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Vanity or valuable? Marketing metrics that matter

Nov 28, 2024

marketing metrics a woman looking at a mirror - in the centre of the image inside the mirror is the word "metrics"

Which metrics matter?

“What metrics do we measure? How do we measure ROI?” These are two of the most common questions in initial client engagements. I do not answer each question or client the same way, but every answer I give includes the word “depends.”
It’s easy to get your marketing metrics wrong. Marketing strategy can easily be warped by being drawn to the metrics that are the easiest to get. In the Catalogue of Bias (my new favourite website), this is called availability bias.
Availability bias: “A distortion that arises from the use of information which is most readily available, rather than that which is necessarily most representative.”
How do we avoid availability bias? A great marketing plan is an expression of a great business plan. The answer is to start there.

A tenuous simile involving DJing

Like many kids who grew up in Auckland in the 1990s, I was a semi-serious pub DJ. Because I’m a nerd, I had my parameters: soul, funk, reggae, and vintage were the order of the day, generally. But outside of that, I had one KPI and one KPI only: was anyone dancing? If they were, I was doing my job. If they weren’t, it was time to stop whatever I was playing and get something on that worked. As long as I stuck within my invisible rules, I would have no shame chasing that goal.


If we stretch this simile to the breaking point, it’s a similar situation in marketing. We actually have one big goal: Are we helping the business make money? Our goals and KPIs are closely linked to the business’s KPIs, and there are almost always the same two big ones in every industry: revenue and profit. Everything we do supports these goals in some way.

Mirror your business strategy: defining a vanity metric.

The definition of a “vanity metric” is that it rarely connects to meaningful outcomes like revenue or customer retention. It’s a starting point, not the finish line. A high CTR might mean your ad is engaging, but what’s the point if those clicks don’t convert into sales or meaningful leads? To truly measure success, we need to look beyond surface-level metrics.

Sales activation vs brand building

It’s mandatory if you write a marketing blog to bring up Les Binet and Peter Field and their seminal work, especially The Long and The Short of It. This humble marketer is not immune. They put marketing activities into two buckets:
  1. Sales Activation: Short-term marketing aimed at immediate sales, targeting specific audiences with actionable offers like discounts or email campaigns. It focuses on measurable results and quick consumer responses, such as purchases or sign-ups.
  2. Brand Building: Long-term marketing to establish emotional connections and positive brand perceptions. It targets broad audiences, builds loyalty, and drives sustained growth through storytelling, values, and trust-building efforts like ads, sponsorships, and content.

An optimal mix

Binet and Field are worth thousands of column inches, but for this article, one of the key findings of their research and work is that marketing needs an optimal mix of both types to create impactful revenue and profit results. The cited figure is often 60% brand and 40% sales activation for B2B brands.

It’s not hard to think through this practically. If you focus entirely on sales activation, you have no loyalty to your product. Therefore, your key differentiator is price. In order to compete, you’re involved in a downward spiral that destroys top-line revenue and bottom-line profit.

On the other hand, if customers are not just aware of your product’s relative features and benefits, especially against the competition, but also feel an affinity with your brand and what you stand for, you’re suddenly fighting on new ground. People will choose to buy the product even if it is more expensive (if you sell a premium product, they may be part of the point: they’re buying it because it is expensive).

That’s the magic that happens when you have both brand-building and sales activation.

Performance marketing does not mean solely sales activation

That’s where the term “performance marketing” can get tangled. The easiest way to measure campaign success is through metrics like impressions, click-through rates, and website activity.

These are not necessarily the metrics we should be looking at, and they’re heavily associated with sales activation – short-term, tactical, sales-orientated marketing. We want to measure everything that matters, and that includes brand-building.

Profit and revenue, like marketing, is a long game

A good performance marketer knows that brand building and sales activation have to happen simultaneously and in a relationship with each other. Because of that, you measure:
  • Different things at different times, depending on the stage of your marketing (we’ve just got our website up! Let’s measure unique users and website traffic) 
  • Different KPIs for different campaigns (e.g. primarily brand-building might be NPS scores or article readership) 
  • It is more complicated and harder to measure metrics (e.g.customer lifetime value (CLV) – the total worth to a customer’s business over the whole period of their relationship with the brand). 
That’s where the “depends” part of this all comes into play. Depending on your objective, the type of marketing you’re doing, who you are reaching, your brand values, your industry, and the channel strategy you’re working on….. these all count towards what we should focus on.

Actionable data that gets actioned

A great performance marketer will work with you to produce two types of metrics: KPIs and leading indicators. Most likely, as a business leader, you don’t need to know all the leading indicators, but you should have access to them. With performance marketing, it’s like being in the cockpit of an aircraft — the pilot uses all of the instruments, including the airspeed indicator, attitude indicator and altimeter, to guide them, not just one.

The real key is that the performance marketer uses all of the reporting to guide their actions—if a piece of content goes down well, they double down. The name of the game is optimisation.

Pieces of the puzzle

Vanity metrics like impressions and CTRs have their place, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle. To truly measure marketing success, you must prioritise revenue, profit, and long-term growth.

Ultimately, the question isn’t whether vanity metrics are useless—they’re not. The real challenge is ensuring they support, rather than overshadow, the metrics that drive sustainable growth. Are you tracking the metrics that truly matter? If not, it’s time to rethink how you measure success.

Marketing that is measured ….. and matters

Here at Europa Creative Partners, we specialise in marketing that matters and is measurable. All our clients benefit from regular, actionable reporting (that we action). We’d love to hear from you if this is something you’re after.

By Dave Hayward

Dave, the founder of Europa Creative Partners, has over twenty years of experience in sales and marketing. He reserves the right to shoehorn in his interests such as astronomy and sport into our company blog. Contact Dave for a no-obligation consultation.