What Are Vanity Metrics? 7 Simple Commented Examples

One of these days, on one of our Instagram posts, we received the following comment: “A company with less than 1,500 followers wants to convince me that they know how to generate leads?” This comment sparked a discussion about vanity metrics.

This situation made us realize that many businesses don’t know which metrics truly measure success and real growth. Often, the metrics that aren’t necessarily the best are the ones most valued and closely monitored.

That’s why we decided to create this article on the blog, focusing on metrics that should be tied to brand objectives and results. Don’t fall for vanity metrics! Understand the details now.

What Are Vanity Metrics?

“Metrics”—this is one of the most frequently heard words in a results meeting, during strategic planning, and in the daily operations of any company. If you’ve made it to this article on our blog, it’s because you understand that measuring and tracking progress through numbers is essential.

The problem for some businesses is knowing which metrics to focus on. Especially with the rise of digital marketing, almost everything is measurable today. As a result, many companies track too many numbers at once without extracting relevant insights or focus on metrics that don’t actually mean anything—these are called vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics seem to quantify important numbers, but they aren’t necessarily related to business objectives. They create a false correlation between data points, often suggesting relationships that don’t have real significance.

Vanity Metrics in Digital Marketing

Defining and tracking metrics is a tool that we should absolutely take advantage of, especially in marketing and sales. However, it’s important to be aware that in digital marketing, some numbers look impressive but contribute little to the results a company actually expects.

This becomes a problem because metrics are the foundation for decision-making. If you’re tracking the wrong metrics, you’ll likely miss the adjustments, improvements, or investments you really need to make.

🔎 Read also: Inbound Marketing in 2023: A Guide to Starting or Expanding

7 Vanity Metrics to Watch Out For

Here are some frequently tracked metrics that may fall into the category of vanity metrics:

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

One of the most popular marketing metrics is click-through rate. It measures whether your Call to Actions (CTAs) are attracting clicks and directing users to your pages.

This is one of the most commonly used metrics in paid media. However, a high click-through rate with a low conversion rate doesn’t mean much—it simply signals that something in your strategy or content needs to be adjusted.

Pageviews / Visitors

The number of pageviews or visitors is often just a vanity metric. In general, these numbers indicate whether your marketing efforts are driving traffic to your site or blog.

But is your content relevant to this audience?

Do these visitors have purchasing intent?

For a more complete analysis, consider metrics like session duration, pages per session, conversion rates, bounce rates, and scroll depth (how far users scroll before leaving).

The key is to understand how many of these visitors take the next step—providing their contact information or making a purchase.

Followers

The number of social media followers is one of the most common vanity metrics—it’s even what inspired this article.

This number is often mistaken for a sign of a brand’s influence or market presence when, in reality, it only reflects the number of people following a page.

A company might gain many followers because of its content, but how many of those followers are actual potential buyers?

On the other hand, a business that focuses on lead generation and has a more discreet presence on Instagram—because its customers come from other channels—may have fewer followers. Does that mean the company is unsuccessful? Not at all.

Unless you’re a digital influencer, your follower count likely isn’t a primary business success metric. Even if you are, engagement matters more than the follower count alone.

Likes

People value likes, both personally and professionally.

Likes can indicate whether your content is being well received.

But does tracking likes tell you how many sales you’re making?

Likes are great to monitor and suggest social media success. However, the real challenge is converting that success into revenue. If you can’t do that, you’ll end up with an Instagram full of likes but no sales.

That’s the essence of vanity metrics—they’re interesting but require action to become valuable.

YouTube Views

It’s not just in personal life that people care about likes

Likes are another indicator to understand whether your content is being well received by the audience.

You might be wondering: isn’t analyzing likes a waste of time, and aren’t most of them irrelevant when it comes to sales numbers?

Well, yes and no. Likes are useful to track and indicate that you’re succeeding on social media.

The next step is to turn that social media success into sales. If you can’t, you’ll always have an Instagram full of likes but never an Instagram with both likes and sales.

That’s where vanity metrics come in. They are interesting to track, but on their own, they do nothing. They require action.

YouTube Views

When discussing the vanity metric of YouTube views, we don’t interpret it the same way as artists, podcasters, and others who use YouTube as their main work platform.

Of course, this is important for B2B and B2C companies, as this number represents how many people are engaging with your content and whether your strategy is working.

However, a YouTube view represents the beginning of the customer journey because you still need to work on converting that user into a lead and eventually into a sale.

In other words, analyze this metric to understand if your conversion goals are being met. Are you generating leads?

Once again, we see the purpose of vanity metrics in action: limited in deeply representing the effectiveness of your strategy but essential for complementing your analysis and gaining additional insights.

Bounce Rate

Wait, but I’ve always heard that bounce rate is essential for analyzing my blog! 🙃

Hold on! Just because we included this metric here doesn’t mean it’s unimportant or that you should stop tracking it.

Bounce rate represents how many users leave your page before taking certain actions or spending a significant amount of time on it. A high bounce rate can indicate user experience issues, affecting your ranking.

Similarly, a low bounce rate means that people are navigating well through your site.

We placed it in this group because bounce rate should be analyzed in relation to what each page represents and offers your business.

The ideal approach is to understand which pages have a high bounce rate. If they are high-traffic pages with high user turnover, that’s normal.

