The vanity metrics list.

Twelve metrics that always look good and almost never matter. Cut these from the dashboard and watch decision quality improve.

Reach. Total people who saw the impression. Reach is bounded by what a platform decides to show. Reach moves with the algorithm, not with the work. A campaign with high reach and low intent looks better than a campaign with low reach and qualified buyers. The dashboard rewards the wrong campaign.

Impressions. Reach with repetition. Has all the problems of reach plus inflation.

Engagement rate. Likes, comments, shares divided by reach. Engagement rate optimizes for content that triggers reaction. Reaction is not purchase intent. The most-engaged content on most brand accounts is the content the buyer is least likely to act on.

Click-through rate. CTR is a useful diagnostic in narrow contexts and a vanity metric everywhere else. A high CTR on a misaligned audience means the audience clicked and bounced. The campaign was efficient at producing wasted clicks.

Cost per click. Optimizing for cost per click optimizes for whoever clicks for the lowest price. That is rarely the qualified buyer.

Email open rate. Apple’s mail privacy protection in 2021 broke this metric for half the inbox. Most marketing teams kept tracking it anyway. It is now a measurement of whose mail client preloads images.

Page views. Time on site. Bounce rate. All three move with traffic source mix more than with content quality. A team that improves these metrics is usually shifting traffic, not improving the site.

Branded search volume. Goes up when the brand spends on awareness, which usually means the company is choosing to inflate the number.

Net promoter score. Useful in some categories. In most B2B contexts it is a survey of which customers happen to be in a good mood the week the survey went out.

Number of qualified leads. The qualified part of MQL is whatever the marketing team set as the threshold. The threshold is often calibrated to make the number look good.

Pipeline created. Inflates with every loose deal. Pipeline closed is the only pipeline number that means anything.

Cost per acquisition without LTV context. CPA tells you what acquisition cost. LTV tells you whether it was worth it. CPA without LTV is half a sentence.

Cut these from the dashboard. Replace with three numbers tied to revenue.

Decisions get faster.

Decisions get better.