KEY TAKEAWAYS
Most companies measure the wrong things. Vanity metrics feel good to report but disconnect from business outcomes. A big follower count is meaningless if followers never buy. High page views mean nothing if visitors bounce within seconds. Real metrics connect directly to what your business cares about: leads generated, meetings booked, revenue influenced, cost per acquisition. What you measure depends on what stage of the customer journey you are trying to move forward. A metric that is useful at the awareness stage becomes misleading at the conversion stage.
The LinkedIn Experiment
A couple of years ago I ran a LinkedIn project for a B2B client who wanted to turn five years of blog content into platform posts. LinkedIn was the right channel for their audience, so we built a content calendar and got creative. Short-form video, custom-graphic carousels, quote cards, everything in the modern LinkedIn playbook. We launched all of it and watched the performance data come in.
One format outperformed everything else by a wide margin. It was not the one we expected.
The highest-performing format turned out to be the simple blog-announcement post. A headshot, a sentence or two of introduction, a link to the article. There was nothing fancy about it. It technically broke a LinkedIn best practice because the platform tends to penalize external links. We had pushed back internally on including the link. The client insisted, and those posts worked better than everything else we ran.
Once we looked at why, the answer was clear. Employees were engaging with those posts. When we posted a carousel about industry trends, the team scrolled past. When we posted a blog announcement featuring a colleague's photo and a plug for their work, employees liked it, shared it, left congratulations in the replies. That internal engagement signaled to the algorithm that the post was worth showing to more people. The reach extended beyond the employee base. The simple format outperformed the carefully designed content because it had triggered real human behavior first.
We would never have figured this out without looking at the data and asking why the data was what it was. Our instinct about which format would perform best turned out to be wrong.
Metrics by Stage
Your instinct about which content will perform is wrong more often than it is right. The only reliable way to know what is working is to measure it. The catch is that what you measure depends on where the customer is in their journey with you.
There are six stages in the path from stranger to repeat buyer. A different set of metrics applies to each one.
Awareness: Can they see you at all?
At awareness, the goal is pure visibility. You are introducing yourself to people who have never encountered your company. The metrics that matter are impressions, reach, video views, website visits from new users, and follower growth. This is one place where vanity metrics are useful because visibility is what you are optimizing for.
Interest: Are they paying attention?
Once people know you exist, the next question is whether any of them are paying attention. The metrics here are about leaning in rather than just getting seen. Likes, reactions, comments. Video watch time and completion rate. Website time on page and scroll depth. Email open rates and click-through rates. What you are asking is whether the audience is spending time with you voluntarily or just walking past.
Consideration: Are they evaluating you?
At consideration, the prospect knows who you are and is starting to evaluate whether you can help. The metrics here are intent signals. Lead magnet downloads. Webinar registrations and attendance. Visits to your pricing page and service pages. Demo requests. These are the behaviors that indicate someone is comparing you to alternatives.
Conversion: Are they buying?
This is where marketing output stops being measurable in engagement and starts being measurable in money. Sales-qualified leads, proposals sent, close rate, revenue, customer acquisition cost. If you cannot connect your marketing effort to these numbers, you cannot claim the marketing is working, regardless of how healthy the upstream metrics look.
Retention: Are they staying?
Most companies stop measuring the moment money changes hands. That is where the biggest leverage is. Retention is about whether the customer stays, renews, expands their spend, or quietly leaves. Churn rate, renewal rate, expansion revenue, time to second purchase. Retention is usually much cheaper than acquisition, which makes this the stage with the biggest quiet leverage for most businesses.
Advocacy: Are they helping you grow?
The last stage is whether your customers become part of your marketing. Referrals, reviews, Net Promoter Score, participation in case studies. Advocacy is where the compounding happens in a healthy marketing system. The companies that win long-term are the ones who take this stage as seriously as they take awareness.
Want the full framework?
This article is adapted from How to Grow Any Organization by Tom Zandstra. The book covers how to measure at each stage, build feedback loops, and use data to iterate faster.
Download the free book →Vanity Metrics vs. Real Metrics
Some metrics feel good to present and do not connect to any business outcome. A big follower count when those followers never engage or buy. A huge page-view number when visitors bounce within seconds. Impressions if nobody is clicking through.
These metrics are fine at the awareness stage, where visibility is the point. They become increasingly misleading the further down the funnel you go. A CMO who reports to their CEO that the marketing team generated 100,000 impressions this quarter has not answered the only question the CEO is asking: did this generate pipeline? If the answer is not yes, you have a problem worth fixing before the next review.
Real metrics are the ones that connect directly to outcomes your business cares about. Leads generated. Meetings booked. Pipeline influenced. Cost per acquisition. If the CEO asks what the marketing team has produced and the answer is about follower count or impressions, the measurement system is broken.
Data, Feedback, and Iteration
You will not get measurement right on the first try. The goal is to put something out, watch the data, notice what surprised you, adjust based on what you saw, and try the next version. The LinkedIn post experiment was a small example of that process. Your instinct is often wrong. That is fine as long as you are learning from the data faster than the competition is.
The companies that win at this are the ones that learn fastest from what they have already put into the world. Data tells you what is happening. Feedback tells you why. You need both. Most companies collect data and skip the feedback loop entirely.
Build feedback moments into the ordinary rhythm of your program. A webinar should end with a question asking what was most valuable and what they want covered next time. When a sales call ends with a yes, ask what almost stopped them from buying. When a campaign wraps, ask what would have made it better. The website itself can carry a one-line feedback widget. You will be surprised at how often people tell you the truth when you make it easy to do so.
Start with three metrics, not ten. Pick them before you launch. Know what success looks like in numbers. Run the program, collect feedback on why the numbers are what they are, adjust, and run it again. That is the measurement cycle that works.
