Top 10 Vanity Metrics - Marketing Edition Metrics

Contacts are individual people that your business has an identified, ongoing relationship with, typically stored in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and often associated with an account or company. In CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, Contacts usually represent people who have been qualified beyond an initial expression of interest and may be associated with opportunities, customers, or former customers. Depending on your CRM configuration, Leads may exist separately or be converted into Contacts once qualification criteria are met.

Email Contacts is an email marketing metric that counts the total number of email addresses in an email list. A large, high-quality list helps marketers build ongoing relationships and reach more potential customers.

Followers is the number of users who have chosen to follow another user’s or company’s posts, such as via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. It is a quantitative metric used to gauge how well you are building an audience and community around your brand.

Media Impressions is the count of the number of times your social media content, such as photos, videos, and stories, are viewed on screen.

Page views are the total count of times a page loads or reloads in a user's browser, including repeat visits by the same user.

Photo Likes is the number of likes a photo post receives on a social media platform. It shows how many people reacted to a single image or a group of images. This metric is no longer widely used as a primary measure of social performance; consider Engagement Rate or Reach-based measures instead. A like takes one tap, so it says little about whether a photo changed what someone thought, did, or bought. It still works as a quick, directional check on which images your audience responds to.

Post Likes is a measure of the popularity of social media content on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.The total number of Likes on your post can be an indicator of impression numbers and engagement.

A session is a group of user interactions with a website that occur within a defined timeframe. Analytics platforms define a session as a period of continuous engagement that begins when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or when the user leaves. Each session can contain multiple interactions, including page views, events, downloads, form submissions, and e-commerce transactions. Sessions are fundamental to understanding user behaviour patterns and website performance, capturing the complete journey a user takes during a single visit.

Video Views is a count of the number of times a video is watched or started. Because each platform defines a "view" differently, raw counts are only meaningful in context.

Website Visits, also referred to as sessions, track the number of times users interact with your website during distinct periods of engagement. Each visit, or session, represents a continuous interaction that begins when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or when they leave the site.