Vanity metrics are not the problem
One of the most disconcerting things you can ask anyone in content strategy is to talk about metrics. Sure, everyone measures for follower or engagement growth spikes. Some might even account for referral traffic and qualified leads. Not to mention how we all ‘drive positive conversations’ about a brand or product.
Then the question pops in: what about business results? That’s where things get a bit trickier. It’s where you draw the line between ‘vanity metrics’ and ‘actual return on investment’. This often suggests that vanity metrics, as a concept, are wrong. They’re not the end game, which means they’re not worth looking at.
I disagree. Vanity metrics are not the problem. Stopping too early on your analysis is.
You might not agree with the traditional metaphor of a conversion funnel. It’s not a perfect model (no model is perfect), but it can be a useful one. If our brains are pattern making machines, a funnel helps you look at things in a pattern-like way. Otherwise, all we see is chaos. And measurement in strategy is all about making sense of chaos.
To that purpose, vanity metrics help you to filter through some of the noise. Look at any marketing channel today and you get dozens or hundreds of things you can look at. Followers. Likes. Favourites. Shares. Retweets. Replies. Mentions. Open rates. Click through rates. Form completion rates. Video view rates. Cost per a thousand impressions. Cost per click. Cost per download. Time spent on page. Repeat visitors. Unique visitors. Unique repeat visitors. Heat map visualisation patterns. Or a mix between a bunch of these, amongst many others.
By looking at vanity metrics, we’re not doing a disservice to measurement. The problem is to stop there.
Ask any strategist about things they measured in the past and there’s a common complaint. Not about the things you could measure, but rather about the things you weren’t able to measure.
Try asking a client for 5,000 customer emails to understand who of those already follow you on Facebook. Or to create custom audiences to help cross-sell products to those existing customers. Or try asking for app data because you want to match social activity with new app downloads. Or ask for Google Analytics access to understand which parts of a landing page convert the most. And then match that to paid performance on social and email marketing performance.
It’s likely that all these things sit with separate teams. Or that legal doesn’t allow your client to disclose this information. Or that your report is due in a couple of days so you won’t hear from the other teams before then. There are so (too) many things between you and accessing that data.
The point here isn’t to bitch about all the problems we face when doing measurement. But there are a lot of challenges to doing measurement right, in a way that tells you a broader business story. That’s part of the job. And it’s often out of our control.
In an ideal world, we’d always show how vanity metrics correlate with business performance. Until that world arrives we’re stuck with reality. And the reality is that sometimes vanity metrics are what we have to make some sense of all the noise.
This is not perfect and it doesn’t often do justice to the hard work of smart teams. But this is not the fault of vanity metrics themselves. Rather, it shows the constraints that force us to often begin and end our analysis with them. An incomplete picture? Sure. But strategy is as often a discipline of optimising as it is one of satisficing.
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Hello! I’m Roberto, a freelance content strategist who delivers simple and practical strategies based on a solid understanding of technology, brand building and human nature. Find out more about me at estreitinho.com and get in touch if you want to grab a coffee!
