Marketing: “Vanity” Metrics You Ought To Ignore
The term “vanity metrics” has made its way into the marketing lexicon as of late, and for good reason. What many use to measure “results” can frequently be misleading and due to this, it’s worth looking at some of the marketing metrics you could (and probably should!) disregard.
Here are a few you can safely ignore:
- Likes, Followers and Connections – The one with the most followers wins, right? If only it were that simple. The truth is, more followers translate to a better bottom line only if you are actively engaging them, and building a relationship which leads to conversions. Merely developing a massive number of likes or followers who don’t make the transition to customers is relatively pointless.
- Comments – Again, with the goal being to improve conversion, merely creating a blog post that titillates and produces a large number of comments, but generates no leads, is a waste of a blog post. Make the reason they comment have something related to leading them further down the path toward conversion, say for example topical question.
- Impressions – Mainly an advertising metric, the number of ad impressions is also pointless for our purposes, as it does not reveal any measurable action. It tells you the number of times your ad displayed on a computer screen, not how it performs. Instead, look at click-thru rates and conversion rates.
A terrific piece about this is available at HubSpot.
Metrics you’ll want to keep an eye on:
- Shares of your content – While this is not a concrete statistic, having your content shared in whatever form is a step in the right direction. This means that that your content making an impression (the right kind!) and is being shared around.
- Social mentions, citations – Especially now that Google is including social signals (mentions) into the search algorithm, these can be most informative. Not only will it help with search, but in addition authority as your content continually gets shared.
- Conversions – The endgame. You need to make sure that your social media and sharable content is actually resulting in more conversions.
Read more about this at Mashable.