Suppose you’re unable to identify which KPIs that are most likely to be a vanity metric. Then it’s time to stop and start concentrating on things like revenue and net new clients.

You are supposed to tell which KPIs that are most likely to be vanity metrics by Social Media Followers, Pageviews, Page Visits, Newsletter Subscribers, Number of Downloads, Unique Visitors, Running Total of Customers…

Please read on.

What is a KPI?

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, track accomplishments and areas for development. KPIs enable companies to set their content strategy, allocate budget, analyze competition and demonstrate accountability. Knowing which KPIs are more likely to be vanity metrics and which KPIs are the real deal is essential if you’re a B2B SaaS marketer who wants to use useful data to expand their company.

What Are Vanity Metrics?

A class of metrics known as vanity metrics are unrelated to the primary objective of the business. For instance, some businesses keep track of how many people like their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. Even though the company may value these metrics, they don’t actually aid in business expansion.

The term “vanity metric” was coined by marketing expert Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin is available as a book. The phrase is used because it implies that your customers don’t care about it at all.

How to Tell Which KPI is Most Likely to Be a Vanity Metric?

Vanity metrics may make your company look good, but they don’t move you closer to your goals. Relying on these statistics can undermine your credibility and divert attention from strategic objectives that are actually beneficial to your bottom line. The three following examples show which KPI is most likely to be a vanity metric.

Social Media Followers

Even if you have a sizable following, does that necessarily indicate that people are interested in what you have to say?

In addition to lack of engagement from your followers, HubSpot says there are over 95 million bots on Instagram, which account for nearly 10% of the total user base of Instagram. This implies that a sizeable portion of your followers might never become customers.

The real value is found in how many people click on, comment on, and share your content, not in how many followers you have on social media.

Go Beyond Vanity Metrics: Content Marketing Metrics That Matter.

Pageviews

Pageviews have been traditionally used as a key metric to measure the success of digital marketing campaigns. Pageviews shouldn’t be used as the only indicator of success because they don’t always reflect engagement accurately.

Page length, font size, and design are just a few of the variables that can influence page views. Furthermore, a large number of pageviews may simply indicate that visitors are clicking through to find something else rather than reading the content.

Because of these factors, marketers ought to pay attention to other metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate to get a more accurate picture of how their campaigns are doing and how many users are actually entering your sales funnel.

Page Visits

You might believe that the more guests you have, the better off you are. However, if your site’s visitors aren’t engaging with it in any way, their presence is really meaningless. The importance of engagement is greater.

Do visitors remain on your website? Do they read what you have to say? Are they going to your sales page by clicking through?

In the absence of this, your marketing efforts are not producing the desired results. So, avoid becoming fixated on vanity metrics. Focus on measures that actually matter.

Huge Spike in Web Traffic

As a marketer, you’re always looking for ways to increase web traffic. After all, it’s one of the most crucial metrics to monitor. But what if you were aware that there can be too much web traffic? That’s right, a sharp increase in web traffic can be detrimental. Here’s why.

It can be challenging to maintain, to start. Chances are they won’t all stick around if you suddenly get a flood of new visitors. To keep them interested, you’ll have to put in a lot of effort. Second, a sudden, large increase in traffic could overwhelm your website and bring it to a halt. This not only annoys your visitors, but it also does not favorably portray your brand.

Finally, marketing strategies like clickbait or viral content are frequently to blame for a sudden increase in web traffic. Despite the possibility of short-term attention, these strategies typically fail to produce long-term effects.

Therefore, keep in mind that it might not be worthwhile to make the effort the next time you’re tempted to follow a sharp increase in web traffic.

Newsletter Subscribers

Many companies place a lot of importance on the number of subscribers to their newsletters. They are frequently viewed as vanity metrics, or numbers that look good on paper but don’t necessarily indicate actual engagement or conversions. To be fair, there is some truth to that.

Only the subscribers on your list and the connections you have with them will determine how valuable they are to you. Just because someone signed up for your newsletter doesn’t necessarily mean they are interested in what you have to say.

Having said that, if you know how to use a newsletter subscriber list effectively, it can be a valuable resource. It’s a method of cultivating bonds with prospective and new clients while keeping them informed about your good or service.

Used correctly, it can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. To keep the bigger picture in mind, it’s crucial to keep in mind that this is only one piece of the puzzle.

Number of Downloads

Another popular vanity metric used by companies to assess the success of their websites is the number of downloads. Marketers who have created their own e-commerce websites or portals for other companies and need a way to determine their traffic levels frequently use this particular metric. This can be helpful for companies that want to monitor their progress, but it can also be deceptive if you don’t know what your rivals are doing.

