Are You Tracking Vanity Metrics?

Shift your focus from vanity metrics to actionable metrics to improve your business

Analytics has made it so easy to collect and interpret data that virtually no aspect of a business goes unanalyzed these days. However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you feel like you’re drowning in data, you need to stop and consider the metrics you’re tracking and their value to your business. Specifically, you need to stop and weed out any vanity metrics.

What are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics are stats that look impressive on paper, but aren’t really meaningful to your business goals.

Vanity metrics are most often discussed in the context of digital marketing. Examples include likes, shares, followers, downloads, and page views. When these numbers are high, it looks great on paper, but tracking these metrics doesn’t provide information about the true level of engagement of the users or how their actions are translating into revenue. For that, a digital marketer would need to track conversions and other actions.

Businesses in any industry can be plagued by vanity metrics. This makes it very important to check whether the metrics you are tracking are vanity metrics or actionable metrics.

What are Actionable Metrics?

Actionable metrics are stats that relate to specific, repeatable tasks that affect the goals of your business. Most importantly, actionable metrics measure things you can take action on and change for the better.

Tracking metrics that aren’t related to your business goals—or that aren’t related to things you can change—isn’t going to be productive or helpful. This means that before you pick your metrics, you need to have clearly defined business goals.

Choosing a Tool for Tracking and Analyzing Your Metrics

The tool you use for tracking and analyzing your metrics can also affect your ability to take actions that will improve your business. Why? Because you need to be able to identify opportunities for action, something that will be very difficult if you don’t have a robust analytics tool that presents the data in a way that is easy to understand.

MyFieldAudits makes an excellent choice of analytics tool for small businesses. Our tool allows you to input data from site audits and other sources and then generate custom reports. These reports make the data easy to understand by presenting it in a visual format on a digital dashboard. MyFieldAudits can be installed on any smartphone, tablet, or computer, making it easy to provide all stakeholders from employees to upper level management and everyone in between with access to information about the company’s performance on relevant actionable metrics.

If you would like to learn more about MyFieldAudits, please email us at info@MyFieldAudits.com.