10,000 “Likes”
2 Million followers
5,000 views

We’ve all fallen for these metrics, they’re flashy and in your face, but what do they mean?

These types of metrics are referred to as “vanity metrics.” They are often skewed to show growth and can be very misleading. Why? Because they don’t tell the whole story.

Don’t get us wrong, metrics have their place – if they didn’t we’d be out of a job – but what are metrics except numbers if you don’t understand your goals?

Imaging you’re driving down the road – your GPS says you’re heading North, cool. It’s hours later and you’re still driving. You are somewhere, but you don’t know where. Why? Because you didn’t actually pick a destination. How can you get where you want to be if you don’t know where that is?

Back to metrics. The question is not, do metrics matter? They do. The question is, which metrics matter for you and why?

Here is an example; we work on a lot of political campaigns – Our goal? to raise money. Do you know which of the metrics below would be important to measure for our clients? Or why?

a. Instagram Likes
b. Click-through-rate
c. Conversions

c. Conversions! A high conversion rate means that users are doing what we want them to do – donating (yay).

IF you said click-through-rate you would also be right, but only if you paired it with conversion rate. If we had a HIGH click-through-rate that would mean that we were successfully getting users to our website (yay) but a low conversion rate, that would indicate that those answers were dropping off before donating (boo).

Our job? Figure out why this is happening and fix the problem.

If you’re not seeing progress towards your goal or are having trouble understanding the metrics you’re being given here are some questions to ask:

1. How did you get these numbers?
2. What do these mean?
3. What’s working and what’s not?
4. How do these relate to our goal?
5. What’s next?

Start there and you will start turning vanity metrics into actionable measurements.