Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to other businesses or consumers but are metrics that don't help you to understand your own performance. This term is commonly used in social media marketing. On a platform such as Twitter, likes and retweets are vanity metrics. Having many likes on your post may seem important but they don't really represent the performance of your business objectives. Let's say you are advertising a promotion on a product on Twitter or Instagram. The tweet or Instagram post may have received far more likes and shares than you anticipated and it may lead your competition to believe the promotion is running well. However it doesn't necessarily mean that the actual promotion is performing well. To determine success of the ad you need to look at what percentage of the sales were from the ad.
References:
- Tableau, "The Definition of Vanity Metrics and How to Identify Them", Tableau, 2019. https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/vanity-metrics.