One of the most important advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the ability to measure the impact of marketing efforts. The various analytics tools provided by the different digital marketing channels make it possible to track all kinds of data. From people reached, impressions to engagement metrics and revenue.
The goal of gathering data should be to make better marketing decisions towards attaining your business objectives. However, more often than not, the attention is on metrics that make a brand ‘look good’ online. The direct impact on the brand objectives is often neglected. These metrics add little or no value to the brand, hence they are called vanity metrics.
WHAT ARE VANITY METRICS?
Vanity metrics are metrics that look spectacular on the surface, but aren’t meaningful and have no relevance to your business performance.
There’s nothing wrong with growing your account or having lots of followers, but it’s pointless if the followers do not translate into actions that benefit your business.
Followers and likes are not an indication of worth.
Vanity metrics such as impressions, followers and likes are not useless. They can be used to measure non-transactional business goals like brand awareness and share of voice.
How To Identify Vanity Metrics
To ensure you are not spending too much time tracking metrics that don’t really matter, the first thing to do is to create marketing objectives that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound)
Also keep the following in mind;
- Can these metrics lead to key business decisions?
- Do you have some form of control over these metrics?
- Are they reliable?
If your answers to these questions are not a big YES, you just identified vanity metrics.
What are Actionable Metrics?
For every vanity metric, there is an actionable metric. Actionable metrics communicate valuable information regarding progress towards your business goals.
Actionable metrics can improve by your digital marketing efforts, but vanity metrics can grow without you doing anything at all.
I’ll recommend 3 priorities that you should pay attention to
1. CONVERSION RATE OVER CONVERSIONS
Imagine waking up to realize about 50 people downloaded your e-book in just one night. It’s going to look great on your report but you need to make sure to ask yourself if that number is as significant as you think. If that ebook were available for over a month and thirty thousand people had visited the website but didn’t take any action, you would immediately see that there’s more to analyze. It is possible that the wrong audience is being targeted or there’s a problem with the landing page. All of these won’t be readily apparent if you looked at the number of downloads in isolation.
2. ENGAGEMENT RATE OVER FOLLOWERS
Number of followers can be manipulated to make it look more impressive. The important things to consider are the number of followers that actually engage with your posts, if they are taking the next step to visit your website or contact you and if they are converting to customers.
3. BOUNCE RATE OVER PAGE VIEWS
Number of page views is a metric that only shows the number of people that visited your website. It is important to determine what percentage of your visitors perform an action. A lower bounce rate indicates that more of your visitors are getting engaged with your website.
Measuring your marketing performance should be based on analyzing metrics that provide actionable insights that help you make key business decisions towards achieving your goals.
At Ragital, we help businesses identify and measure key performance metrics and provide actionable insights that directly impact business objectives.
Do you want to take your digital marketing measurement to the next level? Contact us to get started.