Forget vanity metrics: Try this instead
Learn about vanity metrics and how they mislead you.
Hi! 👋
Learn about vanity metrics and how they mislead you.
Welcome (back)! 🤗
This is Petra from The Creators' Diary. If this is your first TC’D newsletter, welcome! We’re happy you’ve subscribed!
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Story of the week 🗞️
Summers are slow, and that is a good thing for humans in general, but not so much for artists specifically or anyone with a small creative business.
Fewer sales, fewer views, fewer new followers, you name it.
I thought I'd take this opportunity to write about what we call in marketing "vanity metrics".
The number of video views, post impressions, page views, and new followers are all vanity metrics 🪞—numbers that show surface-level success, but don't necessarily translate into true success, which is usually conversion (which can be a different action based on your given purpose, e.g., somebody buying something in your shop or somebody subscribing to your newsletter are both examples of a user "converting").
- You can have 5000 Instagram followers, but how many engage with your content?
With that follower count, if you have 50 likes on your posts on average, that's a 1% like-to-follower ratio, which isn't the highest level of engagement. The same could be measured with comments or shares. Are those followers truly your community (and a nice portion of them return customers, and at least the majority of them one-time buyers), or just platform users?
👉 Calculate these ratios to have a better understanding of what engagement really means. Don't sweat them, just have a realistic view that can inform how you approach your content plans in the future. - You might have 1000 newsletter subscribers, but how many of them open your letters each time?
Open rates vary heavily by industry, but there are a few benchmarks you can look at. To send these newsletters, I use Kit, the email-first operating system built for creators. They say that, for creators in general, a 16-25% average open rate is considered "medium" and 26-35% is "high".
👉 Similarly, you may want to look at how many people click through from your email to wherever you want to navigate them to, and how many unsubscribe on average. It is true that if you don't have any or enough subscribers, what's the point of having a newsletter, right? But, it's also true that if you want to do it right, you need to look at it from the right angle—which means not getting stuck at ogling how many people subscribe each week and paying attention to those other metrics. - You may think that a TikTok video with thousands of views is a big hit, but how many of those views were full-length watches?
On the TC'D TikTok account, I have a video that currently has 8294 views. It's continuously liked, reposted, saved, and brings in new followers, as well. It's all nice, but at the same time, the average watch time of the video is 24.1 SECONDS, and only 4.08% ever watched the full video, which means 338 people. Saying I have 8294 views is very different from saying that 338 people watched my video, right? (By the way, I'm perfectly happy with the 338 people because I consider that 338 people my people. They're the ones I create content for. And, I believe in slow and happy growth. That's the credo for my Creator Strategy Sessions, too.)
👉 Each video platform has those kinds of more informative metrics like watch time, but they're usually in the analytics or admin section, so you need to dig a bit to find them. Views are nearly always in the shop window, but mirrors can lie or, at least, can be deceiving. Look behind the obvious. 😉
Now, in a previous newsletter, I wrote that I advise everyone not to become obsessed when it comes to any of these social metrics. I still stand by that.
However, I also believe in doing your marketing smartly, so my message here is that, if you want to look at any metrics, make sure to look at the right ones and to analyse them properly.
If you'd like to get my tips for that, watch out for next week's newsletter! 💌
In other news 📰
In the last two weeks, two creator interviews were happily published on the site. 🎉 Both Katie and Linda are amazing humans and have important lessons to share with other creators. I highly recommend reading both of their stories:
Creator quote of the week 📌
Mixed media artist YVES on this slow summer:
See you next week,
Petra
Petra Gönczi
