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Here’s a little experiment for you: march into your CFO’s office right now and tell them you increased the company’s click-through rate by 10%. Watch their expression.

They will not care.

They might even blink at you like you just declared your fantasy football win as a Q4 revenue driver.

Because here’s the thing—marketing is supposed to make money. Not just generate traffic, or rack up likes, or create graphs with pretty lines that go up and to the right. And yet, marketing teams are still out here throwing confetti over “record engagement” on posts that don’t translate into a single dollar. It’s the business equivalent of a football team celebrating how many yards they ran—while completely ignoring the fact that they never actually made it into the end zone.

But let’s not pretend this is some big mystery. The industry knows this. We all know this. And yet, we keep chasing after these useless, feel-good numbers like a dog chasing its own tail. Why? Because vanity metrics are easy.

They look good in a slide deck. They make marketing teams feel productive. And best of all, they require zero accountability.

Because if you tell your boss that your impressions skyrocketed, or that your social engagement is “through the roof,” no one’s going to ask the tough follow-up question:

“Cool. How much money did that make us?”

And that’s the problem—real performance metrics require real effort. If you actually want to measure impact, you have to do real work:

📌 Dig into revenue data.
📌 Analyze long-term customer behavior.
📌 Prove that your campaigns aren’t just bringing in clicks but are actually driving purchases.

And let’s be honest, that’s a lot harder than slapping together a report that says, “Hey look, our impressions went up 15%!”

So instead, the industry just keeps playing along. Marketers keep worshipping the Church of Clicks and Views, CMOs keep justifying their bloated ad spend with questionable metrics, and CFOs keep side-eyeing the entire department wondering why their massive budget doesn’t translate to revenue growth.

At the end of the day, comfort doesn’t pay the bills.

You know what does? Real performance, real strategy, and real accountability. But that’s a little harder than just watching the numbers go up, isn’t it?

Alright, welcome to the land of actual business impact, where success isn’t defined by how many people almost engaged with your brand but by how much actual money you made. Wild concept, right? And yet, here we are, still watching marketers giddily measure their success with the wrong damn numbers like they’re in some kind of participation trophy Olympics.

So, let’s get serious. If you want to stop playing marketing theater and start tracking what actually drives results, here’s what matters:

Ah, the favorite pastime of bad marketers: burning through ad budgets like a kid with a trust fund and zero impulse control. Somewhere along the way, people forgot that the goal of marketing isn’t spending money—it’s making money.

But every quarter, CMOs march into boardrooms, flexing about how they “successfully spent” their entire budget. As if that’s an accomplishment. That’s like bragging that you emptied your checking account. Congrats, I guess?

Here’s the thing: budget depletion is not a KPI. If you’re measuring your success by how much you spent, you’re basically a glorified ATM for ad platforms. The real metric? Profit. Not ROAS. Not “awareness.” Not a beautifully optimized spend curve. Cold, hard, money-in-the-bank profit.

Repeat after me: A click is not a sale. A click is not a sale. A click is not a sale.

I don’t care if your CTR is soaring higher than a SpaceX rocket—if the people clicking aren’t actually buying anything, what exactly are you celebrating?

Now, let’s talk about what actually matters—the lifetime value of a customer. Not just that one-time purchase from someone who bought once and ghosted your brand forever, but the long-term, loyal buyers who stick around and keep spending.

Because real businesses don’t survive on one-night stands. They thrive on long-term relationships. But tracking CLV requires actual effort, like understanding purchase behavior, retention rates, and the cost of acquiring (and keeping) valuable customers. And for many marketers, that sounds like a lot of work.

So instead, they keep throwing money at the “awareness” machine, hoping for a quick dopamine hit from rising click counts. It’s lazy marketing. And lazy marketing doesn’t pay the bills.

Ah, last-click attribution—the metric that gives all the credit to the last thing someone clicked on, as if the rest of your marketing efforts didn’t even exist. That’s like saying the only reason you got married is because your spouse proposed, completely ignoring the years of dating, emotional labor, and questionable rom-com marathons that got you there.

If you’re still measuring marketing success with last-click attribution, you’re essentially giving a standing ovation to the last guy who touched the ball before the touchdown—while ignoring the entire damn team that got it there.

The real game-changer? Incrementality. Meaning, if your ads didn’t run, would people still buy? Would your revenue look the same? If so, your ads aren’t doing jack. If you’re not testing for incrementality, you’re just playing a very expensive guessing game.

Let’s have a brutally honest moment: no one cares how many likes your LinkedIn post got.

Vanity engagement is the sugar rush of marketing—it feels great in the moment, but it doesn’t sustain anything long-term. If your content isn’t driving action, it’s just noise.

Real engagement is measurable action—sign-ups, downloads, purchases, referrals, customer retention. Not a bunch of people aimlessly double-tapping your Instagram post before immediately scrolling past it.

“But what about brand awareness?” you ask. Brand awareness doesn’t pay salaries. If you can’t tie your “engagement” to an actual business outcome, all you’re doing is feeding the content machine without a clear goal.

And no, being viral isn’t a strategy. It’s an accident.

Let’s set the record straight: ROAS is a con.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is one of those metrics that sounds sophisticated but is actually a glorified way to justify bloated ad budgets. Sure, your ROAS might look great, but is it actually making you money? Because here’s a little secret: you can have an amazing ROAS and still be unprofitable.

That’s why the real metric that matters is Revenue Per Ad Dollar. How much actual revenue are you generating for every dollar spent? If it costs you $20 in ads to acquire a customer who only spends $19, guess what? You’re losing money.

Yet, agencies and ad tech companies will happily flash high ROAS figures to convince brands that their ad spend is working. Meanwhile, in reality, they’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

🔹 Option A: Keep clapping for your vanity metrics while your competitors eat your lunch.

🔹 Option B: Get serious about tracking real metrics that actually drive business outcomes.

But whatever you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.