Vanity Metrics Don’t Pay the Bills

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.

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.

If you’re trying to drive leads, your metric should reflect that. If you’re trying to build long-term brand equity, you might track share of voice or direct traffic instead. Maybe you’re gearing up for acquisition and need to show explosive top-line growth at all costs. That’s fine too.

What matters is that your metrics reflect the business you’re building — not just the kind of marketing you’re making.

So ask yourself:

Whatever your goal is, it’s valid. But it needs to be clear. Because if you’re chasing profit in a growth-at-all-costs phase, or obsessing over engagement while trying to land enterprise clients, your metrics are lying to you.

Back to Barcelona. This million-impression LinkedIn post sounded like a win. But it turned out to be a cautionary tale.

When we dug deeper, there wasn’t a single lead. Not even a conversation. Nothing the business could build on. It might as well have been an Instagram reel about sourdough.

But here’s the kicker: he was asking how to replicate it. Not how to do something better. Not how to get leads. Just how to get another hit of those vanity numbers.

That’s the danger. We get so caught up in the buzz of what worked on the surface that we forget to ask: did it actually work?

For most businesses, revenue is the north star. Everything should ladder up to more money in the bank: faster deal cycles, bigger average orders, better retention.

But maybe that’s not your north star. Maybe you’re pre-revenue and focused on brand authority. Maybe you’re in a fundraising cycle, where growth rate or market share matters more than margin. Maybe you’re building to sell.

That’s okay. Just be clear. Because only when you know where you’re going can you decide what to track along the way.

At Waye, we don’t optimise for attention. We optimise for attraction. That means:

We’ve seen posts that got 12 likes and brought in a new retainer client. And posts with hundreds of likes that did nothing. Guess which one we tried to replicate?

There’s nothing wrong with getting seen. Reach is great. Visibility matters. But only if it moves you in the direction you want to go.

If you want real results, your metrics need to be:

Otherwise, you’re just making noise.

Not sure if your KPIs are doing their job?

We help agencies and SaaS companies figure out what actually matters, then build marketing that drives it.

Let’s make your metrics mean something.