“Vanity metrics” is a term you may or may not have heard of. It refers to the standards by which we measure our traffic and online viability. What we are now beginning to realize is that several of these used to measure “results” can very often be misleading and ought to be politely ignored.
Here are a few you can safely ignore:
- Likes, Followers and Connections – The one with the most followers wins, right? If only it were that easy. In reality, more followers translate to a better bottom line only when you are actively engaging with them, and building a relationship that leads to conversions. Merely having a huge number of likes or followers who don’t make the transition to customers is relatively pointless.
- Comments – Again, with the goal being to improve conversion; merely creating a blog post that titillates and fosters a large number of comments, but generates no leads, is a waste of a blog post. Make the reason they comment have something related to leading them further down the path toward conversion, like a topical question.
- Impressions – Mainly an advertising metric, the number of ad impressions is also pointless for our purposes, as it does not reveal any measurable action. It tells you the number of times your ad displayed on a computer screen, not how it performs. Instead, look at click-thru rates and conversion rates.
A terrific piece about this can be found at HubSpot
Metrics you’ll need to keep close track of:
- Shares of your content – While this is not a concrete statistic, having your content shared in whatever form is a step in the right direction. This means that that your content making an impression (the right kind!) and is being shared around.
- Social mentions and citations – Given that Google is now integrating social signals and citations into the search algorithm, this is an element that is very helpful. This aids your website in search, along with authority.
- Conversions – The endgame. You must make sure that your social media and sharable content is actually resulting in more conversions.
Read more about this at Mashable