Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
Stop Tracking These Marketing Metrics (They're Costing You Money!)
Why Vanity Metrics Are So Tempting
Clicks, impressions, and giant top-line numbers feel good—and they’re easy to measure. Anthony explains that brands and agencies often lean on these because they make progress look “sexy” in a deck, even when they don’t connect to business outcomes.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
Kendra presses on what marketers should track instead. Anthony breaks it down by funnel stage and business model:
For B2B and lead-gen teams:
- Lead volume and lead quality
- Conversion behavior after the click (time on site, page depth, engagement paths)
- Feeding those quality signals back into ad algorithms
For e-commerce:
- Revenue per campaign
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) vs. customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Target CPA thresholds to ensure profitability
Anthony’s bottom line:
The two most important metrics are CPA and LTV—and every other KPI should support them.
When Algorithms Work Against You
A huge chunk of the episode is about how campaigns go sideways when the wrong signals are optimized. If you optimize for clicks, the algorithm finds more clickers—not buyers.
They dig into how metrics aren’t bad—they’re just often misused.
Examples Anthony gives:
- ROAS is critical for shopping/e-commerce conversion campaigns.
- Video view-through rate matters for awareness campaigns, since the goal is warm-audience building.
- Target impression share is valuable in branded search as a defensive move, ensuring competitors don’t steal your brand traffic.
Competitor Bidding: Old Advice vs. Now
Kendra asks about the old-school thinking that bidding on competitor names doesn’t work. Anthony clarifies the difference between:
- Branded defense campaigns (protecting your own name)
- Competitor conquesting campaigns (showing up as an alternative in a buyer’s search)
He argues conquesting can be effective because you only pay on clicks, yet still gain impression value and market-share opportunities.
Balancing Short-Term Pressure with Long-Term Growth
B2B cycles are long, and clients want fast wins. Anthony recommends a full-funnel budget split:
- Some spend for the 1% ready to buy now (lower funnel)
- Significant investment to warm the other 99% (awareness + consideration)
Biggest Lesson Learned: Simplicity Scales
Anthony closes with his core marketing takeaway:
The best campaigns aren’t the busiest—they’re the clearest.
When you focus on the right audience, the right offer, and the right KPIs, everything improves: creative, reporting, and results that compound over time.
If you want to connect with Anthony or learn more about Volo Media, check out the links below. And if you’ve ever been sold a pretty dashboard full of meaningless numbers… this one’s for you.
Connect with Anthony:
Website: https://www.vallomedia.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.co
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Hi, I'm Kendra Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and I'm really excited for our topic today. But before we get started, if you're on YouTube, you can check out my new office. I am actually at a different location at my office that is at Rochester Christian University, where I am the management and marketing department chair in addition to Kendracorman.com and HDH Consulting, which are my other two companies. So lots there, but uh that's why I have a different background today and just wanted to share that with y'all. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited about this topic because we're gonna be talking a little bit about some vanity metrics and why people are just sort of tracking things that they shouldn't be and a little bit about what they should be. So very excited because I love metrics. I marketing is part art, part science. It's definitely an imperfect science. Um, but tracking the right stuff is so important. So, how did how did you get into this? Where did you start?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, first of all, Kendra, thanks so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. And, you know, I got started very early on. I actually studied marketing in college, but didn't work in marketing right after school, right? I started in retail, uh, did that for a year and a half and realized just wasn't for me. It was a miserable uh, you know, uh type of job. But ultimately I started my career in sales in New York City. So boiler room style, just you know, 100 outbound calls a day, uh, reaching out to marketing, uh, you know, marketing departments, marketing agencies, brands that I was trying to get them to purchase advertising in a print supplement. So I actually started my career in print. This is just as a platform called LinkedIn was just starting to uh come out at the time. And uh it just taught me so much about the importance of you know building relationships in marketing and building relationships in sales. And it gave me a pretty unique perspective as I then you know progressed in my career, eventually becoming a marketing director and ultimately, you know, leading the paid media and performance marketing department within a uh big holding company. And since that time, actually in 2020, I actually started my own firm, Balo Media, and been doing that ever since. We're just uh focused on executing, you know, paid media strategies, uh performance marketing, growth-oriented uh brand strategy, that type of thing.
