The Real Cost of Vanity Metrics

Your marketing report lands in your inbox. Impressions are up 200%. Engagement rate hit an all-time high. Social followers grew by 15%.

Everything looks great. Except revenue is flat.

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive but don't correlate with business outcomes. They're easy to grow, easy to report, and completely useless for making decisions.

Common vanity metrics include:

• Impressions: How many times your ad was displayed (not how many people actually noticed it)
• Follower counts: How many people clicked follow (not how many care about what you post)
• Page views: How many times a page loaded (not how many people read the content)

The Opportunity Cost

Every hour spent optimizing for vanity metrics is an hour not spent on what matters. While your team celebrates a viral post that generated zero leads, your competitor is running A/B tests on landing pages that convert.

What to Measure Instead

Focus on metrics that connect to revenue:

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost to acquire a customer?

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How much revenue does a customer generate over time?

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For every dollar spent on advertising, how much revenue comes back?

Pipeline Velocity: How quickly are leads moving through your funnel?

These metrics might not look as impressive in a slide deck, but they'll tell you whether your marketing is actually working.

Making the Shift

The transition from vanity metrics to meaningful metrics isn't easy. It requires better tracking, clearer attribution, and often uncomfortable conversations about what's really driving growth.

But once you make the shift, you'll wonder how you ever operated any other way.