vanity metric

is a metric which makes us feel like a success (e.g. A sudden increase in hits ) while masking a less flattering business reality (i.e. That all the hits came from one active user).

By contrast, vanity metrics fail this criterion. Take the number of hits to a company website. Let's say we have 40,000 hits this month a new record. What do we need to do to get more hits' Well, that depends. Where are the new hits coming from' Is it from 40,000 new customers or from one guy with an extremely active web browser' Are the hits the result of a new marketing campaign or PR push' What is a hit, anyway' Does each page in the browser count as one hit, or do all the embedded images and multimedia content count as well' Those who have sat in a meeting debating the units of measurement in a report will recognize this problem.

is a number or stat (such as visitor , subscriber, or follower totals) which may look good on paper but don't really mean anything important.

Vanity metrics: Numbers or stats that look good on paper, but don't really mean anything important.

is problematic because it allows entrepreneurs to form false conclusions and live in their own private reality and discourage pivoting.

First, vanity metrics can allow entrepreneurs to form false conclusions and live in their own private reality. This is particularly damaging to the decision to pivot because it robs teams of the belief that it is necessary to change. When people are forced to change against their better judgment, the process is harder, takes longer, and leads to a less decisive outcome.

is problematic in that it leads us to make narrow and often wrongheaded causal conclusions about improvements in certain numbers.

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time. That is why it's so common to have a meeting in which marketing thinks the numbers went up because of a new PR or marketing effort and engineering thinks the better numbers are the result of the new features it added. Finding out what is actually going on is extremely costly, and so most managers simply move on, doing the best they can to form their own judgment on the basis of their experience and the collective intelligence in the room.

vanity metric, n.All

vanity metric