Video content is one of the marketing channels with the highest ROIs out there, with 84% of marketers seeing increased sales. But for video content to be effective, businesses need to make data-driven decisions about where to invest resources — which platforms, what video formats, which topics.

In all of this, there is a major pitfall: Vanity metrics, which tempt businesses into priorities that don’t align with their overall business goals.

But what are vanity metrics? How can they mislead your strategy? And what does all of this look like in practice?

Here’s everything you need to know — and a case study to illustrate it.

Key Facts:

• View counts are not necessarily good indicators of how effective a particular piece of media content is for a business. Similarly, overall channel subscriber numbers don’t indicate how many of your viewers will convert into leads.
• Vanity metrics create a positive impression but can tempt businesses to prioritize the wrong strategies.
• To budget effectively and invest in content types that actually drive conversions, businesses need to keep an eye on more meaningful metrics.

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics, above all, look impressive. They’re statistics that are visible on your channel and videos and wow you when you first see them.

For video content — especially on YouTube — this mostly means view counts and subscriber numbers. Your latest video got a million views and you gained 2,000 new subs? Time for your marketing department to break out the champagne, and to pivot your strategy to produce more content like this viral hit.

Unfortunately, though, vanity metrics alone offer little information about how effective your video content is in reaching your primary business goals.

One million people watched your video. But how many of them actually became customers?

In many cases, the link between vanity metrics like view counts and overall conversions is weak. As a result, businesses often set the wrong priorities. They produce content that aims to drive up view counts and subscribers, not to maximize conversions.

So, how can you avoid this?

How to pinpoint metrics that matter

The key question you need to ask yourself is this: How can I give value to my ideal customer and turn them into a potential lead? We do this by addressing our desired audience’s pain points and positioning ourselves as an authority in our field.

This targeting will drastically narrow the field and likely result in lower view counts. But focusing on the subsection of your potential audience that is most likely to need your services or products will drive conversions and thus boost the ROI of your video content.

Useful indicators of whether you’re succeeding in this effort are metrics such as your audience demographics, engagement rates and watch time. For these, you have to go to the Analytics tab in YouTube Studio.

Audience demographics insights help you determine if your videos are reaching your target segment of viewers in terms of characteristics such as geographical location, gender and age groups. YouTube Studio analytics will even yield additional insights, such as your viewers’ other interests and channels they follow.

Engagement rates and watch time will then allow you to pinpoint whether the content you’re producing for your target audience succeeds in capturing their attention — and holding it.

Critically, you need to seamlessly integrate video content into your analytics ecosystem and funnel tracking. For instance, you can track in Google Analytics how much of your website traffic originates on YouTube, and how these visitors engage with your ecommerce or order pages.

Case study: from view counts to conversions

Let’s look at a case study to see how all this translates into practice. At Tasty Edits, a video editing and YouTube channel management company, we work with a wide range of clients from different industries who have faced this challenge and overcome it.

One of them is Goyette, Ruano & Thompson (GRT Law), a California-based law firm with specializations including estate planning and civil litigation as well as labor and employment law.

Over the past year, they put an emphasis on video content marketing through their YouTube channel, consistently producing content that demonstrates their legal expertise to potential clients. A seemingly successful element of their strategy were YouTube Shorts on a wide range of topics, including the estates of celebrities and the secrets of insurance companies. These regularly earned thousands of views, a considerable achievement for a new channel.

However, this did not translate into client acquisition. When the firm re-evaluated the content strategy after four months, it became clear that many viewers tuned in for entertainment or out of general interest.

The view counts on their videos had proven to be merely vanity metrics.

Based on these insights, they shifted the topics they covered, now aiming to target people who might need immediate legal support, for example, those stuck in toxic workplace environments or who’ve been unlawfully fired.

Since implementing this new strategy, GRT Law’s channel has seen significantly better engagement — watch time and comments increased by 246% each, and the number of times videos were shared shot up by 535%. This growth far outstripped the increase in views, which doubled over the same period.

The bottom line? Shifting their focus from reaching any viewer to reaching the right viewers has resulted in higher engagement and a greater number of potential leads.