money to ensure people see their ad – it doesn’t mean that ad is bringing in any revenue.
Running totals
The total number of new users, customers, subscribers, purchases, or downloads can only go up. Running totals are considered vanity metrics because they are meaningless in isolation. They need context, such as comparing the year-on-year percentage change or looking at related metrics. For example, the number of total purchases tells you more if you look at total returns as well.
How to stress test your metrics
Vanity metrics measure activity, while actionable metrics measure outcomes. They tie to business objectives, and you can take action or make better decisions based on them.
You can judge whether a metric is meaningful to track or not using the acronym SMART. Is the metric you’re tracking,
- specific,
- measurable,
- achievable,
- relevant,
- and time-bound?
If the answer is no to any or all of those, you’re likely tracking a vanity metric.
Actionable metrics to track instead
Instead of vanity metrics, focus on metrics that provide valuable insights and tie to business outcomes. Here are some examples of tracking actionable metrics:
- Leads generated: How many potential customers engaged with your business on a particular marketing channel or campaign?
- Cost per lead: How much does it cost to generate a lead?
- Conversions: How many visitors to your site completed a desired specific action (e.g. made a purchase)?
- Revenue attributed to a channel: Which marketing channels and campaigns are actually driving revenue?
- Return on Ad Spend (RoAS): How much revenue are you earning for each dollar spent on advertising?
- Bounce rate: How many people leave your website after viewing only one page?
- Repeat orders: How often do you retain customers for repeat orders vs one-time purchases?
Tracking these metrics effectively requires Google Analytics 4, conversion-tracking tools, and, ideally, a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).
Return on Ad Spend (RoAS)
GLOSSARYReturn on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures how much revenue you generate for every dollar spent on advertising. This metric helps evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. For example, if you spend $100 on ads and generate $500 in sales, your ROAS is 5:1 (or 500%). This calculation shows which advertising channels and campaigns deliver the best value for your marketing budget.
See also: Return on Investment (ROI), Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
How to identify vanity metrics
One way to avoid vanity metrics is to learn how to recognise them. How do you spot a vanity metric when you see it on a marketing report? Here are 4 practical questions to ask.
1. Can this number change your next business decision or action?
If the answer is no, because the number won’t affect your decisions or actions one way or the other, then it’s likely a vanity metric.
2. Is there a logical path from this metric to business goals you actually care about?
In other words, do you understand the reason why this is being measured and how that measurement relates to performance and business results? If the answer is no, then it’s probably a vanity metric.
3. Can you repeat the result?
If the answer is no, then what you’re seeing is likely caused by an external factor that you don’t control. And if you can’t repeat or influence the result, then what’s the point? The metric isn’t actionable, and you can’t do anything to improve performance or processes.
4. Does the data reflect reality?
For example, external factors can inflate the number of social media followers. Or you can literally purchase followers to inflate the metric. But that higher number doesn’t tell you anything about the actual situation or whether it’s helping your business outcomes. The metric doesn’t include the context or nuance that might make it relevant.
Beyond vanity metrics: a different approach to reporting
Good reporting with actionable metrics tells you what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do next. Here at Futuretheory, we report on the full picture. That may include metrics like impressions and follower counts, but only when they’re relevant to you and your situation.
What sets us apart is that we explain what those numbers mean and how they connect to real business outcomes. A number without context isn’t useful, and our job is to make sure you understand what you’re looking at and why it matters so you can make better business decisions.
Ready for the full picture? Not sure whether your marketing is actually effective? Get in touch – we’d love to talk about how your marketing can work for you.
