What are vanity metrics and why should SaaS founders stop tracking them?

Vanity metrics are measurements that look impressive on paper but do not lead to better business decisions or reflect genuine subscription growth. For SaaS founders, the vanity metrics definition comes down to one test: can this number guide a specific action? Total page views, running customer counts, and social media follower numbers all fail that test. They tend to rise on their own over time, can be inflated artificially, and tell you nothing about whether your MRR is healthy or your churn rate is under control. The real cost of tracking vanity metrics is that your team spends energy optimising numbers that do not move revenue. Replacing them with actionable metrics like trial-to-paid conversion rate, LTV to CAC ratio, and net revenue retention gives every function a clear signal to act on.

What is the difference between vanity metrics and actionable metrics for subscription businesses?

Vanity metrics make your business look good from the outside, while actionable metrics tell you what is actually happening inside your revenue engine and what to do next. The core vanity metrics vs actionable metrics distinction is whether a number changes because of a deliberate decision your team made. A running total of customers only ever goes up, so it cannot tell you whether churn is accelerating. By contrast, customer churn rate drops when your support and product teams take specific steps to retain subscribers. Similarly, total downloads is a vanity metric because it is not tied to a decision, whereas your SaaS quick ratio reveals exactly how well new MRR is outpacing lost MRR and gives sales, marketing, and customer success a shared target to optimise.

How do I identify whether a metric I am tracking is a vanity metric or a real KPI?

Ask three questions: does this metric lead to a specific decision, can your team change it on purpose, and is it calculated from a reliable data source? If any answer is no, you are likely looking at a vanity metric. Identifying vanity metrics in practice means checking whether a number improves from inertia alone, the way total email subscribers grows even when your content is not improving. Real KPIs, like open rate or click-through rate, only improve when your team actively refines targeting and copy. For subscription businesses, the most reliable data source is your payment processor. Metrics pulled directly from Stripe or Braintree, such as MRR movement, expansion revenue, and failed payment recovery rates, are harder to game and easier to act on than any website or social metric.

Which vanity metrics do B2B SaaS companies most commonly confuse with real growth indicators?

The most common vanity metrics mistaken for real growth signals in B2B SaaS are total page views, running customer counts, number of new users per day, social media followers, raw conversion counts, total email subscribers, and total downloads. Each of these metrics fails the actionability test for subscription businesses. The number of new users gained per day, for example, rewards linear growth thinking when SaaS businesses should be measuring whether acquisition is becoming more efficient over time. The actionable alternative is your LTV to CAC ratio. Likewise, replacing a running customer count with customer churn rate and average customer lifetime gives finance leads and growth teams a much sharper view of retention health and where to intervene.

How can I benchmark my churn rate against similar SaaS companies to know if my metrics are actually healthy?

You can benchmark your churn rate against comparable SaaS companies using Baremetrics open benchmark data, which aggregates anonymised metrics from hundreds of subscription businesses. Knowing your churn rate in isolation is not enough. A 5% monthly churn rate means something very different for an SMB-focused product than for a mid-market one. Baremetrics publishes subscription benchmarks across MRR bands and business types so you can compare your churn rate, LTV, and ARPU against companies at a similar stage. This turns a number that might feel acceptable in isolation into a real KPI with clear context. You can explore the Baremetrics open benchmarks without even creating an account.

What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery to reduce involuntary churn for subscription businesses?

Baremetrics Recover is a purpose-built tool that automatically retries failed payments and sends targeted dunning emails to reduce involuntary churn for subscription businesses. Involuntary churn, the revenue lost when a subscriber's card fails rather than because they chose to cancel, is one of the most avoidable causes of MRR decline. Many SaaS teams do not track it separately from voluntary churn, which means they are measuring and trying to fix the wrong problem. Recover integrates directly with Stripe and other payment processors, identifies failed charges in real time, and handles retry logic and customer outreach automatically. Because the recovered revenue data flows back into your Baremetrics dashboard, you can see the direct impact on churned MRR and net revenue retention without any manual reconciliation.

How do I separate new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR instead of relying on a single revenue total?

Breaking MRR into its four components, new, expansion, contraction, and churned, gives you a complete picture of where revenue is being won and lost each month instead of a single number that hides the detail. A growing total MRR can mask serious problems. Expansion MRR from upsells might be covering accelerating churn, which is a warning sign, not a success story. Baremetrics automatically splits MRR movement into these four streams by pulling data directly from your payment processor, so you can see at a glance whether growth is coming from new customer acquisition, from existing customers expanding, or from both. This breakdown is essential for finance leads presenting to investors and for growth teams deciding whether to prioritise retention or acquisition in a given quarter.

