Vanity metrics are data points that look impressive to others, but don`t provide information for future strategies or current success. These numbers are easy to manipulate, intentionally or not, so it`s easy to imply success without actually being significant results in relation to the overall goal. Learn how project managers use metrics to build better products. Use vanity metrics to best measure your marketing goals, such as sentiment or brand awareness, on a particular channel. For business goals such as ROI, custom metrics need to take a back seat to metrics that build the customer lifetime value narrative (conversions, subscriptions, MQL, SQL, etc.). But note, this is not a quick victory. CLTV takes time, A/B testing, content volumes, and conversions to create an accurate image. Do not seek quick and dirty profit with vanity measures. It is not there.

Other actionable metrics that tell you and your managers about your site`s performance are the total time spent on your page, the number of unique users, and the average number of pages per session. As far as numbers go, vanity measures look good on paper. But the brilliance of these numbers fades when you use them to explain important business outcomes such as return on investment or customer lifetime value (CLTV). They become hollow numbers that bring little substance to prove that your marketing makes money. Marketers go down this simple path, which is riddled with vanity measures, not because they`re lazy, but because they`re under pressure to show supervisors instant success. Jill Avery, a lecturer at Harvard Business School and co-author of HBR`s Go To Market Tools, explains: “CFOs are under tremendous pressure to deliver quarterly results and may not be patient until the long-term effects of marketing are felt. You`re asking them to believe in a forward move in a customer`s buying journey, and it can take a long time. “The metrics tracked must be actionable: changes in metrics must be attributed to changes in the condition of our digital property. Keep in mind that, as mentioned earlier, the same measure can be considered “vanity” at one point in time or for a particular company and is feasible for another company. It all depends on the objectives of the marketing strategy. As a company grows from one employee to a hundred, measurements measured from day one are now much less relevant. It`s important to note that metrics can be actionable at some point in a company`s existence, but they can slowly turn into vanity metrics as growth occurs.

Of course, don`t throw away all these vanity measures at once. Before you add or remove specific data from your marketing analytics reports, make sure you and your team have defined your goals and the data points you use to measure whether or not you`re meeting them. Let`s take the marketing goal of outreach as an example. You want to know if your content resonates and is relevant to your target audience – do they know your brand and content? To find out, measure awareness using A/B testing and the resulting vanity metrics. Let`s say you post content on LinkedIn and want to test images to see which ones work best for your LinkedIn audience. You run an A/B test on the snippet images to see if the image of the computer or woman is more relevant to your target audience. But as we`ve learned from previous vanity measures, bigger isn`t always better. While some of the vanity metrics mentioned above may bounce off a graph, page views are one that is only increasing. It`s impossible to reduce the total number of views a page receives, which means your numbers will increase every month and be even more visible than the previous month. A telltale sign of a vanity metric is that the metric is constantly growing where bigger is always better. Examples include metrics such as total number of users, number of app downloads, page views, and social media shares. While some stakeholders may encounter such numbers, a metric that will always increase over time says nothing useful about your users` experience with your product.

Context is necessary to make each metric meaningful. Whether your team absolutely destroys it or struggles a little bit to achieve its goals, it`s important to report the results of their work accurately and honestly. Actionable metrics can be harder to measure and a little harder to watch, but they`re critical to knowing what actions need to be taken to improve. Definition: A vanity measure looks impressive but does not give insight into the actual performance of a digital property (for example, because it lacks the context needed to make a remarkable comparison, or because it measures an aspect of the system that is not tied to a KPI). A word for the wise: actionable metrics must also be accessible and verifiable. Look for quality over quantity by focusing on the right data. And measure only what you really need so you don`t get lost in irrelevant data. It should be noted that vanity measures are not meaningless. You`ll notice that the number of subscribers is still necessary for the fifty-year-old company to create a percentage of converted subscribers. Vanity measures are simply not the numbers that should be published in the report you give to your manager. Whether a metric is labeled, vanity, or actionable depends on the organization and its unique business goals.

You may have heard the term “vanity measurement” refer to tracking analytics or key performance indicators (KPIs). You may even know that vanity metrics should be abandoned in favor of meaningful metrics. But what exactly is a vanity metric and how can you distinguish between vanity and meaningful metrics? In addition, inconsistent data sources, such as increased sales during the holidays, are vanity measures in their own right. Instead, keep an eye on these metrics and report them when reporting general metrics such as total sales over the course of a year. Just because a metric is a vanity metric doesn`t mean it should be completely ignored. To illustrate this point, it`s both difficult and unnecessary to measure the impact of engagement (like a Twitter like) on creating a sale on your website. First, as we`ve discussed before, metrics such as the number of likes aren`t necessarily correlated with the number of sales. Secondly, time is of the essence. If the metric you`re considering doesn`t help accomplish any of these things, it may be best to plug it in.

Metrics that answer this question with a “no” are not feasible. While they may be part of an equation to determine other, more actionable measures, these vanity measures should not be reported alone. Now that we`ve gone over a few examples and how to determine which metrics to avoid reporting to your manager, how do you know which metrics are worth your time? The obvious metrics won`t tell you – you`ll have to dig deeper. Here are five vanity measures you should stop obsessing over and actionable measures you should pursue instead. But are the actions you take so long to track and report the ones that really matter to your supervisor and show progress toward your goals? A vanity measure is an element of analysis that can be measured, but does not represent a significant real return on investment. Examples are the number of followers, likes or comments. These metrics are best contextualized by more concrete numbers such as click-through rate or conversions of visitors into leads.