Many entrepreneurs believe that gathering and analyzing every data/report on their marketing campaign is always beneficial to their business, but this is not always the case. Not all data is helpful.

Digital marketing campaigns are the trending and efficient means of advertisement today. Data obtained from these campaigns can be classified into two namely, vanity metrics and actionable metrics. What are they? How do you recognize them? How do they impact your business?

What are they?

Vanity metrics are data that give the impression of progress but have no real impact on your business, while actionable metrics are tied to your business goals and can be used to determine the progress of your marketing campaigns.

Vanity metrics lack real context and can mislead you into assuming you have had real progress in your marketing campaigns. While actionable metrics tell you what is working and what isn’t working.

How do you recognize them?

The best way to tell the difference between vanity metrics and actionable metrics is to consider what information they provide to you as a business owner. Here is a list of criteria that would help:

• Conversion rate - Conversion rate is the number of cold leads that eventually patronize your business and become clients. You should focus on metrics that provide data about the conversion rate for your digital marketing campaigns. Only actionable metrics provide insight into conversion rate. Vanity metrics would simply tell you the number of clicks and engagements on your digital campaigns. Conversion rate helps you to track the ROI of your digital campaigns. Digital campaigns with little or no conversion rate may be a waste of resources. Find out how to increase the conversion rate .

• Revenue - Revenue is the cash inflow to a company as a result of business operations. In a profitable business, revenue should exceed expenses. The same principle applies to your digital marketing campaigns, the cash inflow from the campaigns should exceed the expenses required to launch them. Actionable metrics would help business owners determine the revenue generated from their digital campaigns and ascertain if they are making profits or running at loss. Vanity metrics provide little or no data on revenue.

• Customer retention rate - Customer retention rate refers to the ability to turn customers into consistent buyers and prevent them from patronizing competitors. Simply put, this is all about brand loyalty. Recent statistics show that customer retention is crucial and cost-efficient for businesses. Here's a read on how to use loyalty programs for customer retention. https://smartsmssolutions.com/blog/83-updates/1811-how-to-use-loyalty-programs-for-customer-retention Hence, entrepreneurs must track this data. Actionable metrics would tell how many existing clients made repeat purchases and those who made a one-off purchase, this would assist you in determining your customer retention rate. Vanity metrics would only tell you about traffic data on your campaigns.

Measuring what matters

The main goal of marketing is to increase sales and gain new clients not just to gain publicity. If your marketing campaign is not achieving this goal then you need to review it to avoid wasting funds. The best way to assess the success of your digital marketing campaigns is to utilize actionable metrics.

In conclusion, not all that glitters is gold, a spike in traffic may have no real impact on your business. While fantastic vanity metrics are not entirely bad as they can attract consumers who are affected by herd thinking, in the long run, they hold no real impact on your business. Hence, focus on what matters - Actionable metrics.

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