It’s easy to fall in love with numbers that go up and to the right. Here’s a list of eight notorious vanity metrics you should avoid.
- Number of hits. This is a metric from the early days of the Web. If you have a site with many objects on it, this will be a big number. Count people instead.
- Number of page views. This is only slightly better than hits since it counts the number of times someone requests a page. Unless your business model depends on page views (i.e., display advertising inventory), you should count people instead.
- Number of visits. Is this one person who visits a hundred times, or a hundred people visiting at once? Fail.
- Number of unique visitors. All this shows you is how many people saw your home page. It tells you nothing about what they did, why they stuck around, or if they left.
- Number of followers/friends/likes. Counting followers and friends is nothing more than a popularity contest unless you can get them to do something useful for you. Once you know how many followers will do your bidding when asks, you’ve got something.
- Time on site/number of pages. These are a poor substitute for actual engagement or activity unless your business is tied to this behavior if customers spend a lot of time on your support of complaints pages, that’s probably a bad thing.
- Emails collected. A big mailing list of people excited about your new startup is nice, but how many will open your emails (and act on what’s inside them), this isn’t useful. Send test emails to some of your registered subscribers and see if they’ll do what you tell them.
- Number of downloads. While it sometimes affects your ranking in apps stores, downloads alone don’t lead to real value. Measure activations account creations, or something else.