Is this the time for your industry to worry about vanity metrics?
Investing in marketing your industry is essential for it to attract new customers and grow. Therefore, social media is a great channel for promoting and expanding your business. After all, relevant content has great power to give visibility and generate recognition for your company. But, after publishing your content, you need to analyze the data to understand how your audience is reacting to what you post. In this sense, the metrics, which consist of information such as interactions, views and shares, are provided by the platforms themselves. However, some of these metrics can confuse even experienced professionals, who may end up getting stuck in numbers and indicators that will not help them understand the success of marketing actions, the so-called “vanity metrics”.
Therefore, using this information to measure the performance of your content on social media may seem like a simple task, but it ends up being very difficult, as indicators are often imprecise and insufficient to provide a true result of the company's social media performance. your industry.
Follow the text and learn more about the use of vanity metrics, and how to avoid falling into the illusion of prioritizing them!
What are vanity metrics?
Vanity metrics are data that do not help to make strategic or relevant decisions for the business, therefore, not bringing real results.
This does not mean that you should ignore or discard this data, but you need to know that these metrics can only provide superficial and vague notes, and that they can even harm the development of your industry if placed as a priority.
Remember that you may be receiving thousands of likes, but this does not necessarily mean that your brand's main objective is being achieved.
Therefore, vanity metrics are seen as an obstacle to the digital marketing strategy.
What are the main vanity metrics?
Finally, the time has come to understand which indicators may be harming your analyzes and, consequently, your digital strategies. Discover the main vanity metrics below.
Likes
The truth is that “likes” do not guarantee any decision-making. A like on your post shows that the person liked your content. However, will she continue to accompany you? And at some point, will she purchase your products?
So, at the end of the day, you may have a lot of likes but no conversions. This is why focusing on this vanity metric or even buying likes will reduce the quality and strategies of your analysis, and will not bring progress to your industry.
Followers
If you have a lot of people following the content you post, but this doesn't reflect any type of action, these followers are just numbers and don't make much difference to your business.
The problem often lies in not being able to build a solid relationship with your followers, not in the lack of them.
Therefore, there are other more valuable metrics to help you analyze the success of your campaigns and social networks.
Sharing
Sharing is not synonymous with conversion and you will only know if your strategy is generating results if those who shared your content make a decision or forward your material to those who do so.
Sharing your content can help you drive more traffic to your website. However, these numbers do not prove whether users are progressing on their shopping journey.
clicks
The click-through rate helps you know whether you are managing to drive people to your website or blog, for example. However, there is no point in having many clicks on your link and a low conversion rate. Many people may just click on your product link out of curiosity and end up leaving without even being interested in it.
Therefore, other points must be analyzed and well executed in your strategy, and you must have a defined objective behind the metric.
bounce rate
This rate represents the number of people who abandoned your page before it met some requirements determined by Google, so that it is not considered rejected by the user. In addition to time, interaction with the listed links is also analyzed, which will determine whether it will be considered rejected.
This metric is one that is worth observing in your industry's marketing strategy, however, we list it here because it can become a danger if not interpreted correctly.
For example, a high bounce rate is typically a negative for sites focused on offering content. However, not all pages are created equal. There are some designed to receive a high volume of interactions, while others do not require this.
Therefore, to evaluate it, it is very important to consider the particularities and objectives of each business.
But then, which metrics really matter?
Those who invest in marketing for their industry are always concerned about the return on their campaigns. And for the expected result to be achieved, the metrics analyzed must be those that provide relevant data, which will indicate how much the business is evolving or how much it needs to improve in some aspect.
This way, instead of focusing on likes, followers, shares and clicks, think about reach. In other words, the number of people affected by your action.
Also consider achieving the objective of the publication. For example, if your post had external links, how many people left and completed a certain action?
Therefore, metrics are fundamental indicators for evaluating the success of your social media marketing strategy. You can find more about this topic, with other metrics that deserve attention, in our text about marketing metrics. Check out!
Apply learnings to your company
Now that you know more about vanity metrics, you can imagine that it can often be challenging even for marketers to discover their true value on a company's social media.
Because of this, it is important to remember that these metrics reinforce the idea that having a digital presence is very important, but that there is no point in simply creating pages and focusing on online ads without a clear objective and without your content reaching the right people.
Therefore, vanity metrics should not be discarded, but rather understood, about what space they occupy in your strategy and what your objective is beyond them. Remember that there are other indicators that will help you measure the efforts of your actions, with real results and greater efficiency.
Do you want to know more about digital marketing to boost your industry’s results? Keep following the blog from Beatz, with the best digital marketing content for your business.