Vanity Metrics Defined: 3 Examples of Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are goals that look good on paper or suggest growth and success, but the data lacks a correlation to conversions, growth, revenue, or other business goals. Here are some qualities of vanity metrics:

1. 1. Look good but lacks actionable data. A vanity metric makes the company appear successful or feel like they are making progress when in reality, the metrics lack actionable insights or detail about the return on the investment.
2. 2. Seemingly valuable data, but it lacks analysis. A data analyst or business strategist can convert some vanity metrics into actionable metrics with the right thinking and perspective. For example, tracking visits to your landing page is important, but if you only track page views and number of site visitors those can be vanity metrics if you fail to contextualize the data and also track conversion rates or bounce rates from that page to assess customer churn and make improvements.
3. 3. Suggest growth without data to back it up. Tracking only the number of downloads or followers can be a vanity metric if you fail to see the end result. For example, a company may only track social media followers. As the number of followers increases, it can appear that the company is successful, but if a closer look at the resulting conversion and engagement rates indicates these rates low, their social presence may fail to impact sales.

Keep in mind that what constitutes a vanity metric can be subjective, and all metrics can be vanity metrics if you fail to contextualize the data. Even an actionable metric can become a vanity metric if you neglect to assess the implications of the numbers with analytics tools.

While vanity metrics lack impactful data, an actionable metric (also called a “real metric”) is any data you can use to represent real change or progress. Actionable metrics include key performance indicators (KPIs) that come from strategic research and testing, such as performing A/B testing or split-tests, creating case studies, or completing user experience surveys.

A startup e-commerce company or business owner can set actionable metrics by considering why metrics matter in the first place. KPIs should show impact to your business goals and translate into actionable data. For example, tracking the customer lifetime value achieved from a marketing campaign shows the return on investment of your digital marketing efforts.

Here are three examples of vanity marketing metrics that fail to correlate to business objectives or the company’s bottom line.

1. 1. Looking at active users only: A business may have many people signed up for their service or product, but customers may become inactive or unsubscribe from the service. If a company only tracks the number of users without factoring in inactive or unsubscribed users, that is a vanity metric.
2. 2. Social media metrics that only track followers: A company with a large social media following may look like thriving business, but by only looking at the number of followers (a vanity metric) they may fail to track if this total number translates to increased brand awareness, social shares, engagement, or conversions.
3. 3. Tracking page views but not conversions: Page views and click-through rates show how many people visit your site. However, these metrics alone fail to indicate if your visitors are becoming new customers by purchasing your products or if your landing page is effective. Factoring other useful metrics, like your bounce rate or pages visited per session, can give you a better understanding of your customer retention rate, the number of returning customers, if the visitors are staying and looking at your products, and the impact of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

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