Vanity metrics can be deceptive. Entities, especially startups want big numbers and want to publish them. 10 lakh downloads, 1 lakh registered users, or 10,000 tweets per day. These growth metrics are many times not real indicators of success and are often a sign of traction. These unrealistic numbers of downloads, registered users, page viewers, and subscribers are called vanity metrics. These metrics are distorted and give false assurance of success and do not correlate to the numbers that matter.
Vanity metrics do not add any value to business growth. Organizations focusing on these metrics can never make their products better or attract customers and make them happy. A company must track the real data that will help in accentuating business growth. However, if they only track vanity metrics, they will get a false sense of success. Unless a company collects numbers that have context and are more meaningful, growth prospects cannot be expected.
Decisions based on vanity metrics could steer a marketing strategy in a completely wrong direction. The so-called ‘ impressive numbers’ obtained through vanity metrics can lead a marketing team to believe that they are getting results, even when they don’t provide any real information about their business growth.
Limitations with using vanity metrics:
Lack of context:
Data without any context impact factors like marketing, sales, and product. There are many ways to boost content views or achieve sales goals. But getting the actual count of footnotes and tracking every step of hitting a goal is a result of hard work and strategies. Similarly, thousands of people may sign up to view a product, however, how many of them are getting converted to actual users of the product is important to track the success of the brand promoting the product.
Unclear intent:
Everything that vanity metrics measures are unclear- one example would be the return visit. Did the customer return the product because he liked it? Or did he return to the product because he needed customer service help? Vanity metrics fail to communicate the real intent of the customers for their return to the product. It will only showcase the number of times the customer has returned to the page of the product. Consequently, whether the return is increasing the conversion rate or not remains a mystery.
No guidance to action and learning:
If data does not prompt the actual improvement of a product, the result is not actionable. Actions, decisions, and learning are important for business growth. If a number keeps growing up but does not benefit a company in gaining profits, they are vanity metrics. The data obtained through vanity metrics are random and unrelated to an understandable pattern, therefore, any decision based on vanity metrics lacks concrete actions.
Less effective when used alone:
Vanity metrics data when analyzed in combination with other types of metrics are effective in better understanding marketing efforts. However, if these metrics are used alone to measure output it is less effective.
If the metrics you’re considering don’t help in accomplishing your marketing goals, then it calls for an effective alternative.