7 Vanity Metrics to Avoid and What to Track Instead

I like to say metrics of any sort are designed to answer one specific question about your business (I say this a lot, a lot a lot, maybe too often), and you track them so that you like the answers.

Well vanity metrics either don’t answer a question, don’t answer a needed question, or you can’t make positive changes to like the answer.

While tracking actionable metrics gives you instant feedback about how your decision making is affecting your business processes, vanity metrics do not provide useful feedback.

In this article, I go over 7 of the vanity metrics that you’ve probably been using and should stop using now.

What is Baremetrics?

Baremetrics provides an easy-to-read dashboard that gives you all the key metrics for your business, including MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more directly in your Baremetrics dashboard. Just check out this demo account here.

Connect Baremetrics to your payment processors and start seeing all of your revenue in a crystal-clear dashboard. You can even see your customer segmentation, deeper insights about who your customers are, forecast into the future, and use automated tools to recover failed payments.

Just look at the beautiful Control Center with all of its actionable metrics. This is real data from an Open Startups company:

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics are so named because they make you look good instead of be good. From the outside, they look like they have meaning, but they do not hold up to deeper scrutiny.

While the metrics you should be tracking allow you to monitor the results of your business decisions, vanity metrics might not be related to your business decisions at all.

At best, vanity metrics are a distraction for your teams. At worst, vanity metrics provide cover for poor decisions.

Vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics

Vanity metrics are superficial measurements of your company’s success. They are often easier to improve than actionable metrics or should improve automatically from inertia and do not reflect any new activities.

Actionable metrics are well-defined and proven measurements that provide valuable insights into your business objectives. They improve based on genuine positive activity. The feedback provided by actionable metrics gives clear guidelines on improving the metric and, therefore, your company.

Three questions you should ask to identify a vanity metric

Your teams will chase the KPIs you assign them. If they are good metrics that genuinely help the whole company, then you have nothing to worry about.

Otherwise, there’s a chance they will wind up working hard but accomplishing nothing. That’s why you need a way to identify vanity metrics and switch teams to actionable ones instead.

Here are some of the obvious characteristics of a vanity metric:

It doesn’t provide needed answers.
It is easy to measure.
It isn’t presented in context.
It is often misleading.
It improves or worsens independently of the team or company.

Now that you know the telltale signs of a vanity metrics, consider the following three questions to identify whether your company is relying on them.

Does this metric lead to specific decisions?

This is the first question you need to answer. An actionable metric will provide you with a course of action.

For example, the net revenue retention rate (NRR) can tell you at a glance whether you are spending enough time marketing to current customers.

If your NRR is above 110%, you gain enough added MRR from current customers monthly. Otherwise, you may need to work more on upselling.

If your team is tracking a metric that doesn’t give them obvious assistance in decision making, then ditch that vanity metric for an actionable one.

Can the metric’s value be changed on purpose?

If a metric improves or worsens by chance instead of by methodical changes, that’s an example of a vanity metric.

For example, while a solid content marketing team can influence the number of visitors to your page, it can also be caused by a random share by an influencer.

That’s why your content writers should focus on metrics that tell you how many targeted audience members visit your page.

Is this metric reliable?

There’s nothing more important than reliability when it comes to your data. If your data isn’t accurate, then how can you expect it to provide accurate metrics?

That’s why you should be searching for metrics that can be calculated using reliable data sources.

For example, growth metrics can be calculated using data pulled right from your payment processors. Payment processors provide highly reliable data, and therefore you can be confident in the metrics using that data.

Use Baremetrics to track actionable growth metrics

It can be challenging to discern vanity metrics from actionable ones. Once you settle on the key actionable growth metrics, you must track them diligently. That means using the most accurate data possible.

Baremetrics monitors subscription revenue for SaaS companies. Baremetrics can integrate directly with payment processors and pull information about your customers and their behavior into a crystal-clear dashboard.

Baremetrics offers metrics, dunning, engagement tools, and customer insights. It monitors MRR, ARR, LTV, the total number of customers, total expenses, and more.

Best of all, it can calculate your quick ratio automatically! Sign up for your Baremetrics free trial and see it now.

The quick ratio is one of the best metrics you can use:

7 vanity metrics

Now that we know how to identify vanity metrics and why you should find actionable ones instead, let’s examine seven specific vanity metrics you should stop tracking today.

