I was hosting a roundtable at Shoptalk EU in Barcelona when someone brought up a LinkedIn post they’d written that had racked up millions of impressions. Naturally, everyone leaned in. The holy grail, right?
Except, when we asked what happened next, the answer was: nothing. No leads, no conversations, no sales. Just a lot of people scrolling past. Maybe a few likes from other marketers. The kind of thing that feeds the ego, not the pipeline.
It reminded me how often companies are chasing the wrong metrics — not because they’re bad at what they do, but because they’ve never stopped to ask: what are we actually trying to measure?
Because if you’re not measuring progress toward your actual goal, then you’re not tracking performance. You’re just doing performance theatre.
A picture of me hosting the workshop at the EAG ShopTalk Barcelona conference, you know, to prove I was actually there…
The KPI Trap: Easy to Measure ≠ Worth Measuring
Let’s be honest: it’s comforting to track impressions, likes, open rates, or new followers. They go up quickly. They look good in a deck. They’re easy to screenshot and share around in Slack. But unless they map to what your business actually needs right now, they’re just noise.
These are attention metrics. But attention doesn’t always equal traction. Especially not the kind that turns into revenue.