Why I Ignore Vanity Metrics Even When They Look Impressive

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I get sent screenshots all the time. A follower count that jumped overnight. An impressions graph shooting straight up. A launch email that got a 60% open rate. People expect me to be excited. Most of the time I just ask one question back: did it make you money? Half the time the honest answer is no, and that’s the number I actually care about.

This filter is something I teach in depth inside Master Internet Marketing, our 7-week live comprehensive training, where we build out exactly which numbers deserve a spot on your dashboard and which ones are just noise dressed up as progress.

What Counts as a Vanity Metric in My World

A vanity metric is any number that goes up and feels good, but doesn’t tell you what to do next. Eric Ries coined the term this way in his original breakdown of the concept, in a guest post for Tim Ferriss’s blog. It’s a metric that never tells you why it moved, and never points to a specific action. Page views. Follower counts. Open rates. Impressions. They all feel like progress. None of them tell you what to fix.

The trap isn’t that these numbers are fake. They’re real. The trap is that they’re easy to move without moving the thing that actually matters. You can grow followers with a giveaway. You can spike impressions with a controversial hook. Neither one puts a dollar in your account.

Real talk: if a number can go up while your revenue stays flat, that number was never the point. I stopped letting those numbers set the tone of my week a long time ago.

Why an Impressive Number Made Me Nervous

Early on, a big spike in any dashboard used to feel like validation. Now it makes me ask harder questions. A follower count doubling in a month with no matching sales bump tells me something. That new audience probably isn’t the audience that buys. An email with a huge open rate but a flat click-through tells me the subject line worked. The offer inside didn’t.

The data backs this up outside of my own experience too. One recent analysis found that follower count predicts a creator’s return on ad spend at a correlation of 0.04, according to research from The Cirqle. That’s statistically noise. A creator with 22,000 followers returned 20x. A creator with 631,000 followers returned 2.7x. How big someone’s audience looked told you almost nothing about how much money they’d make you.

• A follower count tells you reach, not fit.
• An open rate tells you curiosity, not intent to buy.
• An impressions graph tells you visibility, not whether anyone acted on what they saw.

None of those are useless numbers in the right context. They’re just the wrong numbers to build a business decision on.

Why Goodhart’s Law Wrecks Vanity Metrics

There’s an old idea in economics called Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The classic version, described well by Sketchplanations, is a Soviet nail factory told to hit a quota on number of nails. Workers made a mountain of tiny, useless nails. When the target switched to total weight, they made a handful of giant, useless nails instead. The target got hit. The actual goal, useful nails, got missed both times.

The same thing happens the second you tell a team to hit a follower target or an open-rate target. People find the fastest way to move that specific number. That fastest way rarely lines up with what you actually wanted. Buy followers. Write a clickbait subject line. The number goes up. The business doesn’t.

This is exactly why I only build KPI systems around numbers with a direct line to revenue. I laid out the actual five I track every single day in the 5 metrics I watch daily when pushing to $1M/month. None of them are vanity numbers. Every one of them can be traced straight to a dollar amount.

The Metrics I Actually Track Instead

The filter I use is simple: can I trace this number, in one or two steps, to money in or money out? If yes, it earns a spot on my dashboard. If it takes three or more steps of hand-waving to connect it to revenue, it gets watched occasionally. It never gets obsessed over.

Show rate, close rate, cost per acquisition, cash collected, and refund rate all pass that test instantly. A follower count does not, no matter how good it looks in a screenshot. That’s the whole filter. It’s not complicated, but almost nobody applies it consistently. The vanity number always feels better in the moment.

I built my entire 8-metric morning dashboard around this exact filter. Every number on it either moves revenue directly or explains why revenue moved. Nothing on that dashboard exists to make me feel good. It exists to tell me what to do next.

How I Filter a New Number Before I Trust It

Any time someone pitches me on a new metric to start tracking, I run it through three questions before it earns a place on any report I actually look at. First: if this number moves, do I know exactly what caused it? If the answer is “not really,” it’s not actionable yet.

Second: does moving this number, by itself, change what I’d do tomorrow? A vanity metric can double and my actual next move stays identical. An actionable metric moving even slightly should change a real decision. Which offer to run. Which ad to kill.

Third: can this number be gamed without actually helping the business? If yes, expect someone on the team to eventually game it. Whether on purpose or by accident, once it becomes something they’re evaluated on. That’s not a knock on the team. That’s just what happens once a number becomes a target instead of a signal.

Get Your Whole Team Ignoring the Same Numbers

This only works if the whole team is filtering the same way. If your media buyer is proud of impressions while your close rate is falling, you’ve got a mismatch in what “good” means inside your business. Fix that mismatch before you fix anything else. It will quietly undo every other improvement you make.

The fix is not a lecture. It’s a shared sheet. Every metric that earns a spot on it has to survive the same three questions above. Everyone on the team reports against the same short list, not whatever number happens to look best that week. I keep this exact discipline documented in the only KPI sheet I trust when pushing to $1M/month. It’s the single biggest reason my team and I are never arguing about whether a number that looks good is actually good.

Bottom line: an impressive number that doesn’t change your next decision is entertainment, not data. I’d rather look at five boring numbers that tell me exactly what to fix than one exciting number that tells me nothing.

Building this kind of metric discipline is one of the things we work through together inside my Inner Circle, my private mastermind, where operators bring their actual dashboards into the room and we cut out whatever’s just there to feel good.

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