How to recognise and avoid vanity metrics
Marketing
16 Apr 2026
Kali Dennett
Account director
As a marketeer, evaluating and reporting shouldn’t just be an activity at the “end”, or just a tick box exercise to be read by others – whether it’s an always on strategy or a multi-channel campaign, evaluations should be integral to the auditing, insights and planning stage as well as being an essential look at what has worked and what hasn’t, how to improve and the best route forward. However, at a time when there seems to be more measurement tools and metrics than ever before, it can feel a challenge to know which ones should be guiding your strategies.
Gaining confidence and understanding the difference between KPI-driven business impact and vanity metrics could mean the difference between the C-suite in your business valuing the contribution of marketing (and dare we dream, mean more budget and investment) or seeing it a disposable and ‘nice to have’ addition to the sales toolkit.
Below, we break down the options so you can confidently report to business leaders on the metrics that matter to tangible company growth.
What is a vanity metric?
A vanity metric is a marketing result that looks great on paper – it commonly features a green tick or an upwards arrow - but apart from showing an increase, it doesn’t correlate to an impact defined in both a wider marketing strategy and ideally, the three-to-five-year business plan. This could include over inflated numbers drawn from averages or statistics shared without any context – rendering them effectively useless.
Not only do vanity metrics undermine the value of marketing and do nothing to help future planning and improvement, but they prevent deeper thinking and transparent conversation. For example, you may be tracking your website traffic with the broad aim of seeing it go up month on month. Ticking a box that identifies an increase is just the start of the conversation – is this the right traffic, is this audience taking the actions that matter when they come online and is the website experience right for them. These are all questions that if you dig deeper, either raise challenges that are worthwhile exploring or bring forward results that are more valuable to the business and therefore to the C-Suite reading your reports.
Examples of vanity metrics
Vanity metrics impact reporting across all areas of marketing – from SEO and social media to PR and PPC. Here are some examples to help you consider what may be vanity or valuable in relation to your own marketing plan and business.
Follower count on social media
In social media, one vanity metric to look out for is follower count. When social media first became a marketing tool, follower count was considered a useful gauge on the success of an account – more people following you meant more people seeing your content. However, as platforms have evolved, along with the way users interact with them, it’s become clear this isn’t the case.
Often non marketeers will still see this as the golden metric, but follower count shows surface level popularity without delving into the impact of the marketing channel. Just because people follow your page doesn’t mean they see your content, engage with your activity or click through to your website. You should be targeting people who you actually want to convert, and there are far more accurate metrics to do that, such as click-through rate and engagement rate. Follower rate is also not prioritised by the algorithm and so you are focusing your efforts on something that will not deliver longer term ROI.
Total reach
Total reach is limited in what it can tell us about the quality of marketing activity when used in isolation. Total reach in PR refers to the estimated number of people who could see your press piece within the full lifecycle of that piece being published. It’s based on circulation figures from publications and average monthly website visits.
Estimates and approximations such as reach are the ultimate vanity metrics as they don’t offer true insights into not only how many people actually read the piece, but who they are and if they align with your target audience for awareness raising. It’s crucial when reporting value from PR we think about business impact, not guesswork. Keep reading to find out about a much more meaningful metric.
Impressions
Impressions measure how frequently a piece of content, whether that’s Google ads, organic social media or search results, are displayed. When misused, they show only the top of the funnel awareness but if you’re not running an awareness campaign then it can be misleading as to how impactful your activity really is.
One key challenge with impressions that make it a vanity metric is that it doesn’t require any action. For businesses looking to gain customers, in B2B or B2C strategies, you want to drive people to an action. Impressions only scratch the service by telling you how many people have seen your marketing activity, but business leaders want to know what those people did next as they moved down the funnel of awareness – this is what you should be reporting on.
How to avoid falling into the trap of vanity metrics
The good news is marketeers have more evidence than ever before to prove that marketing has gone far beyond ‘nice to have’ and is essential to support business growth and development goals. With KPI-driven strategies, we can prove how marketing tactics translate into tangible impact.
Examples of actionable metrics
Referral traffic
While PR is an awareness raising tactic, that doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. It’s important to understand where PR is linking to your other marketing channels and amplifying them further. Monitoring referral traffic through implementing UTM links allows you to see in Google Analytics where a user has landed on your website via an external source – such as a PR article. These trackable links are easy to implement and help you go from unknown website visitors to quantifiable referrals from specific PR activity.
Developing a new UTM link to track referral traffic for each campaign will allow you to compare success through measurable data, not vanity metrics, and evidence how PR is supporting your wider marketing tactics, and ultimately business goals.
Engagement rate
One of the most valuable ways you can show impact is through engagement. A strong metric used in both social media and SEO reporting, engagement rate goes beyond measuring how many people have seen a piece of content to how many people it has resonated with.
It’s calculated by dividing the number of engagements (likes, shares, comments, etc) divided by the total number of impressions and translated into a percentage. On websites it shows how long someone has stayed on a page, or multiple, and interacted with it. By highlighting engagement rate you’re able to measure brand resonance as customers move down the sales funnel.
Used in a not too dissimilar way in PR, whitepapers and roundtables are both a strong PR tactic that allow us to monitor engagement via in-person interaction or digital downloads when amplified on other channels, such as paid social media.
Turn your metrics into measurable results
As digital develops, so do metrics and the surge of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are newer but growing in importance. If vanity metrics are proving a minefield for your reporting or you’re struggling to translate output into business impact, our team can align business goals with your marketing strategy through cohesive reporting metrics.
