Are vanity metrics misleading marketing ROI?
I've spent a decade in marketing, mostly doing content for SaaS startups, and I keep circling back to one question: are we measuring the right things, or just the easy things? Vanity metrics like impressions and page views still dominate many dashboards, yet they tell us little about whether a campaign actually changed anyone's behavior. I've seen a $50,000 campaign generate millions of views but zero qualified leads, and a $5,000 email sequence that closed six-figure deals, so I'm genuinely uncertain if we've overcorrected toward 'brand awareness' at the expense of 'revenue attribution.' What's your take—are marketing teams too obsessed with metrics that flatter the report rather than the bottom line?