1. Page views

Nobody is arguing that pageviews are bad, but that’s not the mark of a vanity metric. It isn’t enough to say “x is good, so let’s base our decisions on x”.

Since not every pageview has the same value, and focusing on the wrong ones can be detrimental to the company, you should avoid using pageviews as a metric to track the value of your content.

You want the visitors who are interested in your product. Those visitors are more likely to give you their information, sign up for your free trial, and ultimately become paying customers.

So, what is a better metric? Instead, you could track the number of leads or your lead conversion rate or trial conversion rate. Alternatively, you could track the click through rate of your calls to action.

2. Running total of customers

This is the perfect vanity metric. It only goes up, and it doesn’t provide anything actionable.

Although getting more and more customers is the goal in business, it is easier said than done. It is also accomplished indirectly by improving your funnel.

Instead, consider tracking customer churn or your customer lifetime. These can help you earn more from each customer.

3. Running totals of purchases or downloads

This has the same problem as the running total of customers—it can only go up and it isn’t actionable.

Instead of tracking your total purchases or downloads, consider tracking your SaaS quick ratio, which tells you how well your company is bringing on new customers relative to the churn of old ones.

Since the quick ratio can be improved in two ways, by increasing sales or decreasing churn, it gives your marketing, sales, and customer service teams a good representation of their activities.

4. Social media followers

This vanity metric tricks companies, hobbyists, and individuals. Having a massive follower count is so valued that many influencer contracts are based on it—even when those followers are purchased bots!

While many people would say the actionable counterpart to this is engagement numbers, that might not be accurate either—engagement can also be purchased after all.

So, what should you track instead of social media followers? I personally like counting the click-through rate here, too. If my shares get people to click the link on one of my Instagram profile pages, then I know they are at least interested in my message enough to see what I am doing with my pages.

5. Number of conversions

It is hard to influence the total numbers of some metrics, but you can influence the percentages. That makes them vanity metrics for failing the second question above.

While the number of conversions—visitors to leads, leads to opportunities, opportunities to wins, etc.—can fluctuate over time, you should be able to provide higher conversion rates by improving your inbound marketing plan.

Month on the month, you should be able to get better visitors, which means more leads.

Similarly, month on month you should be able to better engage with your leads, leading to more opportunities and wins.

6. Number of email subscribers

Having more and more people on your email subscriber list is nice, but a lot of those subscribers are going to be bots, fake email addresses, or a random email address.

Now that there are so many great emailing tools out there, consider keeping track of the improvement in open rates or click through rates instead.

7. Number of new users gained per day

Hypothetically, your company should be growing exponentially. The first dollar of MRR can be harder than the next $100, which is probably going to be harder than the following $1,000, and that’ll be harder than the next $10,000, and on it goes forever.

Keeping track of the number of new users gained per day is a way to be satisfied by a linear growth.

Instead, consider your LTV to CAC ratio, which will tell you whether you are getting those new customers for less and less money.

Summary

All business metrics should answer a meaningful question about your business. If they don’t, it is time to start tracking actionable metrics instead of vanity metrics.

That’s where Baremetrics comes in.

Baremetrics is a business metrics tool that provides 26 metrics about your business, such as MRR, ARR, LTV, total customers, and more.

Baremetrics integrates directly with payment processors, including Stripe, so information about your customers is automatically and in real-time piped into the Baremetrics dashboards.

FAQ

What are vanity metrics and why should SaaS founders stop tracking them?

Vanity metrics are measurements that look impressive on paper but do not lead to better business decisions or reflect genuine subscription growth.

For SaaS founders, the vanity metrics definition comes down to one test: can this number guide a specific action? Total page views, running customer counts, and social media follower numbers all fail that test. They tend to rise on their own over time, can be inflated artificially, and tell you nothing about whether your MRR is healthy or your churn rate is under control. The real cost of tracking vanity metrics is that your team spends energy optimising numbers that do not move revenue. Replacing them with actionable metrics like trial-to-paid conversion rate, LTV to CAC ratio, and net revenue retention gives every function a clear signal to act on.
What is the difference between vanity metrics and actionable metrics for subscription businesses?

Vanity metrics make your business look good from the outside, while actionable metrics tell you what is actually happening inside your revenue engine and what to do next.

The core vanity metrics vs actionable metrics distinction is whether a number changes because of a deliberate decision your team made. A running total of customers only ever goes up, so it cannot tell you whether churn is accelerating. By contrast, customer churn rate drops when your support and product teams take specific steps to retain subscribers. Similarly, total downloads is a vanity metric because it is not tied to a decision, whereas your SaaS quick ratio reveals exactly how well new MRR is outpacing lost MRR and gives sales, marketing, and customer success a shared target to optimise.
How do I identify whether a metric I am tracking is a vanity metric or a real KPI?

