Digital Marketing is an ever-evolving world, and it is often too easy to get caught up in a sea of likes, shares, and follower numbers. It is all to common in the world of marketing to put up a great post, with a witty caption and all the right hashtags and get a huge number of likes and new followers. Then, only to see that this hasn’t translated into a boost in website traffic or an increase in sales. In other words, it hasn’t really engaged with the audience.

Likes, shares and followers are great, but they do not always translate into improved sales figures.This means they are something of a misleading sense of accomplishment. These vanity metrics focus on what are really rather superficial numbers instead of meaningful conversions.

The illusion of vanity metrics

Vanity metrics can pull you in and make you believe they are important. However, they are, unfortunately, misleading. They offer instant gratification but little more and they offer a false perspective on your marketing achievements. Unfortunately, although we would love it if they did, vanity metrics do not usually correlate with actual business goals. What you need from a digital marketing campaign is increased sales, enhanced customer loyalty, or higher revenue. You want to ensure that you are driving traffic to your website with the hope of converting this traffic into sales.

Vanity metrics can also, unfortunately, be easily manipulated. Bots and fake accounts, for example, can boost likes and followers. This can make things seem more popular than they are. And whilst this might be impressive at a glance there is no real value, and this can actually do more harm than good.

When you focus on your vanity metrics there is also the potential that you may be misallocating your resources. You could be spending too much time and money on content that generates likes rather than content that engages, educates, and converts. The result is a marketing campaign that appears to have been successful but in reality, isn’t.

If not vanity metrics, what should you be measuring?

Vanity metrics aside, you need to be measuring actionable metrics. These are the metrics that help you to make decisions that are driven by data, and which drive business. They include:

  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – the total cost of acquiring new customers
  • Lead-to-customer conversion rate – how many leads become paying customers
  • Time on site – how long people stay on your site, the longer they stay the more engaging it is
  • Pages per visit – the more pages someone visits the more interesting they find what you have on offer
  • Bounce rate – the number of visitors who look at one page and then leave. A higher rates means they find your content less engaging
  • Click through rate – those who click on an add or link to get to you
  • Email open rates – the number who open your email campaigns
  • Social media engagement – comments and mentions are more important than likes and shares here

Conclusion

Vanity metrics may look great but if you want to see how successful your digital marketing has been there are so many other metrics that you should be looking at that will give you a much better picture.