SPEAKER_01:I love where you started. I have to say, if more people started there getting hung up on and told no on a daily basis, I think we would learn to do so much more and so much better in our careers. So kudos to you for that. That probably still serves you really well, having done that job.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, 100%. It's that I would say it's probably one of the most valuable experiences of my career, right? Because you're learning to deal with rejection, you're learning to sell ideas. That's what marketing is, really, is you know, learning to sell your ideas, whether you're a brand or an agency or working on behalf of a client. That type of experience, I would recommend everyone get a little bit of sales experience at one time or another because it's just like you said, it is so valuable.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and I think all jobs are selling, right? You're selling ideas and marketing. If it's internal, external, it doesn't matter, right? You're constantly selling and you need to understand when not to take it personally, because most of the time it's not personal. And I think that that having a little bit of a tough skin with that is is really helpful. So thank you for sharing that. So let's talk about clicks and impressions, some of those vanity metrics. Why are people even tracking that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a good question. And I've been, I feel like I've been having these conversations for so long now, right? Because uh, at the end of the day, people track them because they're easy to measure, right? It makes people feel good. It makes brands feel good when you see a big number of clicks or a big number of impressions. It feels and looks like progress. The problem is though, those numbers they don't always translate into business outcomes. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for upper funnel campaigns and metrics, and we'll dig into all of that because I do believe it has an important place. But a lot of teams fall into what I call reporting theater. In other words, they're focused on what looks good in a deck instead of what's actually driving revenue. Now, the truth is marketing isn't about visibility for visibility's sake. It's about driving profitable growth. And the first mindset shift uh is realizing ultimately that not all metrics are created equal. And so, for example, it may be better to have fewer clicks from the right audience than thousands of clicks from the wrong audience, or worse, bots, which we see a lot of in digital advertising as well. So we could dig into all that for sure.
SPEAKER_01:People love it because it can tell such a big story, right? It sounds sexy. And when you're presenting to people that don't know better, which like a lot of my my vendors, some of my clients and stuff like that, when I'm working um as their outsource marketing department, they try to sell me on these vanity metrics. And I was like, but what does that mean? And when they're selling it to people that actually know what they're talking about, it doesn't carry as much weight. Yeah. And I'm always like poking holes in it because I'm like, I don't really care if they clicked and looked at the site. I want to know what happened next. Speaking about what happened next, let's talk about the other side of that. If we're not tracking clicks and impressions, what KPIs or key performance indicators should we be tracking and how do they tie to revenue? Because that's what we want, right?
SPEAKER_00:No, 100%. And I think you hit on a really important point. The most critical question that we can ask is what metrics most closely tie to the desired outcome? Let's just use an example in a B2B company, they want leads, right? And so they can measure obviously the total volume of leads, but even that's not deep enough. They need to also measure the quality of those leads. Like I work with tons of clients who who got burned by paid media agencies countless times.
SPEAKER_01:And they come to the- I would be a millionaire if I if I was paid like a dollar for every time someone got burned by a paid media agency or any kind of marketing agency. They just overpromise and under-deliver to what people think they're gonna get.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And they've honestly given the the paid agency where all the bad rap. And so I've made it my personal mission to uh expose the bad paid media agencies. And actually, part of what we do is we audit other paid media um campaigns that other agencies have done. And I would say 90, 95% of the time, we are seeing the same mistakes over and over and over again. They're optimizing towards clicks, they're optimizing towards impressions. And don't get me wrong, we track those metrics as well, but that's not enough. We also track um the conversion metrics that are really important. But here's the other caveat: not every single user, in fact, the majority of users that are clicking on an ad and coming to your website, they are not going to convert, but