What’s a Vanity Metric? (And Why You Should Care)

The other day I was reading through posts in a private Facebook group for entrepreneurs. 

A woman who had launched her website recently was asking, “What is a good number of page views your first month?” 

You may have asked the same question as you try to build your audience. After all, if you want to build your audience, doesn’t that mean you want more page views? 

Yes and no. 

Charts! 

Of course you want more eyeballs on your site pages. But why? 

Page views don't tell you how those eyeballs got to your site. And that means you won't know whether your marketing has actually made a difference. If that number goes up or down each day, page views won't tell you why. Maybe a baby grabbed his mom's phone (believe me, it happens) and hit Refresh a 1,000 times. Maybe 1,000 babies each did that once. Either way, 1,000 babies aren't going to get you any closer to your goal.  

In other words, a larger audience is not an end; it’s a means to an end. The end is to reach people who can really benefit from your services or products. 

Your “means” is not simply a larger audience; it’s got to be a larger audience of potential customers. 

So how do you measure if you’re creating a larger audience that can help you reach your goal? 

It won’t be from page views, as you know by now. Not only do page views tell you nothing about how someone arrived at your site, they also can't tell you anything about what that viewer did—or didn’t do—next. 

Because of all this, page views qualify as a “vanity metric.” This metric, AKA measurement, doesn't help you make decisions about what to keep doing and what to do differently in order to reach your potential customers. It just tells you that some people have come across your site. 

Here are 3 essential posts about vanity metrics, with some resources thrown in the middle if you'd like to start using actionable metrics: 

1. Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics : Eric Reis, the originator of the term vanity metric, breaks it down: “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” So, how do you figure out which metrics are actionable? … The next post can help with that. 

2. Metrics, Metrics On The Wall, Who’s The Vainest Of Them All? A lot of info here, but the bottom line: 

“When some people pick the key metrics they want to track (also known as key performance indicators or KPIs), the first thing they do is log into Google Analytics and figure out what’s easily accessible. ...

"Start from the opposite direction. Don’t even look at Google Analytics or any other tool. Start with your business. Pick 1-5 metrics that tell you how healthy your business is. This will include things like revenue, number of leads, account signups, and lifetime value.

"Figure out how to force your analytics tools to get you as close as possible to these metrics. If you have to import and merge data into Excel, do it."

3. Once you take the advice above, you'll probably find that you need to set up Goals in Google Analytics, if that's the tool you're using. Google Analytics has a useful tutorial for how to set up goals. (If you're not using GA, start. It's free! Click for SquareSpace or WordPress instructions for connecting GA.)

4. Finally, if you have time, read this story to understand the far-reaching impact of the misuse of vanity metrics. This story of this YouTuber may not seem directly relevant, but it is all about how an entire economy has sprung up around vanity metrics (like video views and clicks) that don't really mean much. Something to think about. 

How to Blog If You Don't Feel Confident as a Writer

When it comes to writing, I've already shared my difficulty getting started. The truth is, though, I like to write. 

But what do you do if you don't like writing or you don't feel like you're any good at it? 

Tough to write when you’ve just stolen an antique typewriter and a banquette used on the set of Goodfellas. 

Is content marketing—which establishes your authority in your industry and attracts potential customers—still for you? UH HUH. 

Here are three ideas for you to create and share content even if you don’t feel confident in your writing. 

1. Don’t write. Yes, maybe you thought of this one already. But I’m here to tell you that rather than stifle your creativity, try sharing your knowledge using other media.

• Video: Get a tripod for your iPhone, find a spot with good lighting (near a window, for example), hit record, and start talking!

Amy Schmittauer of Savvy Sexy Social has fantastic tips for getting started on camera. Two of my favorites: Don’t forget to look straight into the lens at your ideal client! Imagine her on the other side of the lens. Some public-speaking coaches even recommend taping a photo of your favorite star or crush just above the lens. Uptoyou.

Also, don’t introduce yourself at the beginning of your video. As Amy says, “Give them everything good first,” meaning, start with information on the topic that drew them to your video title. Start with content.  

Embed the video on a blog page on your site, and voila! A blog post. 

• Images: You can also experiment with sharing a gallery of photos with short captions, or a series of charts. Or an infographic. 

Telling people how to do something: How about a step-by-step post with a photo representing each step? Just remember to include the images on your website, and link to them, driving traffic from social media to your website. 

2. Do write, but change your point of view. 

When you come up with a blog post idea, think about the knowledge you want to share from the POV of your potential client. You’re not writing an essay or a short story.

You’re solving a problem. Their problem.

That’s what you got into business to do, right? You saw that you could provide a service or a product better than the way it'd been done before. You have the ideal solutions for your audience—a set of people whose problem you can solve. So, make it about them. How does knowing about this topic make their lives easier? Organize your post around the answer.

3. Find your voice. 

If you’re not a chummy, buddy-buddy kind of guy or gal in person, you don’t have to adopt that tone in your writing. Conversely, if you balk at formality, and your casual style allows you to meet people where they’re at, use that to your advantage.

You don’t have to write like a poet. You just have to know what you want to say. Sharing your knowledge in an authentic way will help you stick with writing, and employing point #2 (what problem of your audience’s are you solving) will help you structure your writing. 

These three tips involve taking the time and allowing yourself the freedom to experiment with new media, a new way of approaching content, and with your voice. 

