Are you getting a monthly marketing report full of green arrows and upward graphs, but you still can’t quite work out whether any of it made you money?
You’re not alone, and you’re not being unreasonable for asking.
We’ve sat through a fair few marketing reports over the years, some sent to us, some sent to businesses we’ve spoken to. A lot of them look genuinely impressive. Reach is up. Engagement is up. Impressions are through the roof. Followers are climbing nicely.
Then you ask the obvious question. “Great, so how many of those people actually bought something?” And the room goes a bit quiet.
This isn’t an attack on marketing, or on social media, or on the people running your campaigns. It’s a question every business owner is entitled to ask, and one that doesn’t get asked nearly enough.
Before We Go Any Further
This is simply our view, based on what we’ve seen running our own marketing and watching plenty of other businesses do the same.
We’re not saying every agency is hiding behind vanity metrics on purpose. Some genuinely believe reach and engagement are useful indicators, and in fairness, sometimes they are. What we’re saying is that a business owner needs to know the difference between a number that looks good and a number that means something to the bank balance.
Have a look at your own reports with that in mind. Make your own judgement.
What Actually Counts as a “Vanity Metric”?
A vanity metric is any number that goes up and makes you feel good, without telling you whether the business actually benefited.
Impressions, reach, likes, followers, “engagement rate”, video views, even website traffic on its own, all fall into this category. None of them are worthless exactly. They just don’t tell you what you actually need to know.
What you need to know is simpler than any of that:
- Did anyone get in touch?
- Did any of those enquiries turn into a sale?
- What did it cost to generate that sale?
- Was that cost sensible compared to what the sale was worth?
Everything else is context, not the answer.
Why Do Vanity Metrics Get So Much Attention?
Partly because they’re easy to produce, and partly because they almost always look good.
Impressions and reach are numbers that grow naturally the moment you spend any money on advertising or post anything at all. A poorly performing campaign can still generate thousands of impressions. That doesn’t mean it’s working. It just means the platform showed your advert to a lot of people, most of whom scrolled straight past it.
Engagement rate is another one worth being sceptical of. A post that gets a hundred likes and thirty comments can look brilliant in a report. It tells you people found it interesting enough to tap a button. It tells you nothing about whether any of them were ever going to buy from you in the first place.
To be fair to agencies, some of this is genuinely how the platforms themselves report performance. If Meta or LinkedIn hands you a dashboard full of reach and engagement figures, it’s an easy shortcut to lift those straight into a client report. Producing a proper report that ties spend to actual enquiries and sales takes more work, more access to your systems, and honestly, more honesty about what isn’t working.
“If a marketing report makes you feel good but you couldn’t repeat the number back to a bank manager and expect them to care, it’s probably a vanity metric.”
Is It Ever Fair to Report Vanity Metrics?
Yes, but only as context, never as the headline.
There are situations where reach and impressions genuinely matter. If you’re building brand awareness for a new business with no existing audience, knowing that more people are seeing your name is useful information. If you’re running a big content push and want to know whether people are actually watching the videos before you invest more, view counts have their place.
The problem isn’t that these numbers exist. The problem is when they’re used to fill a report and quietly avoid the harder question of what it actually delivered commercially.
A good report puts the money numbers first: enquiries, cost per enquiry, sales, cost per sale, return on spend. Reach and engagement can sit underneath as supporting detail, explaining why those numbers moved the way they did. Not the other way round.
A Hypothetical Worth Thinking About
This isn’t a real business, and we’re not claiming it happened exactly this way. But it’s a fairly typical pattern that plays out, and it’s worth walking through.
Imagine a small trades business spending £800 a month on social media advertising, run by an external agency. Every month, the report lands: reach up 40%, impressions up 60%, engagement rate “excellent”, follower count climbing steadily.
Six months in, the owner does a proper stocktake. New enquiries traceable to those campaigns: four. Jobs actually won from them: one, worth about £600.
On paper, the reports looked like a success story every single month. In reality, the business spent £4,800 to bring in £600 of work.
