Marketing Metrics that aren’t as valuable as you may think

The metrics you use to determine the success of your online marketing campaigns have a huge impact on your marketing decisions. However, the metrics that a lot of people are using to define their success and failures on may not be as reliable or valuable as you may think and in fact in some cases they may be absolutely pointless.

Monitoring the wrong metrics may be doing your marketing campaigns more harm than good, so here are the 4 most common metrics you shouldn’t really rely on:

1. Facebook Page Likes

Having more Facebook Likes has no real value to determine success. Many think having thousands of Likes equals’ success as your reach is massive, however in reality that isn’t the case.

The majority of brands are reporting less than 1% engagement. If the people who have Liked your page aren’t seeing your content then why would you consider that a success?

You can have 1 million or 100 Likes but you still need ads or extremely powerful content to reach them on Facebook so the number of Likes you have has no real value.

Someone who has 100 Likes and provides powerful content could be more successful than someone who has a million Likes and produces terrible content.

2. Referred vs Direct vs Organic segmented traffic

We know why you see value in this metric; however it isn’t accurate at all which makes it a very poor performance indicator.

This is because browsers don’t always tell you exactly where the traffic has come from so it may look like your SEO isn’t working but much of what you attribute to direct traffic is actually SEO.

3. PageRank

Google hasn’t updated the PageRank tool since 2013, and even that update was an accident. This should give you a pretty good idea about how much weight it really carries within Google Algorithm.

A few years ago PageRank was probably a pretty good indicator of site quality, but it isn’t any more so it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

4. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool but not for metrics. Some metrics are worth looking at however the majority aren’t very accurate at all.

It’s ok to use the numbers for trending purposes but the numbers aren’t accurate enough to make any real business decision. The numbers should only be considered estimates.