How to Safely Ignore Metrics and Get a More Accurate Picture

The term “vanity metrics” has made its way into the marketing vocabulary lately, and for good reason. What a great many use to measure “results” can quite often be misleading and because of this, it’s worth examining some of the marketing metrics you can (and possibly should!) disregard.

Those you can safely ignore:

• Likes, Followers and Connections – The one with the most followers wins, right? If only it were that easy. In reality, more followers translate to a better bottom line only if you are actively engaging with them, and building a relationship leading to conversions. Merely developing a massive number of likes or followers who don’t make the transition to customers is relatively pointless.
• Comments – Again, with the objective being to increase conversion,  merely creating a blog post that titillates and produces a large number of comments, but generates no leads, is a waste of a blog post. Make the reason they comment have something related to leading them further along the path toward conversion, such as a topical question.
• Impressions – Mainly used in your advertising, the sheer number of ad impressions is relatively useless, as it will not indicate any measurable action. Simply having your ad display in front of a couple of million computer screens is no real measure of how it performs. Rather, take a look at click-thru rates and conversion rates.

A terrific piece about this is available at HubSpot.

Those you ought to keep an eye on:

• Shares – Having people share your content, emails and other media is a step in the right direction. This means that not only is your content making an impact, but it’s also being passed around.
• Social mentions, citations – Especially now that Google is including social signals (mentions) into the search algorithm, these can be most helpful. Not only will it help with search, but also authority as your content continually gets shared.
• Conversions – The endgame. You must make sure that your social media and sharable content is actually resulting in more conversions.

Read more about this at Mashable.