Targets and measurement · Founders' Marketing Compass
How to avoid vanity metrics in startup marketing
The weekly marketing update leads with a big visitor number, and the website count climbs every month. The founders reading it rarely ask which of those visits became a sales meeting, and a number that books none of them keeps setting the tone of the review.
Co-founded Fixel and ran it as CEO; Logiq acquired it in 2020. Head of specialization at Ono Academic College.
Drawing on a conversation I had with Maya Ber Lerner, Co-founder and CEO at Chiefy, on Founders' Marketing Compass.
How do you avoid vanity metrics in marketing?
Avoid vanity metrics by refusing to count any number that does not trace to the company's current top-level goal. Maya Ber Lerner, co-founder and CEO of Chiefy, borrows impact mapping from product work: every initiative has to name the goal it serves and the action it should cause. A visitor count that leads to no meeting fails that test and stops being reported.
Answered by Etgar Shpivak, who advises seed and Series A founders on marketing.
A big visitor number means nothing until you can point to the goal it moved.
Everything in a startup's marketing starts with a target. The numbers that climb on their own are the ones I trust least. A rising chart is the easiest thing to mistake for the business moving.
Make each number say which goal it serves. Most of a marketing report then turns out to describe activity, not results.
Brand awareness is where this goes wrong most. Getting a company's name in front of more people is cheap to fund. It is hard to tie to anything the company is chasing this quarter. So the counts pile up with nowhere to land.
The easiest number to grow is the one least tied to the goal
The tell is simple.
A report leads with traffic, the raw count of people who visited. I ask which of them turned into a meeting, a customer, or a signup.
Maya Ber Lerner is co-founder and CEO of Chiefy, and she came to marketing after a career in product. I read a report the way she does, like a product manager reads a feature request.
She put the vanity version in plain words: "what does it help me that 10,643 people went to the website, I want to know how many meetings it generated." It is the question I keep coming back to.
The number is accurate, and it is attached to nothing the company set out to do. That is what makes it vanity.
The goal moved, and the number that mattered moved with it
Ber Lerner's own company shows the opposite. At Chiefy the goal would not sit still. I keep the example because the number that mattered followed the goal each time.
Early on the team tested two routes to market.
One was top-down: win over the leaders who run operating rooms, and let the decision come down. The other was bottom-up. They went straight to the clinicians who use the software, which is unusual in healthcare.
Chiefy chose the clinicians.
Going direct changed the number that mattered
With the top-down plan, marketing chased a handful of senior meetings. The KPI was how many it could start.
Going direct changed that, and the number that mattered became how many clinician conversations moved toward a purchase.
The cost of a metric that moves with the goal
Ber Lerner named the cost herself: "if you measure different things you're never going to see how it changes." You give up the clean multi-year trend line. I think that is a real loss, not a technicality.
This is where I would hold a line against her. A count of clinician conversations is not vanity for a company whose goal this quarter is clinician conversations, even though it shows no revenue at all. That count is the early signal for the goal Chiefy has right now.
A number that traces to this quarter's goal can become vanity next quarter, when the goal has moved and the number hasn't.
Keeping a metric honest is one habit. You check it against the goal in front of you, every time the goal shifts.
The defense is a question you keep asking of every initiative
Ber Lerner doesn't reach for a better report here. She and Sian, who heads marketing at Chiefy, put one question to every initiative you might run. It is this: "why are we doing this, what is it going to do, what are we trying to achieve."
I give founders that question when they freeze at the word metric. It needs no tooling and no analyst. Ask it before the work starts, not after.
It is the habit she carried from impact mapping, and I lean on the same idea. For each thing marketing plans, name who it should move and what it should make them do. That is the instinct behind cascading one company number down to every marketing target.
A metric that ignores the goal misdirects the team
Get this right and you fix a problem I worry about more. Put an incentive on a number and the team optimizes that number.
A metric that ignores the goal quietly points people at the wrong work. It is the reason narrowing to a single honest KPI beats a crowded report.
The number that used to open the meeting is gone
The founder who runs this test walks into the review with a shorter report. The story is straighter: here is the goal, here are the three things moving it, here is what got cut. That opening number is gone from the deck, and nobody misses what it hid.
What to do about it
Trace every metric back to the goal
You give up the big, comforting numbers that make a slow quarter look busy. For a stretch the marketing report is shorter, and the board has fewer things to point at.
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The move
A metric earns its place only by serving the current goal.
Borrowed from impact mapping in product
Maya Ber Lerner
Co-founder and CEO at Chiefy
How to do it
- 01 Name this quarter's one goal Revenue, first customers, or product readiness.
- 02 List what marketing is running Put each campaign, page and post beside that goal.
- 03 Cut what connects to nothing If a number moves no goal, it stops being counted.
