Feed Your Wallet, Not Your Ego

1. BLACKSHEEPDIGITAL.CA Feed Your Wallet, Not Your Ego PRESENTED BY BLACK SHEEP DIGITAL

2. Vanity Metrics are the nails that build the house of failure. Let’s 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 that’s about it.

3. 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 doesn’t 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, it’s 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 doesn’t actually matter how many visitors or likes or whatever you get – you aren’t making money.

4. So what should you really be monitoring? It’s 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.Let’s use pageviews for example. At the top level it doesn’t 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?

5. 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. IT’S 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

6. 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!