“What gets measured gets managed” – ( attributed to Peter Drucker, among others.)

If vanity metrics were merely useless, we might abide them as just one of many wastes of time.  But they are actively counterproductive, crowding out the useful and camouflaging the useless.

Vanity metrics may make you feel good.  They may be easy to measure.  And some of them may feel like a victory.  But they seldom bring you closer to your goals.  We are creatures of finite capacity and time, so the act of measuring them, talking about them, or (worst of all) striving for them detracts from actions that matter.

(Perhaps I’m colored by writing this at a time when the U.S. President is talking about how his nuclear button is bigger than the nuclear button of a potential adversary.)

The central question of a metric should be “if I get this information, what will I do differently as a result?”

So let’s take a look at the metrics that should be cast off to sleep with the fishes, along with some better versions of the same thing.

Social media “Likes”, “Followers”, etc.

Congratulations!  You have a Facebook like!  You’ve helped a multi-billion-dollar company append a bit of data to a person so they can better sell ads to that person.  Surely Facebook is driving constituents to you in return…  They aren’t?

Well, surely you can redeem those followers for valuable prizes, like Chuck E Cheese tickets.  No?  Not even the pencil eraser?

These types of metrics are often popular because they tend to go up and to the right – those people who like or follow you but don’t care about you don’t get your posts, so they don’t think to unlike or unfollow. They are part of a popularity contest to nowhere.

What to measure instead: If you must measure it within the social networks themselves, actual engagements with posts beat following or liking at a general level.  But I’d strongly lean toward cost per acquisition (donor and/or constituent).

The incentive for the social network company is to get you to make your audience theirs.  Your incentive is to get them to make their audience yours.  These seem opposed, but because they live by advertising revenue, the social media companies are more than willing to assist you for a price.  You can advertise to your fans for donations (or your competitions’ fans) or to subscribe to your e-newsletter.

When you actually gain a donor or a constituent–and only then —  are you building your house on land you own.

Web site visits.

Not all visitors are quality visitors.  If you’ve been using Web site visits as a useful metric, and wish to depress yourself, go to Google Analytics (or your comparable platform) and see how long visitors spend on your site.  Generally, you’ll find that half or more of your users are on your site for less than 30 seconds.  Are 30 seconds long enough for people to take the action you want them to take on your site?  Not usually (except for email subscribers).

Even among quality visitors, not all visitors are created equal.  Let’s say you find that people coming to your site looking for an advocacy action sign up for emails 10% of the time; those who come looking for information about a disease sign up 5% of the time; those who look for top-line statistics sign up 1% of the time.  Which of these is the most valuable visitor?

This isn’t a trick question.  You would rather have one person looking for advocacy actions than nine people looking for stats.  Except that the metric of Web site visits lumps them all into one big, not-very-useful bucket.

What to Measure instead:  Value of website visits.  If you can define the value of a constituent and the likelihood of getting a constituent from a section of your website, you can weight each website visit by the value of someone going to that page.

Time on web site. 

You make your content stickier.  Time on site goes up!  Yay!  You streamline your content and making it faster loading.  Time on site goes down!  Yay!

If a metric can be viewed as good if it grows or if it shrinks, it’s a bad metric.

What to measure instead:  Conversion rate.  You want to have a website that accomplishes your goal, whether it takes seconds or the time to read the Bhagavad Gita.

You can also look at bounce rate.  If it’s high, you are likely targeting the wrong people or targeting them with the wrong campaign.  (Bounce rate is a metric, not a key performance indicator, as you still need people to take an action once the get to the page.)

File size.

I would be lying if I had not seen this used as a case for investment.  There is no small amount of power in standing up in front of a board (which is, sadly, more older white men than we should probably have as a percentage of board members) and saying “your X is too small.”  That X stands for “file size” is not entirely relevant at that point.

What to measure instead:  There’s always something better for refining file size.  For online, deliverable file size is more important than raw file size.  Active file size is always better than raw file size.  And file size broken down by identity segment so that you can more sharply focus on recruiting and retaining the best types of donors.

Other thoughts on metrics that need to take a long walk off a short pier?

Nick