Stop Measuring These Digital Marketing Vanity Metrics

Are you focusing on vanity metrics rather than metrics that are really important to your business and success? In love with your list size, followers and web traffic? If so in this post I will be sharing why you need to stop focusing on vanity metrics and then sharing the metrics you should be focusing instead.

I first came across the term Vanity Metrics in Ryan Holiday’s Growth Hacker Marketing. Ryan describes a vanity metric as:

“Vanity metrics are the metrics that feel important but are ultimately superficial or, worse, deceptive.”

I loved this term and knew it was something I wanted to write about in the future and then GDPR happened. Overnight I deleted hundreds from my mailing list and realised how attached I was to the vanity metric of the size of my email list. And I know that I am not the only person out there who loves vanity metrics. Lots of people love to share that they have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, 10,000+ instagra followers and an email list in the thousands, but you can have all of those things and an unsuccessful business.

As an entrepreneur, not an influencer, those headline figures are not important. Bigger is not always better so lets see what you should be focusing on, because as they Peter Drucker said “What’s measured improves” so you need to make sure you are measuring the right things.

WEBSITE

When it comes to your website the ultimate vanity metric is website traffic. Every website owner wishes they could get more website traffic, right? NOPE!

I don’t want more generic traffic. I want more quality traffic.

Every day I get an email from someone trying to sell me a service. An email that comes via my contact form. That means I have traffic on my site that isn’t a potential client.

Rather than concentrating on your website traffic you should be focusing on your bounce rate and length of visit.

Bounce Rate

As a website owner you want your bounce rate to be decreasing. Your bounce rate shows you the number of people who visit your site and leave straight away. This is not the sort of traffic you want. You want people to come to your site, love it, start exploring etc. As your bounce rate lowers it shows you that you are driving the right type of traffic to your site and that your site is useful for those who land on it.

Length of visit

In addition to bounce rate, I would highly recommend you monitor the length of visit. A good length of visit will be different depending on your site, but if you are someone who provides valuable long-form content on your site (a blog, integrated videos and/or podcast) etc then you want a length of visit that shows people are consuming that content.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is the holy grail of vanity metrics because the whole world can see them. Whereas people can get away with lying about their web traffic and email list size there is no hiding about the number of followers/fans you have on social media platforms.

When it comes to social media most people definitely believe that bigger is better, but again it is about quality. Fans and followers can be bought and there was a time when this was really popular, especially in the influence world where brands would look for people with a following of x or bigger.

However, a large following with fake or disengaged people is useless. Instead, you should be focusing on engagement.

Stage 1 engagement – LIKES

How many people have liked/hearted etc your content? This shows that your fan/followers have been served your content and there was something about it that appealed to them. This doesn’t take that much engagement from your audience, but it does show at least they are engaged in some way. Rather than monitoring the raw number of likes you can monitor your ratio (divide the number of like by the number of followers/fans you have). Monitoring your ratio will enable for you to see if your engagement stays the same as you grow your following. Often it doesn’t.

Stage 2 engagement – COMMENTS

Are people commenting on your social media? Commenting takes more energy from an individual but shows they were driven to take an action. (If you want to increase your engagement, check out ‘7 Call To Action examples you can use in your digital marketing‘.

Stage 3 engagement – SHARING

This is the ultimate type of engagement. When someone shares your content they are showing they found it so useful, informative, helpful, entertaining etc that they want to share it with their own friends and family.

As I hope you can tell, by focusing on your engagement stats (likes, comments and sharing) rather than the number of fans/followers it will help you to see what content is performing well, which should help you build a stronger relationship with your audience and encourage more sales.

EMAIL

Marketers, me included, are forever telling you that your power is in your list. As a means of communication that you own, I believe that building your own mailing list is important. But the size of your list is not the most important thing. The most important metrics are:

Open Rate

What percentage of your list is actually opening your emails? Who cares if you have 10,000 people on your mailing list, but only 2,000 open it. You might as well just have 2,000 on your list. Keep an eye on your open rate. If an email performs above or below your average then take a look to see what was different about it (subject line, day/time of delivery).

Click Through Rate (CTR)

If you are someone who uses your email to drive people to somewhere else (blog post, sales page, video etc) then you need to be monitoring your Click Through Rate. Again if something performances above or below average check what the call to action was. It is important to learn what commands work best and what position in your email performs best. Knowing this information will mean when you need to write important emails that convert that you can use those learning to optimise those emails.

That’s it!

I have shared three areas (website, social media and email) were vanity metrics are often monitored and recommend the metrics you should be watching instead. However, vanity metrics can appear all over the place so be mindful.