Vanity Metrics Vs Actionable Metrics

The Right Stats to Track

Identifying actionable metrics and vanity metrics is a crucial step in any marketer’s journey. Knowing how many people have read your latest blog post or liked your most recent social media post may be important, but what does it actually connote? This blog will help you to demonstrate with certainty how your marketing efforts contribute to increased revenue.

Keep reading to know:

• What Exactly Are Vanity Metrics?
• What Do Actionable Metrics Mean?
• What is the Reason Behind Marketers’ Preference for Vanity Metrics?

What Exactly Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics make you look good but are not reflective of actual performance, and don’t help you to know how well your marketing strategy is working. They tend to be oversimplified, lacking in context, or misleading. But, your marketing strategy’s success hinges on your ability to grasp the implications of data and apply what you learn from the analysis to your campaigns.

Example of A Vanity Metric

The number of people who follow you on social media is unquestionably a vanity metric. To turn vanity metrics into actionable metrics, you need to understand the full customer journey. 

Say you are a PPC marketer. There’s a good chance you’re keeping tabs on things like clicks and impressions. Probably you are also using conversions to track your leads.

But, this only provides a one-sided picture of the success of the PPC campaign. In our opinion, it is devoid of the most critical metric, which is Revenue.

Let’s look at a case study: A PPC marketer compiles a report on the ads they have run over the previous month. For a cost of £1,000, they recorded 10,000 clicks and more than 300,000 impressions. It resulted in the acquisition of 200 new leads.

Is this impressive? Well, let’s analyze it; 750 pounds are lost for every lead that doesn’t result in a sale of $250. Also, It’s not enough to make a profit if only four leads turn into revenues of £1,000 each.

What Do Actionable Metrics Mean?

Actionable Metrics are a must-have for marketers, both holistically and on a channel by channel basis. In order for a metric to be actionable, it must be linked to a specific action. Using these tools will help you gain a better insight of how you can improve your outputs and push more purposeful actions throughout your marketing campaigns and channels. Want to know how? Continue reading.

Example of An Actionable Metric

If you’re looking for a metric that can be quantified, implemented, and scaled, actionable metric is our go-to choice. A common denominator is needed if you’re testing two campaigns with the same budget. If you compare the sales generated by the two campaigns, it will be clear which was the more profitable. Using this data, you can increase the reach of your marketing efforts.

Helpful tip: If the goal of your marketing reporting puts more emphasis on generating revenue, we can’t blame you for using this metric. It is the best metric for measuring, proving, and optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Cost per sale, cost per lead, cost for customer acquisition, customer lifetime value, and more are examples of actionable metrics.

What is the Reason Behind Marketers’ Preference for Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics are more fun to track and easier to obtain. When you log into Instagram, you can see who your followers are in a matter of seconds. In Google Analytics, you can see your monthly traffic in a matter of minutes.

But, marketers aren’t using actionable metrics because of a lack of time, due to the following reasons:

B2B Marketers Have Lead Generation to Focus On

Your Google Analytics account will show which campaign and channel are bringing in the most revenue if you work in eCommerce. But, what if you need to generate leads via phone call, live chat or form submission?

Many marketers find it difficult to accurately track lead generation and conversions. More than half of the marketers who used calls and texts as a conversion tool had difficulty tracking it.

Getting Beyond Lead Tracking is a Challenge for Many Marketers

It’s possible that you may be able to keep track of your leads and link them to their source. But how do you incorporate closed revenue?

Can you possibly say that, we generate 100 leads via PPC, 25 of which closed into sales, resulting in a total of £30,000 in revenue?

If you can’t, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity. Nevertheless, you need not be alarmed. It’s not easy to determine where a company’s revenue is coming from. As a result, you require marketing attribution software like ours to bridge the information gap. With it, you would be able to evaluate how much revenue each marketing channel, campaign, ad, and keyword generates.

Marketers are Unable to Accurately Attribute Sales to Long and Complicated Customer Journeys

Vanity metrics provide no context or nuance, with one clear point in time. Unless Actionable metrics that are accompanied by context. As such, there are more touchpoints for marketers to manage and understand within these customer journeys. 

A user may visit your site more than 20 times, but without the use of a marketing attribution tool, a referral can’t be directly correlated with the customer’s closed revenue.

Methods for Selecting the Metrics to Track

It’s good to know that vanity metrics and actionable metrics have their differences, as well as the challenges associated with measuring them.

So, how do you choose which metrics to keep track of?

Method 1: Define your marketing objectives 

Each of your marketing goals should have a corresponding set of actionable metrics. Your efforts will be focused and measurable because it will help you keep track of your progress.

Marketing objectives could include:

• Enhance brand awareness 
• Improve SEO ranking

Then, we would look at the actionable metrics that can be used to measure these objectives. For these, it would likely be:

• Visitors to the site should be increased, as well as the social media presence
• Drive more highly converting organic traffic by improving your SEO rankings for specific keywords

Method 2: Examine Your Existing Marketing Metrics

You should focus on metrics that support your marketing objectives while also providing structure and value. Your data is only telling a portion of the story if you can’t definitively link changes to marketing campaigns. A small analysis can be done to explain why there is a fluctuation in the number of visitors.

Method 3:  Turn Vanity Metrics into Actionable Metrics

Vanity metrics can easily be converted into actionable metrics. To help you get started, here is a collection of some of the more common ones. Remember that all you have to do is give your data context and nuance.

Know that you can add context to your data by using marketing attribution and call tracking. Tracking revenue attribution allows you to quickly identify what is and isn’t working.

Helpful tip: Find out what revenue attribution is, and how it can improve your business strategies. Using revenue attribution will give you a clear edge over your competitors and boost your bottom line.

Conclusion

By utilizing actionable metrics, you’ll be able to make more informed decision making about your paid advertising budget, allocate resources to the channels that are most effective, and give feedback on what really matters: generating revenue.

You can use marketing attribution to convert vanity metrics into actionable metrics.

To learn more about how DuceCampaign can help you bridge the gap between sales and marketing, book our team today!