You can’t take shortcuts to good content, but if you put the time in, you can share your knowledge effectively, even if you don’t love to write. 

The #1 Mistake Brand Pages Commit on Facebook (And a Quick Fix, for Once!)

EdgeRank: a concept worth knowing about. 

For every rule, there’s are many exceptions. 

But. 

You can’t break rules unless you first identify them. Michael Port just reminded me of this rule (ironic) in a recent podcast episode about public speaking. If you know the rules, then you can decide whether they apply in your case. If you don’t know the rules, you are just spitballin’. 

Here's a rule I'd like you to think about: 

Don’t post links to other people’s websites on your Facebook brand page. 

I understand the impulse: Facebook is for sharing cool stuff! Right? On my personal Facebook profile, I share articles and videos from all over the web. Why wouldn’t I share links to other sites on your brand page? 

Here’s why: Facebook is the ideal platform to drive traffic from social media to a website. In fact, as of the end of 2014, Facebook drives 25 percent of all internet traffic. 

But Facebook is not the ideal platform for being seen every one of your Facebook page fans. That’s because Facebook uses its own algorithm to determine what to show in the newsfeed. It’s a curation formula called “EdgeRank,” and it means that many times, even though you post something publicly, most of your fans won’t see it. In fact, brand pages can reach as little as 2 or 3 percent of their number of fans each time they post. 

So, if your post is lucky enough to reach one of your fans or one of their connections, make the most of this moment! Direct users to your site, not to someone else’s. 

Even if your website is not (yet) tricked out with a lead magnet or another way to capture e-mail addresses, you should still drive your users to the place where people can learn more about you if they click around. 

What do you do if you still really, really, REALLY want to share that interesting link, because it’s inspiring and super-relevant to your business? 

Quick Fix

I promised a quick fix. Another rule I'm breaking! I don't often offer quick fixes. But here's my exception. Collect three or four of these URLs in a Word doc (or in Notes or Evernote or an e-mail draft). When you’ve got at least three, write a blog post.

Do you see three interesting articles having to do with your industry every single week? You’ve got a weekly industry news roundup feature. 

Each week, write a two- or three-sentence summary of the article, with a link to the full article. Include a photo from one of the articles, a headline and boom: you have a weekly piece of original, branded content to share to your Facebook page that drives fans and potential customers to your site. 

Starting in The Middle

Most weekday mornings, while walking my dog and my toddler to daycare, I listen to news and social media marketing podcasts because I'm a nerd.

So it was this morning, when an interview with Danny Strong, the creator of Empire, was the next podcast queued up. Here's how the interview started: 

"When I sat down to write the pilot, I remember staring at the blank screen thinking, 'I have no idea what I'm doing.' There's this moment of fear before I ever write anything."

Sound familiar? 

View fullsize

A photo from our morning walk.

The blank screen intimidated me so much in college, that rather than tackling a 20-page paper by writing an outline first, or even beginning with the thesis paragraph, I would begin by fleshing out an essential idea that I knew needed to end up somewhere in the middle of the essay. Starting this way helped me get over the intimidating feeling of starting on Page 1, Sentence 1 of a 20-page paper. 

Here's what I realized years later: not only did starting in the middle intimidate me less, but starting this way also helped me form my thesis statement.

Fleshing out a single aspect of the thesis allowed me to identify how that supporting idea fit into the overall structure of the essay. Which forced me to decide on an overall structure for the essay. 

So, starting in the middle helped me clarify the objective of my essay and the structure for how I would get there. 

As I've worked to build the online and social media presences of several online and brick-and-mortar companies, I've seen that same knee-jerk tendency to "start in the middle" when it comes to PR and marketing campaigns. 

"We need to be on Twitter!" "Everyone's on SnapChat!" "Why aren't we blogging? "Why aren't we blogging more????"

This is the marketing campaign equivalent of writing out a random idea before coming up with your thesis statement.

And just like with essay writing, it can work, but only if you, as a marketing strategist, take the time to create a structure around it. 

Blogging, creating a contest on Facebook, joining a group board on Pinterest and the like are tactics.*

Just like the body of a 20-page paper, tactics are essential. But they don't mean anything without an objective and the structure that an objective provides. In essay-writing, a thesis states the objective and provides the structure. 

When it comes to social media marketing, deciding on the objective(s) provides a guide for everything you do next. What do you want to accomplish?

Having a website, moderating a Facebook group, gaining 1,000 e-mail subscribers--those are not accomplishments. Those are a means to an accomplishment. 

Deciding on an objective (or 2 or 3) allows you to  give a purpose to every tactic you employ.

So, if your objective is, say, to establish your authority as a social media strategist by helping people learn more about how to use social media effectively, then a blog where you share ideas, tips and tricks about how to use social media might be a very effective tactic. Sharing that content on social media, so that people see it is another effective tactic. 

So the next time you feel pressure to start a new marketing campaign, or a new social media profile, or to develop a new product for your business, understand that if you start there, you are starting in the middle. When you recognize that, the next step is to ask, "What do I want to accomplish with this new venture?"

Allow the answer to guide your work and motivate you as you build out your campaign and your business. 

*— Thanks to Eric Chandler for sharing his social media campaign steps, which inform my explanation of the difference between objectives, strategy, tactics and results.