That’s not necessarily proof the agency was doing a bad job of running the ads. It might simply mean the offer, the targeting, or the industry itself wasn’t a great fit for that platform. But nobody could have spotted that from the reach and engagement figures alone. The only way to see it was to look at what actually turned into revenue.
What About the Other Side of the Argument?
It’s worth saying, marketing doesn’t always convert in a straight, easy-to-trace line, and that’s a fair point that gets raised whenever this subject comes up.
Somebody might see your advert three times, follow you on Instagram, read a couple of blog posts, and then six months later ring you up because they finally need the service. Attributing that sale cleanly to “the advert from March” is genuinely difficult, and any agency that claims perfect attribution is probably stretching the truth a bit.
We accept that. Some of what social media and content marketing does is slow-burn brand building, and it deserves some patience.
But that’s a reason to track things properly over a longer period, not a reason to stop asking the question altogether. If a business has been running the same activity for a year and still can’t point to a single enquiry that came from it, patience has turned into an excuse.
“I’m not against brand building. I’m against calling it brand building for eighteen months so nobody has to explain why the phone isn’t ringing.”
So, What Should You Actually Do?
- Ask what happens after someone clicks, not just how many people clicked.
- Insist enquiries are tracked, not estimated. A phone number, a form, or a booking link that’s traceable back to the campaign.
- Ask for cost per enquiry and cost per sale every single reporting period, not just when you ask for it.
- Compare the cost of a sale against what that sale is actually worth to your business.
- Give slower-burn brand activity a fair, defined trial period, with a clear point where you review whether it’s working.
- Don’t scrap something the moment one month looks quiet. Look at the trend, not a single snapshot.
- If a report only ever contains reach, impressions and engagement, ask directly why enquiries and sales aren’t in there.
Questions Worth Asking Your Marketing Team or Agency
- How many enquiries did this activity generate last month?
- How many of those enquiries turned into paying customers?
- What did it cost us per enquiry, and per sale?
- How are you tracking that a sale came from this specific activity?
- If reach or engagement went up but enquiries didn’t, why do you think that happened?
- What would you change if the budget doubled? What would you change if it was cut in half?
If those questions get straight, confident answers, that’s a good sign. If they get vague answers about “building the brand” with nothing concrete behind it, that’s worth a proper conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a vanity metric in marketing?
A vanity metric is a number that looks impressive but doesn’t tell you whether the activity actually generated business. Impressions, reach, likes, followers and engagement rate are the most common examples.
Are vanity metrics completely useless?
No. They can provide useful context, particularly for brand awareness activity, but they should never be the main measure of whether marketing is working. Enquiries, sales and cost per sale matter far more.
Why do some agencies focus on vanity metrics in reporting?
Often because those numbers are easy to pull straight from a platform dashboard and almost always look positive. Reporting properly on enquiries and sales usually needs deeper access to a business’s own systems and more honesty about what isn’t converting.
What should I actually ask my agency to report on?
Enquiries generated, sales resulting from those enquiries, cost per enquiry, cost per sale, and return against spend. Reach and engagement can be included as supporting detail underneath those figures.
How long should I give a marketing campaign before judging it?
That depends on the industry and the sales cycle, but it should be a defined, agreed period from the outset, not something that keeps quietly moving whenever the results are disappointing.
Does more website traffic automatically mean more sales?
Not necessarily. Traffic without enquiries usually points to a mismatch between what’s bringing people to the site and what they actually need once they arrive.
Our Final View
We think social media and digital marketing are genuinely useful for most businesses. We use them ourselves.
Our issue isn’t with the activity. It’s with reports that dress up busy-looking numbers as proof of success, when the only number that pays your staff and keeps the lights on is the one showing up in your bank account.
Reach, impressions and engagement have their place, as context, not as the headline. If nobody can tell you how many enquiries or sales came from a piece of marketing, that’s the question worth pushing on, however uncomfortable the answer turns out to be.
Want a Second Opinion on Your Marketing Reports?
If you’re getting reports full of impressive-looking numbers and you’re still not sure what they actually mean for your business, bring one along and talk it through with us.
You don’t need a sales pitch. Sometimes it just helps to have somebody who’s seen a few of these reports take a proper look with you.
Give us a call. We’re always happy to talk it through.