Why Vanity Metrics Are Killing Your Media Performance

There’s a quiet but persistent challenge that plagues even the most well-intentioned marketing efforts: an overreliance on the wrong metrics. Not because marketers don’t care about performance, which of course they do, but because it’s easy to get swept up in the volume-driven dashboards and surface-level stats that dominate most reporting. Clicks, impressions, CTR, CPM - they’re everywhere. And without the right lens, they can feel like progress. But if these numbers aren’t tied to outcomes that grow the business, they risk becoming distractions rather than drivers.

The Illusion of Performance

Too often, campaigns look successful on paper while delivering zero impact on business outcomes. A display ad campaign racks up millions of impressions. A social campaign gets thousands of likes. A paid search initiative delivers a low cost-per-click. And yet, revenue stalls. Acquisition costs rise. Churn creeps in quietly, and no one’s sure why.

The answer lies in the metrics that are being celebrated. Vanity metrics inflate our sense of progress, but they rarely correlate with what truly matters: profitability and business growth.

Clicks don’t equal conversions. Impressions don’t pay the bills. Engagement without intent is just noise.

Metrics That Matter

In contrast to vanity metrics, performance metrics offer clarity. They speak the language of business impact, not platform success. These include:

• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Are you making more than you’re spending?

• CPA (Cost per Acquisition): How much does it cost to win a customer?

• LTV (Customer Lifetime Value): Are you attracting valuable customers or short-term browsers?

• Revenue Generated: Not traffic. Not leads. Actual dollars in the door.

The distinction seems obvious, but it’s often overlooked—especially when media teams report into marketing leadership that was trained in an era where “brand awareness” was the only currency.

How We Got Here

To understand how brands got so comfortable with measuring the meaningless, you have to look at the platforms. Google Ads. Facebook Business Manager. Programmatic dashboards. They were built to make advertisers feel like things are working. These interfaces surface CTR and CPM by default. They highlight trends in impressions and bounce rates. The metrics are immediate and seductive—designed for dopamine, not discipline.

Layer in internal pressure to show early “wins,” and it’s easy to see how media buyers fall into the trap. You can’t optimize for what you aren’t measuring, and many brands aren’t measuring anything past the click.

Why Volume Is a False God

Let’s break down one of the most misused metrics of all: volume.

“We drove 500,000 visitors to the landing page.”

Sounds great. But what did those users do?

Did they convert? Did they bounce in under three seconds? Were they even qualified to begin with?

High-volume campaigns often look productive but fail to move the needle. That’s because volume can be gamed. A broader audience gets you more eyeballs, but they might be the wrong ones. You’ll burn budget chasing scale instead of precision—and precision is where performance lives.

The Risk of Channel-Level Obsession

It’s not just the metrics themselves—it’s how brands segment them. Take a client who swears by Facebook Ads because of a low CPC. Meanwhile, that same traffic generates abysmal post-click engagement and nearly zero conversions.

Or a client preoccupied with keeping display CPMs below a benchmark, while the channel generates no attributed revenue whatsoever.

When you optimize channels in isolation, you miss the forest for the trees. Media buying is an interconnected system. No one touchpoint tells the full story. True performance evaluation demands a cross-channel, full-funnel lens. Every click, every view, every action needs to be placed in the context of what it drives downstream.

Goodhart’s Law in Action

There’s a name for this phenomenon, and it's not new. Goodhart’s Law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

If you target low CPCs, you’ll optimize for cheap traffic—often from irrelevant or low-converting segments. If you chase impressions, you’ll buy broad inventory that looks impressive but delivers no value. You get what you measure, even if it’s the wrong thing.

Marketers often forget that every optimization is a trade-off. When you aim for the lowest CPM, you compromise on audience quality. When you push for the highest CTR, you risk sacrificing message clarity for clickbait tactics. The result? Empty clicks and wasted spend.

Shifting the Mindset

This is where things get difficult—and where agencies either lead or get led.

Clients are often conditioned to ask for the wrong data. They want “more impressions,” “higher engagement,” “better CTR.” That’s not their fault. It’s what the platforms taught them to care about. But your job as a media partner isn’t to validate flawed thinking. It’s to reframe the conversation.

We’ve found success in aligning stakeholders around business goals first, not media metrics. Want to reduce customer acquisition costs? Then impressions are meaningless unless they correlate with conversions. Looking to increase retention? Then we need to measure the quality of acquisition, not just the quantity. Some of our best performing campaigns from a CPA standpoint also have the highest CPCs in our portfolio. Imagine that!

It requires consistent education and firm boundaries. Sometimes, it means not reporting on certain metrics at all—if they aren’t tied to a specific business outcome.

What Real Media Strategy Looks Like

Effective media buying isn’t about spending smarter in the abstract. It’s about aligning strategy with ROI reality.

That means:

• Structuring campaigns to gather meaningful signal, not vanity indicators.

• Allocating spend based on contribution margin, not CPM deltas.

·         Targeting audiences based on predicted LTV, not just demographics.

• Building attribution models that track revenue impact across every touchpoint.

Most importantly, it means asking the uncomfortable questions early: What are we trying to accomplish? What are we willing to sacrifice to get there? What does success actually look like—and how will we know?

There’s no trophy for lowest CPC. No bonus check for highest impression count. The brands that win are the ones that build media systems around financial outcomes, not optical illusions.

Vanity metrics might make the dashboard light up, but they won’t keep the lights on.