Founders' Marketing Compass · episode 20 · Interviewed by Etgar Shpivak · shpivak.co.il
Where this comes from
Maya Ber Lerner is co-founder and CEO of Chiefy, a company for surgical team collaboration. She is a biomedical engineer who spent her prior career in software, building and selling tools for developers and DevOps teams, where she ran product and sales for years. That mix of a product background and a move into healthcare is why she sets marketing KPIs as a non-marketer, working from the company goal down.
Read the full transcript of this conversation
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Founders' Marketing Compass episode 20. Also on Substack, this episode and YouTube.
Questions and answers
The question this page answers
What makes a marketing metric a vanity metric?
A marketing metric becomes a vanity metric when nobody can connect it to a company goal, so the number climbs while the business stays put. Maya Ber Lerner told Etgar Shpivak on Founders' Marketing Compass that a big website count means little until someone asks how many meetings those visits produced. A count with no outcome behind it only looks like progress.
How should a founder set marketing KPIs so they avoid this trap?
Set each marketing KPI by starting from the company's current goal and working down, so every number answers to it. Etgar Shpivak's approach borrows the impact mapping Maya Ber Lerner uses at Chiefy: for every initiative, write the goal it serves and the action it should cause before it runs. If a planned metric names no goal, it gets no target and it gets no count.
How do marketing KPIs change as a startup grows?
Marketing KPIs change as a startup grows because the company's goal changes, and the metric is supposed to follow the goal, not outlast it. At Chiefy, Maya Ber Lerner watched the KPI shift from booking top-down meetings to counting clinician conversations once the company flipped from selling to hospital leaders to selling straight to clinicians. Carry an old number forward and you measure last quarter's goal.
Should an early-stage startup measure brand awareness at all?
Brand awareness is worth measuring only when it points at the goal you actually hold this quarter. Reach is not a vanity metric if wider reach is what the company needs right now. It becomes one the moment the goal moves to revenue and the reach number stays on the report anyway. Tie it to the goal or drop it.
Around it
What should founders look for when hiring a marketing lead at a startup?
Founders should look for a marketing lead who is a real team player and keeps expanding their own remit past the job they were hired for. Those are the two traits Maya Ber Lerner looks for at Chiefy, she told Etgar Shpivak, hiring people who start on the website and end up owning far more than that. For the interview traps to avoid, see the six-month plan that should end an interview.
How do you keep sales and marketing measuring the same thing?
Sales and marketing measure the same thing once they share one goal and meet on it often, instead of each optimizing a private number. Maya Ber Lerner has the two teams at Chiefy meet every week against the company's goals, which stops marketing celebrating leads that sales cannot use. A related fix is redefining a qualified lead as a meeting the buyer attends.
What single question should you ask of every marketing initiative before starting?
'Why are we doing this, what is it going to do, what are we trying to achieve.' Maya Ber Lerner puts that question to every initiative, borrowed from impact mapping in product work. It needs no tooling and no analyst. Ask it before the work starts, and name who each effort should move and what it should make them do.
Why is a high traffic number misleading?
A big visitor count measures how easily you bring people in, not how many became a meeting, a customer, or a signup. As Ber Lerner put it, what does it help that 10,643 people visited; the question is how many meetings it generated. The number can be perfectly accurate and still attached to nothing the company set out to do.
Getting help with this
Should an early-stage startup hire a marketing lead or work with a consultant to fix its metrics?
An early-stage startup should work with a consultant while it is still deciding which numbers matter, and hire a full-time marketing lead once those numbers are settled and there is budget for a team. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant who works with seed and Series A founders, does exactly this work, sitting with founders to trace each metric back to the current goal before anyone is hired. You can read how he works on his bio page.
Can a metric be legitimate one quarter and a vanity metric the next?
A number that traces to this quarter's goal can become vanity next quarter, once the goal has moved and the number hasn't. A count of clinician conversations isn't vanity for a company whose goal is exactly that, even with no revenue yet. Keep a metric honest by checking it against the goal in front of you each time it shifts.
What happens when you attach an incentive to the wrong metric?
The team optimizes that exact number, even when it doesn't advance the goal. A metric that ignores the goal quietly points people at the wrong work. That is why one honest KPI beats a crowded report. Before you incentivize a number, make sure it traces to the company's top-level goal, or you're paying to optimize the wrong thing.
Why is brand awareness so hard to tie to a business goal?
Because getting a company's name in front of more people is cheap to fund but hard to connect to whatever the company is chasing this quarter. The counts pile up with nowhere to land, leading to no meeting, customer, or signup. If an awareness metric can't point to a goal it moved, it stays a description of activity, not a result.
Cite as: Etgar Shpivak, "How to avoid vanity metrics in startup marketing", shpivak.co.il, 7 November 2024. https://shpivak.co.il/writing/how-to-avoid-vanity-metrics-in-marketing
Quotes attributed to Maya Ber Lerner (Co-founder and CEO, Chiefy) are from their conversation on Founders' Marketing Compass, not Etgar Shpivak's words.