Every Metric Is A Vanity Metric

Marketers can get caught up in specific metrics, focusing on those data points that make you look good in reporting, but don’t help you understand your performance.

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete discusses the vanity we bring to the metrics we track, and how to take a better, more realistic view of your results.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Dr. Pete, the Marketing Scientist for Moz, and I want to talk to you today about vanity metrics.

So I think we all have an intuition of what that means, but what I want to discuss today is I think we get caught up in this being about specific metrics. To me, the problem isn’t the metrics themselves. The problem is the vanity. So I want to talk about us and what we bring to metrics, and how to do better no matter what the metric is.

SEO metric funnel

So I want to start with this kind of simplistic SEO funnel of metrics, starting with ranking.

Ranking

Ranking via click-through rate delivers traffic. Traffic via conversion rate delivers leads or sales or conversions or whatever you want to call them, the money. Then beyond that, we might have some more advanced metrics, like lifetime value, that kind of get into revenue over time or profit over time. Naturally, over time we’ve moved down this funnel and kind of put our attention more at the bottom, at the bottom line and the dollars.

That makes sense. I think it’s good that we’ve gotten away from metrics like hits. In the early days, when a page counted more because it had 200 images and 73 JavaScript files, that’s not so great, right? We know now that’s probably bad in some cases. But it’s possible to hold that mirror up to any of these metrics and get caught up in the vanity.

I know we’re used to this with rankings and traffic. We’ve all had customers that wanted to go after certain very specific head terms or vanity terms as we call them, that really weren’t delivering results or maybe cost a lot or were very competitive.

Traffic

Traffic, okay, traffic is good. But if you’ve ever had a piece of viral content that went really big but ended up not driving any conversions because it had nothing to do with your site, you know that’s not so great.

In fact, traffic by itself could be bad. You could be overloading your server. You could be stopping legitimate customers from buying. So bringing people to your site for no reason or the wrong people isn’t that great.