It’s well-known that internet marketing involves being well-versed in data analysis as you’re going to be working closely with data and how your marketing strategies are making an impact on website traffic and the like. However, while metrics are certainly important in determining the success of your marketing strategy, there are some metrics that won’t do you any good and aren’t a good indicator of your strategy’s effectivity. These are known as vanity metrics. To help you out, here are some vanity metrics that you should ignore in your internet marketing strategy.

Facebook Fans

Social media marketing is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing that are currently in use today. Because of the large percentage of social media users, social media marketing has really boomed in terms of popularity and effectivity as a digital marketing strategy. Facebook is arguably the largest social media platform available, and plenty of businesses are making use of this for their marketing. One vanity metric that you should avoid on this platform is the number of Facebook fans you get on your social media page. These don’t tell you if the users who have liked your page are actually engaging with your content, and serve no benefit to you at all.

Social Media Followers

In the same thread of thought, social media followers on platforms like Instagram and Twitter don’t add much value to your social media marketing strategy. This is especially true on these two platforms because buying followers and “follow back” followers are very common on these websites. There are profiles out there that pay for a large number of profile followers. Follow back followers are profiles that follow your profile in the expectation that you follow them back. If you don’t follow them back, you tend to lose that follow in a few hours. The most important thing that you should be looking at for social media marketing is the user and follower engagement with your content.

Page Views

Page views are a lot like page traffic in how valuable these are for your website. On paper, it looks good, after all, the more page views you get, the better, right? However, the thing about page views or website traffic is that it doesn’t tell you how many people are actually engaging with your content or if they’re actually reading it, so it doesn’t help you much with your internet marketing strategy. You should be looking at metrics like bounce rate and social shares to determine if your website is providing content that users are finding valuable.