Vanity Metrics
Vanity Metrics are numbers that are easy to grow, easy to celebrate, and often easy to misunderstand. They look good on dashboards but have little proven link to the outcomes you truly care about.
What we mean by “Vanity Metrics”
Vanity Metrics are metrics that provide emotional reassurance or storytelling value rather than actionable insight. They may correlate loosely with success but are not stable drivers of your North Star Metric, and they rarely change what you would do next.
Why this changes how people read a dashboard
When dashboards give Vanity Metrics equal space with real drivers, attention is pulled toward what feels good instead of what matters.
- Teams celebrate small wins on superficial metrics while deeper issues in retention, quality, or margin go unaddressed.
- Reviews drift into defending the metric itself (“but impressions are up”) instead of checking whether the outcome has improved.
When you will feel this term in real life
Vanity Metrics quietly support KPI Overload and False Alignment:
- Too many KPIs — metrics exist on the page mainly because someone likes seeing them go up.
- False alignment — teams claim to optimise for outcomes but spend emotional energy on numbers that do not change those outcomes.
Not every “nice to know” metric is a vanity metric. The key question is: “When this moves, does it reliably change how we behave?”
See this term in context
Vanity Metrics are discussed implicitly in:
Related terms in this glossary
Vanity Metrics are easier to spot when you are clear on:
You do not have to delete every vanity metric. You may simply move them to a lower tier in the layout, so they inform without distracting.