that's okay. But we need another way to qualify them. And that's where we look at behavioral metrics, such as, you know, time on site or page views or where are they clicking through. And so understanding what that user journey looks like when they come to your site. And then more importantly, feeding that information back to the paid media algorithms. And this is where so many brands and so many agencies get it wrong, because they're not sending the right signals back to the algorithm to find more customers, like the ones that they want and the ones that they need for their business. And so when we're looking at a client's paid media funnel, we are looking at every stage in the funnel. So, yes, that does mean tracking impressions and clicks and click-through rate, but it also means going several layers deeper. Now, in an e-commerce client, it's very easy. You could say, hey, this ad drove this sale worth this much money, and this customer has this much lifetime value. And so we know that our target cost per acquisition needs to be$50 in order for this ad to be profitable. That's pretty easy. It's cut and dry. But then you have, you know, B2B and you have other brands that are not, you know, doing e-commerce types of campaigns. Uh, and it becomes just a little bit more of a gray area. And that's where getting smart about those lower funnel metrics that you track, such as the behavioral metrics, the conversion, the lead gen, the lead quality, um, that's where the measurement comes into play. And again, going back to my point about the algorithms, if you are not tracking and optimizing correctly, your algorithm is actually working against you because it's taking a problem that maybe is small and can be fixed easily, but it's actually amplifying that times 10 or even 20x, because now you're taking these data signals that are not exactly what I would call quality or qualified metrics, and you're feeding that into the algorithm. So the algorithm is just doing what it does best. It's taking the data that you're feeding it, and it's going to find more people like that. But if those aren't the right people, you've just compounded your problem times a factor of 10. And that's when we run into really big issues with wasted spend, with junk traffic, with bots, with low quality conversions. Um, we had one client, they were getting, you know, 10,000 visits uh a week. Every single one of them was a bot. And we went in and we said, this is like, what is going on here? And after we dug deeper into the data, it turns out their former agency was actually paying to drive fake traffic to their website to make it look like they were doing a good job. And, you know, we we fixed the whole thing, but it took, it takes time to rebuild, like, you know, a real funnel uh after dealing with some of these things. But um, you know, at the end of the day, I would say the two most important metrics in marketing are, you know, your cost per acquisition and then the lifetime value of your customer, right? And so every other metric needs to tie back to those two things. Not a perfect science, right? Because there is still a lot of value in brand building. I'm a big proponent of brand building. I actually just did a LinkedIn post about this recently where uh I was talking about how only 1% of your audience is ready to buy. So stop ignoring the other 99% and start building a relationship with them. So when they are ready to buy, there's no question in their mind who they're coming to, right? And so there's a ton of value in looking at your media and your marketing ecosystem through the lens of what I call the full funnel and understanding how each of those stages of the funnel, whether we're talking awareness, you know, consideration or conversion, how they work together, how your strategy, how your creative, your messaging, your audiences, where you show up, how you show up, what channels you're on, how do those align with the different stages of the funnel? But more importantly, how are you moving people through that journey? So we could get into all that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and I think it's so important to really consider that journey, right? Because if all you're doing is focusing lower funnel on those conversions and you don't have anybody getting any awareness or consideration, that's gonna dry up fast. And so that balanced look, I think, is really, really important. And having those different goals are, I think, important too, right? So I think you said the two most important ones are cost per acquisition and lifetime value, lifetime value of your customer. Huge metrics to know. Yes, they are definitely imperfect measurements, but um, you can get pretty, pretty good with that. Speaking of those metrics, so definitely cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. When you're focusing on those metrics, how does that help your campaign? Like what does it change? I mean, we talked about the bots. What else is it changing in in that, in that funnel, in that journey in what you're looking at?