For example, blogs: a high bounce rate is extremely common. A low bounce rate can indicate many things, including that people are jumping from article to article. In this case, the best metric is the number of leads generated.

However, if it’s happening on contact pages, sign-up pages, category pages, or product pages, then you need to worry.

Email Open Rate

Let’s consider the following situation: you sent a nurturing email marketing campaign to your leads, and 30% of them opened it. Great result, right?

Partially, yes. After all, you caught their attention and convinced them to open the email.

But how many of them actually converted? How many clicked on your CTA?

That’s why we classify email open rate as a vanity metric—it needs to be correlated with the conversion rate to truly understand email performance.

What Are the Most Relevant Digital Marketing Metrics?

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors on your conversion pages who actually convert. A conversion can be filling out a form, starting a live chat, signing up for a discount coupon, completing a purchase, trying a free trial, or upgrading a plan.

It all depends on what action you expect from your visitor.

Conversion happens at various stages of the marketing and sales funnel—from turning a visitor into a lead, a lead into a qualified lead, and a qualified lead into a customer.

We emphasize that this is one of the most important metrics in digital marketing and sales. If you want to learn more about the topic and how to improve your rates, check out our complete guide: “What Is Conversion Rate, How to Calculate It, and What Is the Ideal Rate?”

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost is a metric that helps understand your company’s financial health and the results of marketing and sales investments.

In general, CAC is calculated by dividing the total investment in these areas by the number of customers acquired in the same period. This gives you the average amount spent to acquire each customer for your brand.

By tracking this metric, marketing and sales teams can make better decisions and allocate investments into the most effective actions.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

In simple terms, LTV (Lifetime Value) is the metric that tracks how much your customer spends while engaging with your company.

While CAC relates to how much your company spends to close a sale, LTV is about how much your customer spends throughout their buying journey.

This metric is especially crucial for companies that rely on recurring sales or service subscriptions.

🔎 Read also: [Complete Guide] How to Succeed in Post-Sales

Engaged Leads

The engaged leads metric represents which users from your lead list opened emails, downloaded materials, and strengthened their connection with your brand.

Engaged leads are those with the highest potential to become customers.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Keep in mind that Return on Investment (ROI) is essential for all your strategies, whether in digital marketing or other areas.

ROI calculates how much money a company earns or loses from its investments. With this metric, you can track the results of campaigns, actions, and new marketing strategies.

To calculate it, use the following formula:

Average Ticket

The average ticket represents the average amount each customer spends on purchases or contracts with your company.

In other words, the higher the average ticket value, the more customers are spending on average.

To calculate this metric, divide total revenue for a given period by the total number of sales in that same period.

Check out the formula below:

Click to Open Rate (CTOR)

Click to Open Rate (CTOR) is the opposite of the vanity metric of simple email open rates.

It shows the percentage of people who opened the email and then clicked on the CTA. With CTOR, you gain deeper insights into your content and a clearer understanding of whether your strategy is driving results.

To calculate it, use the following formula:

How to Define Relevant Marketing Metrics?

Want to stop looking at vanity metrics and start tracking indicators that truly matter for your business? We have gathered some tips to help you avoid this mistake:

Understand Your Company’s Objectives

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the most important step before defining metrics is ensuring they are tied to business objectives.

Therefore, if you do not clearly and objectively understand what those objectives are, you will not know which metrics will help track your progress toward achieving them.

With clearer objectives, you will not only define the right metrics but also know how to allocate investments and efforts effectively.

Consider Your Audience Profile

The metrics and channels to be monitored are also related to your audience’s consumption habits—not only regarding product or service consumption but also information and entertainment consumption.

Understanding how your audience consumes and behaves will also provide direction on which metrics may be relevant to your brand.

Define Metrics That Are Easy to Measure and Understand

A good metric must have certain characteristics: it should be important, simple to understand, easily measurable, and capable of leading to positive action.

A metric that needs to be deciphered or lacks relevance in decision-making is of no use. Stop wasting time monitoring vanity metrics that do not contribute to growth and success.

Use Tools to Facilitate Tracking

Now comes the part about marketing tools. Use the right tools to extract all data according to the channels and investments made.

Another very important point here is that this process needs to be documented. This ensures that data tracking and extraction are not dependent on just one employee, making it easy to consult the historical data.

Review Whether Metrics Are Aiding Decision-Making

Metrics must provide insights into actions and investments and, most importantly, guide decision-making regarding maintaining these actions.

Periodically review whether the defined metrics are aiding this process. If they are not, redefine which metrics may be more useful. There is no problem in making course adjustments.

Analyze Metrics Together for Valuable Insights

Some of the metrics mentioned in this article can be considered vanity metrics when analyzed in isolation. However, when observed in conjunction with others, they can provide valuable insights to guide your marketing strategy.

Get Inspired by Other Companies – But Don’t Stop There

It is very valid to conduct benchmarking to understand which metrics and average conversion rates other companies are tracking.

However, it is important to understand that even among companies in the same industry, the metrics used can vary significantly, as each company has different business configurations and specific objectives to track.

Conclusion

We hope this article has been helpful in reflecting on what your success metrics are and which vanity metrics you may be focusing on.

And we leave this space open for dialogue.

We want to hear your thoughts on the topic in the comments!