Feed Your Wallet, Not Your Ego

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BLACKSHEEPDIGITAL.CA
Feed Your Wallet, Not Your Ego
PRESENTED BY BLACK SHEEP DIGITAL
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Vanity Metrics are the nails that build the house
of failure.
Lets start off by sorting out what a vanity
metric actually is. A vanity metric encompasses
anything related to page likes, social media
followers, page views and other fluffy analytics
that look great on paper but have no actual
effect on developing smart future marketing
decisions. Vanity metrics feel awesome and
thats about it.
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So why should you be extremely worried about
digital marketers that place a heavy emphasis on
these metrics?
Anyone can count the number of likes, page views,
page follows and metrics of this nature. This is
the lowest hanging fruit in the digital marketing
world. It may feel like you are getting fantastic
results, but this has no bearing on determining
what the actual state of your business is. Vanity
metrics can be easily manipulated to show
business success or even validate the
effectiveness of entire marketing campaigns. Be
cautious of placing too much importance on these
results because at the end of the day it really
doesnt give you any foundation to make any smart
marketing decisions.In order for any digital
marketing campaign to be plausible it needs to
have an actionable end goal. The end goal is
converting a visitor into a paying customer, its
as simple as that. This is where YOU make money.
Basing decisions on vanity metrics does nothing
to accomplish this and will inevitably lose you
money in the long run. It doesnt actually matter
how many visitors or likes or whatever you get
you arent making money.
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So what should you really be monitoring?
Its all about your perspective and approach to
the situation. Start thinking about how you can
reframe your campaign objectives into actionable
metrics. If you look closely every vanity metric
has a corresponding actionable metric that can be
tracked. What it really boils down to is if you
are willing to dissect the data into finer
details.Lets use pageviews for example. At the
top level it doesnt really tell us much it
just shows an x amount of pageviews over a
certain period of time. Not super helpful at the
moment. So how can we transition this into an
actionable metric? Quite simply we can start
asking questions like
What was the source that led them to the page?
What was the medium used by site visitors?
How many pages did visitors view per session?
Page Bounce Rate?
How much time did visitors stay on a page?
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YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE THAT A SIMPLE CHANGE OF
PERSPECTIVE AND APPROACH TO A METRIC CAN EXTRACT
VALUABLE INFORMATION AND TELL A MORE COMPLETE
STORY. ITS JUST A MATTER OF KNOWING WHAT
QUESTIONS TO ASK. ANOTHER GOOD PLACE TO START IS
PAYING CLOSER ATTENTION TO REVENUE AND COSTS.
WHAT DOES YOUR PROFIT AND LOSS REPORT LOOK LIKE?
WHAT IS A CUSTOMER ACTUALLY WORTH TO YOUR
BUSINESS? YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPENDING A
DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF YOUR MARKETING BUDGET
TO ACQUIRE A NEW CUSTOMER. HERE ARE SOME AREAS TO
CONSIDER

• Customer Lifetime Value
• Total Revenue
• Return On Investment
• Monthly Recurring Revenue
• Cost To Acquire

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Thoroughly answering these questions with
empirical data will tell a much more detailed
story about the current state of the business as
well as grading the effectiveness of current
marketing plans. We can determine if the business
is operating efficiently and can easily see every
single detail regarding the procurement of a new
customer base. At the end of the day you want to
be in the best possible position to optimize your
ROI (return on investment) and generating more
revenue for your business. Focusing on surface
level vanity metrics will only serve to distract
you and be a detriment to your business.
If you are curious about how to start tracking
some of these metrics, feel free to get in touch
with us, and we would be happy to help point you
in the right direction!