Unique Visitors

Another common vanity metric is unique visitors, which can be calculated quickly and with little effort on the part of the person doing the counting. Unfortunately, this metric only tells you how many people visit your website and says nothing about your audience or how they use your product or service.
Due to this, evaluating the effects of modifications to your marketing plan, such as a new advertising campaign or a change in copywriting tone, can be challenging.

Running Total of Customers

Because it is predicated on the idea that you can count your customers, the running total of customers is a vanity metric. You might be able to, but there are a lot of other things you need to do to keep your business running. You’ll be required to take calls from customers, handle their orders, and send their purchases. The longer you put off doing these tasks in favor of counting customers, the less likely it is that your company will endure.

Likes & Shares

Two of the most popular vanity metrics are likes and shares. We assume that a post has a lot of likes because it must be well-liked, but we don’t really understand why. Even worse problems arise with shares.

Just because someone shares a post doesn’t mean they’ve read it or found it useful. In fact, the vast majority of people share without even skimming the material. As a result, while likes and shares may make you feel good, they aren’t actually reliable measures of achievement or suitable candidates for consideration as leads for marketing or sales.

Time Spent on the Web Page

The most frequently used metric is time spent on the website, or how long a user stays to browse the site before leaving. It’s important to keep in mind that this metric is not always a reliable indicator of success, even though it can be useful in some circumstances.

This is due to a few factors. First, lingering on a website doesn’t always indicate that a user is interested in its content. It’s possible that they are simply waiting for a page to load or aimlessly scrolling through.

Second, just because a user is interested in the content doesn’t mean they will act on it. For example, they might read an article but never click through to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter.

Finally, it is simple to manipulate how long visitors stay on the website. Businesses might, for instance, make adjustments that lengthen users’ visits to the site without actually raising engagement or conversion rates.

Keyword Volume

Numerous marketing professionals become fixated on gaudy metrics like the number of keywords their campaigns produce. Nevertheless, it is misguided to prioritize quantity over quality, and doing so may actually result in less successful marketing campaigns.

In actuality, a few carefully chosen keywords are more valuable than a hundred poorly chosen keywords. It’s critical to keep things like search intent and keyword competition in mind when choosing keywords.

Additionally, just because a lot of people are using a particular keyword in their searches doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good keyword to target; you don’t always know what exactly motivated them to use it. In many instances, the most popular keywords are also the most difficult to rank for.

Because of this, it’s likely that you’ll invest a lot of time and money trying to rank for them without ever getting any worthwhile results.

So, while it’s important to keep an eye on keyword volume, don’t let it be the only thing you focus on. Instead, consider it one piece of information among many when deciding which keywords to target.

Is This KPI a Vanity Metric?

You should ask that question.

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, have two sides to their blade. They are commonplace in businesses. Without them, some won’t make any decisions at all. The use of KPIs to monitor performance in important areas of a business makes sense. As they say, what gets measured, gets managed.

Certainly, KPIs can be useful in the appropriate situations. But if you’re not careful, they can have disastrous consequences…

When KPIs Turn into Vanity Metrics

Tracking the incorrect KPIs in your company can lead to employees making poor decisions, just as the British government’s poor KPI selection drove snakes into the street.

Say, for example, you hire a new Social Media Coordinator, and set their top KPI as “growing our Instagram followers”. This appears to be a reasonable thing to track on the surface. Increasing our fan base is beneficial to our business, right?

But this is not always the case. If your social media coordinator’s job or compensation depends on achieving their KPI, consider all the ways they could quickly increase their social media following. A click farm offers followers for sale for pennies. Cheesy giveaways may be used to attract their attention. Or, they might be obtained by means of intrusive account-to-account cross-promotions.

A Social Media Coordinator could reach their KPI right away by doing all of the aforementioned. But it’s missing a crucial component… quality. If your followers have no genuine interest in your company, they are worthless. It serves only as a vanity metric. one that doesn’t actually promote revenue, client retention, or outcomes.

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Setting KPIs That Matter

KPIs are potent instruments. Because of this, before they are put into practice, they merit careful consideration.

The British government would have understood that a collection of dead snakes traded in exchange for money had no real relationship to the number of snakes roaming the streets of Delhi if it had given its cobra program proper consideration. They would have been better off giving potential cobra catchers a specific territory and rewarding KPIs like decreasing the number of snake sightings or bites. The very last thing that these courageous hunters would have done was to increase the number of snakes in their herd if doing so would have increased their pay.

So, the next time you’re contemplating KPIs to track for your business, be sure to stop and ask yourself: Or am I just releasing more snakes into the streets by killing cobras?