Useless Metrics

In digital marketing, it is incredibly easy to fall into the trap of useless metrics.

No metric in itself is useful or useless. The value comes from how you use the metric - what action do you take as a result?

Reports quickly fill up with numbers, percentages, ranked lists. You glance at them and go back to what you were doing. If there are enough non-actionable metrics, sometimes you don’t even open the report (too busy with actual work).

The simple way to make your metrics more powerful is to delete any that are just ‘nice to know.' Only keep the ones that feed directly into actions. If you are not going to change your plans, or create tasks and deadlines based on the metric, you probably don’t need it.