How the “vanity metric” got a bad name

The green tick, the upward trajectory, the percentage increase, it feels good, doesn’t it?

That small dopamine hit when the numbers climb, even slightly, is the marketer’s equivalent of applause. It doesn’t matter if the conversion rate only increased by 0.01%, it’s still an increase, and don’t let anyone tell you any differently!

We hate to admit, a little to ourselves, mostly to others, but most definitely to other marketers, that it feels good.

That is, until we hear the phrase, vanity metric.

Seeing that eyebrow raised from someone also used to desperately paddling in the same water-rising paddleboat. Did you just use a vanity metric? Says Adam (telepathically) from the social media delivery team. That knowing feeling of, I saw what you did there, I may also have done it in the past.

So, what does it truly mean to play around with vanity metrics? Are we snobby or simply selective? 

Determining marketing value

Marketing metrics come in many shapes and sizes - this is one of the reasons why “marketing success” is so difficult to comprehensively track. 

Some ways you can break it down are: 

Channel-specific metrics: 

• Website metrics: You might track performance visitor numbers, bounce rate, or landing page conversions. 

• Email metrics: Open rate and unsubscribes might tell you more about the people in your email lists.

• Social metrics: Impressions? Views? Follows? Socials are teeming with analytics to use.

• SEO metrics: Organic traffic, keyword rankings, and click-through rates from search can help you track visibility and performance in organic channels.

• E-commerce metrics: You can measure add-to-cart rates, cart abandonment, and checkout conversion rates to understand purchase behaviour.

• Customer and brand metrics: Customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and retention rates reveal how customers feel about your brand.

Performance metrics: 

• Pipeline generation: Whether that’s digital or not, often good marketing is equated to the sales value it produces.

• Conversion rates: A key indicator of how effectively your marketing turns visitors or leads into customers.

• Cost per lead (CPL): Measures how much you spend to generate a new lead.

• Cost per conversion (CPC): Shows how much it costs to achieve a specific action or sale.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Estimates the total revenue a single customer is expected to generate over their entire relationship with your business.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but it paints the picture. Marketing analytics are a force to be reckoned with, there is so much you can track, so how do you determine what should be tracked?

What should you be tracking?

The uncomfortable truth is that there’s no universal answer. Every organisation will have a different definition of success depending on its sector, size, audience, and, most importantly, its intentions. 

For example, a B2B SaaS company chasing qualified leads will define value differently from an e-commerce brand chasing one-click conversions. And both will have to explain their worth to someone with a spreadsheet and a furrowed brow.

Why you can’t track everything

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

Remember this famous quote from Peter Drucker? It was everywhere, splashed across LinkedIn posts and thought-leadership articles for years. 

It made marketers feel inadequate for caring about things like brand sentiment, word of mouth, or even intuition.

But who actually believes that? Anyone who’s spent a few years in marketing knows it’s utterly false. 

Some of the most valuable marketing impacts are untraceable. You can’t neatly quantify how a brand’s tone of voice builds trust, or how a perfectly timed meme makes a potential customer feel connected enough to click buy next time. These things live in the grey area of human behaviour, the area vanity metrics often hint at but can’t fully explain.

Marketing metrics are something, but they’re not everything. If we could collectively admit that, we might start building a more holistic understanding of how marketing truly works, through a web of multi-touch points that extend far beyond what analytics can see.

A customer might see an ad, scroll past it, hear a podcast mention, read a review, and then convert weeks later through an organic search. Try attributing that accurately with a single number on a report deck. You can’t. But it doesn’t mean the earlier touchpoints didn’t matter.

By ignoring this rich ecosystem and focusing only on what’s measurable, businesses are making decisions with one eye closed. Data gives us clarity, but context gives us truth.

The justifiers

The truth is, as marketers, we’re all chasing role justification.

It’s frustrating, and often a complete waste of energy, that we still have to bridge this chasm of misunderstanding between what marketing is and what a business wants it to be. 

So, which company do you work at? 

The “we don’t really understand the value of what you do” company? 

The “we want more output, more, more, more” company? 

Or the “we’ll just ignore your existence and then blame you for everything” company?

I could go on, but I’ll spare you the night terrors.

To be fair, not every business falls into these traps. Many organisations do respect marketing, ask the right questions, and give space for experimentation and long-term growth. I’ve been lucky to work with some of them. They understand that marketing isn’t a magic vending machine, it’s a process of building visibility, trust, and timing.

But we’re still at the mercy of larger organisational power. Because of this, there’s always an undercurrent of justification attached to our roles. 

We become “the justifiers”,  forever proving ROI in a system that secretly knows metrics aren’t king, but can’t quite let go of the crown.

How the vanity metric was born

So, what happens when you combine the need to constantly justify marketing activity, access to incomplete data, and the reality that sometimes customer journeys go beyond what's measurable? The vanity metric is born, ladies and gentlemen.

Instead of collecting data like pennies in a slot machine, we should be using data to inform our strategies. Data should be the compass, not the destination. If you think of it more organically, it’s about building a story, a narrative around behaviour, both from potential and returning customers.

The problem is that we’ve become so obsessed with quantifying every pixel of progress that we rarely stop to ask what it means. 

We hate the idea of cherry-picking data, yet sometimes it’s unavoidable. Show me a perfect database, where open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and marketer sanity rate all align neatly, and I’ll show you a fantasy.

The vanity metric exists because reality is messy. Not every campaign leads directly to conversion. Not every post drives purchase intent. Sometimes the value lies in visibility, in recognition, in subtle movement. Vanity metrics became our shorthand for progress in a world that demands instant results.

Escaping the metric maze

So, where do we go from here?

Data is good, essential, even. But it’s only powerful when we interpret it with honesty.

Vanity metrics aren’t evil; they’re incomplete. They might not tell us the whole story of performance, and they might not reveal the most important part of that story, but they do tell us something. 

The trick is not to worship them or weaponise them, but to understand their place in the bigger narrative.

A spike in followers might not mean business growth, but it could mean growing awareness. A sudden dip in engagement might not signal failure, but a shift in audience behaviour.

Every number has a context, and every context needs curiosity.

Escaping the metric maze starts with reframing how we talk about success. It’s not about inflating the shiny figures to impress a boardroom. It’s about aligning what we track with what we value. And sometimes, what we value can’t be plotted on a graph.

Because at its core, marketing isn’t about numbers, it’s about people. It’s about the moments we can’t measure: when someone remembers your brand months later, when a story resonates, when trust quietly forms without a single click to prove it.

So the next time Adam from social delivery raises an eyebrow, smile back. 

A vanity metric might not win you a data-science award, but when used with awareness and intention, it can still be a valuable piece of the puzzle.