Cover Story
Cover Story
Breaking The Curse Of Vanity Metrics
By Frankline Kibuacha
Eons ago. I was heading social media and online marketing at an early startup. A heavily funded start-up. It was only my second proper job, coming from a similar role at an old corporate where my team was doing massive sales growth week on week but digital marketing and only sales were only a tiny part of the business, and what my team and I did was, well, ticking boxes( story for another day). Here at this startup, everything I did mattered because we were a strong team of only two employees in Kenya, where the product was being launched. You know about Kenya being the cradle of mankind, and of tech start-ups in Africa.
The mandate I was given was to grow the app user base and increase Facebook followers. And so, I did what any ambitious young marketer would do- I put my heart into delivering the absolute numbers. I hustled, experimented, ran campaigns everywhere, worked late nights, and pushed that app to nearly 100,000 downloads in just five months. In Kenya, that’ s no small achievement. I helped build a Facebook community of almost 50,000 followers.
My performance was judged purely on volume. In meetings, my mood would be based on“ How many new users this month? Why isn’ t the growth higher?” And I hated it when I didn’ t match up with the growth demands, so I hassled harder. And we were successful. On paper. On the dashboards.
But behind the scenes, something entirely different was happening. We had no idea what to do with this sudden“ community.” There was no monetization plan, no retention strategy, not even proper infrastructure. One week, we acquired so many users that the app simply crashed, and stayed down long enough to make the whole effort feel pointless.
Eventually, I left that start-up, burnt out, frustrated, and far wiser after months of chasing empty numbers. I felt tired, disillusioned, and frankly, duped by the very metrics we were applauding. The start-up sadly closed down not long after. It had thousands of users … and almost no value.
Years later, I joined an agency that served small businesses across Africa to lead the marketing execution- the team that actually ran the campaigns for these small businesses. Typical clients paid between $ 150 and $ 250 per month- covering the cost of social media management, ads on search and social AND the agency fee. Did you cringe at the impossibility? Yes, that’ s the type of clients we worked with, and they were very demanding because the $ 200 dollars they gave us was a choice between marketing and paying school fees for their children. So, how do you report to them at the end of the month that they got 300,000 impressions? Would they even matter? What mattered was leads and actual sales. And somehow, we made it happen!
These experiences taught me a lesson I’ ve carried through my entire career: numbers do matter, but only the right numbers matter. You look at the wrong numbers, even the ones that make you happy, and they can easily bury you. You follow the right ones, and you create miracles. Hence the concept of vanity metrics.
What Are Vanity Metrics, Then?
The term“ vanity metrics” was popularised by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, where he describes them as“ measurements that give the illusion of progress but don’ t reflect meaningful, actionable insights.” In other words, they make you feel good without making you any smarter. They are the numbers you point to when you want to appear successful, not when you want to understand what is actually happening.
Tableau defines vanity metrics as
“ performance statistics that look impressive on the surface but do not offer meaningful, actionable insights into a business ' s actual health or progress. They can provide a false sense of success and often fail to correlate with core business objectives like revenue, customer acquisition, or retention.”
Harvard Business Review has written about this, noting how vanity metrics“ reward the appearance of growth rather than the substance of it.” They are seductive because they rise quickly and are easy to influence, but they rarely correlate with value creation, profitability, or long-term brand health.
So, what exactly makes a metric a vanity metric?
Vanity metrics tend to measure volume, not value. They count everything, but weigh nothing. App installs, page views, impressions, total followers grow fast and look beautiful in presentations, but they don’ t tell you if the people behind those numbers care about your product, understand it, or would ever pay for it.
Vanity metrics show activity, not behaviour. A million app impressions do not tell you if anyone actually uses the app. High web traffic doesn’ t tell you if people found what they were looking for. A large social media following doesn’ t tell you if your brand is trusted. Vanity metrics measure motion without telling you whether that motion leads anywhere meaningful.
Vanity metrics show popularity, not performance, amplifying noise rather than signal. A campaign can go viral on social media yet fail to convert a single sale. A video can accumulate hundreds of thousands of views while brand preference remains unchanged. In many industries, especially ours, popularity is a fragile and misleading compass.
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