Actionable Metrics vs Impressive Metrics

There’s a standard line of thought in the digital analytics world that pushes people to differentiate between actionable metrics — statistics you can act on; that will let you learn, change and optimize — and what most people call “vanity” metrics. Those can include metrics that are unique to your organization (for example, adding up impressions and reach of social channels and calling that “exposures”) or well-known metrics like pageviews or social followers that, without context, give you nothing that will let you act and optimize.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the term “vanity metrics”, though. It’s always said dismissively, which is short-sighted. There are situations where a big number is needed. These are times when people want some numbers, but really just want to know how things are going and that you’re on track.

For example, think of a report to the board of an organization, where you just want to tell them, say, “We have a lot of people listening to what we’re saying on social media”, so you report your social media follower numbers. It’s not important to them what the attribution rate of social media is or techniques to optimize engagement. They want to know “we were told that social media is important to communicate to our constituents”, and so those big metrics tell them that and satisfy their questions.

Still, it’s vital to know when to use which of these metrics, and to know that before you start your reporting. Are we looking for a statistic that tells us how we should optimize our email sends, or are we just looking to tell a sponsor how many people they can expect to see a mention of them in an email?

The term I’ve started using is “impressive metrics”. When people coming to me asking for “stats”, the first thing I want to know is whether they’re trying to learn something about our communications, or whether they’re trying to tell an audience that “yes, we’re doing well”. Using the word “impressive” instead of “vanity” makes that a little more clear from the beginning, and certainly is less condescending.

Often, it’s not just a request for generic “stats”, but a request for a particular metric like “how many pageviews did we get on X page” or “what are our total email subscribers”. In these cases, I try to walk the requestor back to that question of actionable vs impressive metrics. Do you want to know how many people saw a particular page to see if our tactics are working, or do you want a big number to give the assurance that we’re successful? If it’s the former, there are likely better ways to understand user behavior, and if it’s the latter, let’s make sure that we get a standard, reproducible number that leaves the audience satisfied.

We all know that actionable metrics are what we need. They’re what fuel our goals and improvements. But I also think it’s important to recognize that there are audiences that need those simple, understandable numbers. Dismissing them as “vanity” does a disservice to everyone.

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash