Honest metrics make marketing look worse first

Most marketing teams know which of their metrics are vanity.

Impressions. Followers. Traffic spikes. MQLs nobody in sales would call a lead.

They keep reporting them anyway.

Not because they're fooled. Because the honest numbers look worse.

What a vanity metric actually is

A vanity metric isn't a small or soft number. It's a number that can't change a decision.

Reach can be a real metric for a brand campaign, if it's reach within your target audience and you judge it on the right timeline.

MQLs can be a vanity metric, if sales ignores half of them.

The test is simple: if this number doubled or halved, would we do anything differently?

Why the switch is hard

Replace MQLs with sales-accepted leads, and the number drops. Replace traffic with pipeline, and the chart flattens. Replace "engagement" with conversations that led somewhere, and the board report shrinks.

Nothing got worse. You just stopped counting what didn't matter.

But to a CEO who has seen big green numbers for a year, it looks like marketing just fell off a cliff.

How to switch without losing the room

Warn before you change anything. Tell leadership the numbers will look smaller, and why, before they see it for themselves.

Run both for a quarter. Show the old metrics alongside the new ones, so the drop is explained, not discovered.

Define the new metrics with sales. "Qualified" should mean the same thing on both sides of the handoff.

And start with one. Swap a single vanity metric for a meaningful one, and let the first honest win make the case for the rest.

The report got smaller

I worked with a SaaS team that had been reporting MQLs as its headline marketing number. The monthly reports looked healthy: hundreds of leads, strong month-on-month growth, plenty of activity to show the business. But when sales looked at the list, a very different picture emerged. Many weren't people they would ever expect to sell to.

We changed the headline metric to sales-accepted leads. The first report looked terrible by comparison. The number dropped sharply, and the CEO's first reaction was "What happened to our leads?"

Nothing had happened to the leads. We'd simply stopped calling everyone who filled out a form a lead. We ran the old and new numbers side by side for the next quarter, and agreed with sales exactly what qualified for the new metric.

In hindsight, we should have warned the CEO before that first report, not after it. The smaller number made marketing look less productive, even though the underlying quality hadn't changed. Once we explained the change and kept both numbers visible during the transition, the conversation became much more useful.

Instead of asking why there weren't more MQLs, leadership could ask which campaigns were producing sales-accepted opportunities, and where those opportunities were coming from.

The new number didn't earn trust because it was bigger. It earned trust because, over time, people could see that it helped them make better decisions.

Look good, or get better

Vanity metrics make marketing look good.

Honest ones make it better.