Vanity metrics are wasting your time.
And they are boring to everyone outside of marketing. (And probably to a few people in marketing, too.)
What makes a metric boring? When the measurement doesn't mean anything for the business.
I give you four metrics to measure instead of common vanity metrics we are accustomed to. These four meaty metrics actually help generate revenue for your company.
People will care about these metrics because there is a solid story behind why you should measure each one.
Let's talk about track this, not that, because as a marketing professional, we can get stuck in vanity metrics because sometimes those are easier to measure than the actual metrics that move the needle. And whenever I talk about move the needle, it's really about what is going to help generate revenue for your company.
There's a couple of vanity metrics I want to talk about. Number one, you've probably heard me talk about before is number of followers on any social platform. I don't care how many followers a company has. What I do care about as a marketing professional is the engagement rate. And you can do a quick Google search to find what the average engagement rate is for a company in your specific industry on a specific social media platform.
A couple of other vanity metrics include the number of website visitors. I don't really care how many people come to my website unless I sell things on my website. For a lot of companies in the AEC space, we are not selling things on our website. Instead of that vanity metric, what I would actually pay attention to is time on website and specifically time on a specific page. If I have a website page that is full of really good content (how to contact us, a careers page, an award that the company won) I want to see more time on that page versus other pages.
Another vanity metric is a proposal hit rate or a lot of companies call it their win rate. While that is a great metric to follow, it's not really a good metric for marketing because after the interview stage of a project pursuit, you have a lot of other departments and a lot of other people getting involved in that project pursuit. So for marketing professionals, I would say, track the number of pursuits that get to the interview stage. That is a key indicator for how well marketing is doing up to that point. After that point, while marketing is still involved, we don't really get to control the outcome as much as getting to the interview stage.
And then the last vanity metric I want to talk about is the number of proposals. I don't care how many proposals you go after. What I care about is the time you spent on a won proposal, because if you're spinning your wheels on projects that you don't win, that's costing me money. And if we're spending more time on proposals that we are winning, that is an indicator of asking yourself "How do we make that process more efficient?" and really doubling down on that type of measurement.
Think about what you may be tracking and is it a vanity metric, and is it really moving the needle for your company?
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