Ask three questions: does this metric lead to a specific decision, can your team change it on purpose, and is it calculated from a reliable data source?

If any answer is no, you are likely looking at a vanity metric. Identifying vanity metrics in practice means checking whether a number improves from inertia alone, the way total email subscribers grows even when your content is not improving. Real KPIs, like open rate or click-through rate, only improve when your team actively refines targeting and copy. For subscription businesses, the most reliable data source is your payment processor. Metrics pulled directly from Stripe or Braintree, such as MRR movement, expansion revenue, and failed payment recovery rates, are harder to game and easier to act on than any website or social metric.
Which vanity metrics do B2B SaaS companies most commonly confuse with real growth indicators?

The most common vanity metrics mistaken for real growth signals in B2B SaaS are total page views, running customer counts, number of new users per day, social media followers, raw conversion counts, total email subscribers, and total downloads.

Each of these metrics fails the actionability test for subscription businesses. The number of new users gained per day, for example, rewards linear growth thinking when SaaS businesses should be measuring whether acquisition is becoming more efficient over time. The actionable alternative is your LTV to CAC ratio. Likewise, replacing a running customer count with customer churn rate and average customer lifetime gives finance leads and growth teams a much sharper view of retention health and where to intervene.
How can I benchmark my churn rate against similar SaaS companies to know if my metrics are actually healthy?

You can benchmark your churn rate against comparable SaaS companies using Baremetrics open benchmark data, which aggregates anonymised metrics from hundreds of subscription businesses.

Knowing your churn rate in isolation is not enough. A 5% monthly churn rate means something very different for an SMB-focused product than for a mid-market one. Baremetrics publishes subscription benchmarks across MRR bands and business types so you can compare your churn rate, LTV, and ARPU against companies at a similar stage. This turns a number that might feel acceptable in isolation into a real KPI with clear context. You can explore the Baremetrics open benchmarks without even creating an account.
What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery to reduce involuntary churn for subscription businesses?

Baremetrics Recover is a purpose-built tool that automatically retries failed payments and sends targeted dunning emails to reduce involuntary churn for subscription businesses.

Involuntary churn, the revenue lost when a subscriber's card fails rather than because they chose to cancel, is one of the most avoidable causes of MRR decline. Many SaaS teams do not track it separately from voluntary churn, which means they are measuring and trying to fix the wrong problem. Recover integrates directly with Stripe and other payment processors, identifies failed charges in real time, and handles retry logic and customer outreach automatically. Because the recovered revenue data flows back into your Baremetrics dashboard, you can see the direct impact on churned MRR and net revenue retention without any manual reconciliation.
How do I separate new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR instead of relying on a single revenue total?

Breaking MRR into its four components, new, expansion, contraction, and churned, gives you a complete picture of where revenue is being won and lost each month instead of a single number that hides the detail.

A growing total MRR can mask serious problems. Expansion MRR from upsells might be covering accelerating churn, which is a warning sign, not a success story. Baremetrics automatically splits MRR movement into these four streams by pulling data directly from your payment processor, so you can see at a glance whether growth is coming from new customer acquisition, from existing customers expanding, or from both. This breakdown is essential for finance leads presenting to investors and for growth teams deciding whether to prioritise retention or acquisition in a given quarter.

7 Common Vanity Metrics That You’ve Been Using

Table of Contents

What is Baremetrics?

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics

Does this metric lead to specific decisions?

Can the metric’s value be changed on purpose?

Is this metric reliable?

Use Baremetrics to track actionable growth metrics

7 vanity metrics

1. Page views

2. Running total of customers

3. Running totals of purchases or downloads

4. Social media followers

5. Number of conversions

6. Number of email subscribers

7. Number of new users gained per day

Summary

FAQ

Timothy Ware

7 Common Vanity Metrics That You’ve Been Using

Table of Contents

More Articles

What is Baremetrics?

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics

Does this metric lead to specific decisions?

Can the metric’s value be changed on purpose?

Is this metric reliable?

Use Baremetrics to track actionable growth metrics

7 vanity metrics

1. Page views

2. Running total of customers

3. Running totals of purchases or downloads

4. Social media followers

5. Number of conversions

6. Number of email subscribers

7. Number of new users gained per day

Summary

FAQ

Timothy Ware