SPEAKER_00:We do look pretty closely at return on ad spend, which is, you know, similar to a cost per acquisition, but it's just showing you your rate of return. So if I spend, you know, one dollar and I make two, you know, that's a 2x return on ad spend, right? That's good, right? We're able to put money in and get money out profitably. But it doesn't always work like that. A lot of clients come to us and they think, all right, let's just turn these ads on and we'll just start printing money. I'm just like, well, it doesn't quite work like that. Like you really have to take the time, you know, to build the funnel, to invest in the brand, to build warm audiences, to build awareness and ultimately to drive those users through those different funnel stages. I would say, you know, when we're looking at metrics like return on ad spend or ROAS, whatever you want to call it, very, very important, but only for certain campaigns. Like return on ad spend is not something that we look at for awareness campaigns. Instead, we look at, you know, video view through rate, what percentage of people are watching more than 10 seconds of our video, and how are we now taking those people and actually building a retargeting audience around them? And so it actually goes back to the strategy about you know preheating audiences and actually retargeting warm audiences with additional content and moving them down the funnel in a structured sequence. And so it becomes really important when we talk about KPIs that there's a time and a place for each one. So, for example, impression share. That might be something that many consider a vanity metric. But in reality, target impression share is actually a KPI that we optimize for in branded search campaigns. Because in those types of campaigns, we don't want to pay cost per click because that's our brand name. So of course we would show up for our own name organically. So why should I have to pay extra for people to drive a branded search ad when they're already searching for our name? The reason we do that, that we even run branded search ads in the first place, is more mostly as a defensive tactic, right? Because we have other brands' competitors that are bidding against our name and we want to make sure that we own our own name within the search results. And so in that particular instance, we'll actually use a target impression share bid goal within Google Ads, for example. And that's going to allow us to achieve maximum impression share for our brand name while paying as little as possible for that cost per click. Because again, these are clicks we may have gotten for free anyway. We're just doing this as a defensive strategy to prevent competitors from targeting our name and stealing market share from customers who weren't even maybe considering them, right? They're looking for us by name, but we need to make sure that we're there. So that's just one example where an impression share KPI might make sense. Now, if you're an e-commerce uh company and you're running shopping ads on Google, then you're very, very focused on ROAS return on ad spend. And in that particular situation, you want to make sure that you're driving a profitable return on ad spend. If you spend$5, I want to make$10. That type of thing. But you also got to be careful with that.
SPEAKER_01:Way back in the olden days. Um, so long time ago, I remember reading a study that said you shouldn't necessarily buy your competitors' names because people are in market for them, it really doesn't do much for you. And I think you had said, yeah, we'd probably get it ourselves. It's a defensive tactic because it sounds like people are still doing well, I know people are still doing that because they show up in my my Google search, right? As a paid ad. So if it doesn't really work, why are people still doing that? Or does it work now?
SPEAKER_00:No, so it's a great question. I would say there's I want to make one distinction between what you just said. So running a branded campaign is a defense against competitors bidding on our own brand name, whereas running a competitive conquesting campaign is actually what the competitor is doing. So it's very effective because now you're taking people who are in market for your competitor services and you're giving them an alternative and saying, hey, try us out. Maybe you haven't heard of us before. Maybe they have, right? If somebody's researching uh a B2B software product, typically they'll have already researched the top five solutions in their space. So you might already be in their sort of ecosystem there. And then what happens is there's a lot of value in actually siphoning market share from your competitors and positioning your product or service as an alternative. So it can be very effective, but we distinguish campaigns within the back end of Google's ads platform between branded, unbranded, and competitor campaigns. And we will run all three and we'll do a lot more as well. But I would say 100% if we're talking about an effective Google page strategy, you have to have each of those represented. You also have to have Demand Gen and YouTube and PMAX campaigns, but that's a whole other uh conversation. But there is a lot of value because again, number one, you're you're not paying for the impression of that ad. So let's say I'm looking for a particular um, you know, software uh brand, and I'm presented with an ad for a competitive alternative. I don't choose to click on that ad. As the brand that's running that, I'm not paying. I'm only paying when somebody clicks. But I still got value from that impression of that person who actually saw that ad and said, Oh, interesting. You know, maybe they don't remember the brand, maybe they do, but there was certainly value in showing up there. So we do see a lot of brands are still running competitive conquesting campaigns, uh, not just in Google, but across the entire digital ecosystem, whether it's on social or programmatically. Um, there's a lot of opportunities for that, and it is effective at taking market share from some of your competitors.
SPEAKER_01:Like I said, it was way back in the olden days when uh when I saw that it wasn't super effective. So things have changed a little bit since then.
SPEAKER_00:Cause I think they're changing so fast too.
SPEAKER_01:I think like my data is like maybe a little bit less than 20 years old. So um, it's been a long time. Um, so thank you. So, and thank you for explaining that because I think it's important to note the three types of campaigns that you're running when it comes to to search and and in other places, because there are different ways to break through and to get people again at different stages of the funnel. Speaking of different stages, as a marketing agency myself, there's a lot of pressure to deliver immediate results, which is again why those clicks and impressions and those vanity metrics like make us look like rock stars, even though they don't mean anything. How do you balance that immediate need for results with the right metrics that are sometimes just a little bit longer, right? Especially with some of our sales cycles being three, six, nine months in the B2B industry.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. No, it's a great question. I would say the key is really understanding long-term how marketing works and understanding um the data around how we drive performance, right? And so there needs to be a balance between short-term goals. These are lower funnel campaigns. This is how we target the 1% of people uh within our audience that are ready to buy. What are we doing to capture them right now? These are people that are already in market, they're ready to make a decision, right? And so that maybe represents 40, 50, 60% of your marketing budget. Uh, I'm actually finding brands even spending less now on these lower funnel campaigns because, again, it's such a small portion of your audience. You don't have to use a ton of money to reach them because it's such a small percentage. And then the brands that are actually doing it right are investing a more balanced uh, you know, approach in the sense that they've got a certain percentage going towards upper funnel, they've got a certain percentage going towards their mid-funnel campaigns, but they're not just spraying and praying, right? And I that's a that's a phrase we've used a lot in the marketing world. Um, they're doing it in a very strategic way, like I was talking about earlier, where we're building warm audiences, we're retargeting them, we're reengaging them, we're filling our funnel with these people and we're capturing them and we're moving them through a journey. Uh, I can't tell you how many brands we've audited that are running awareness campaigns. I'm like, okay, you're doing something right. You're you've got like awareness, you've got your conversion. But they had no retargeting, or if they did, it wasn't set up properly. So their awareness campaigns, okay, we're generating all this great awareness. People are watching our videos, but they had no way to actually re-engage those same people. So I said, you're spending all this money. Yes, you're driving clicks to your website. Yes, you're driving all these great, you know, impressions and video views, but you have no way of actually parsing out the audience of people that are engaging. So in other words, they're spending money and they're just throwing it into the void. They had absolutely no way of re-engaging these audiences. So people think of retargeting and they think of, okay, somebody came to my website and now we dropped a cookie on their browser, and now we can show them ads, you know, wherever they go on the web. And that's true. That's one form of retargeting. But there's many others. There's uh ad engagers. So within social platforms, you can retarget people that are engaging with your content, therefore pre-qualifying themselves and raising their hand as saying, hey, I'm interested in what you're doing or saying or have to offer. And then there's other ways that we can retarget using first-party data. So that could be data from your CRM system, which is email addresses. Like let's say you have an email list of 10,000 people. We can build audiences using that exact list to target those individual people one-to-one through not just email, obviously, but other platforms like social media and programmatically, but then also building look-alike audiences from that data. And those audiences are very effective because that's now the algorithms are actually going out, finding the people that are on your existing customer list, your first party data list. And now we're building audiences that look like them. And so we use that as an awareness and prospecting tool, but we use it against an audience that's highly, highly targeted. So very effective way ultimately of how you structure your campaigns. And I would say that's the most important is the strategy and the structure. And if you're missing that, I would say don't run any paid until you have those things in place first.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh, I totally agree. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with waiting until you're ready. Right. Making sure that you have all of this set up can save you thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. Like it's just, there's so much to say for that. Um, I've got a couple of clients that I stopped agreeing to run any Google ad campaigns for them because they didn't have anybody picking up the phone. I was like, well, let's hire a phone answering service that can at least make people feel like they're they're heard and connected. And they refuse to do that. And I'm like, okay, fine, then I'm not running campaigns anymore because people are calling. And all I would get was a bunch of hangups because they kept going to um a random press one for sales, press two for and I was like, nobody wants that. Like, if I'm gonna drive you and we're gonna pay for this customer, like you need to have this infrastructure set up. And so waiting until you're ready, I think is just a huge, awesome piece of advice. So thank you for sharing that. So I appreciate all your time. I got a lot out of this. I hope everybody else watching or listening did too. Um, before I let you go though, I have to ask the question that I ask all of my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Marketing is anything but a perfect science. What's been your biggest marketing lesson learned along the way?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so great question. I would say, you know, my biggest lesson has been that simplicity scales. So the most successful campaigns aren't the ones with the most tactics, they're the ones with the clearest focus. Uh, and so, like, you know, early in my career, I thought adding more channels, more audiences ultimately would drive growth. But the real, the real breakthrough comes from clarity, knowing your audience, refining uh what your offer is, measuring what matters. And so when you strip away just a lot of the noise and focus on the KPIs that actually, you know, move revenue, move the needle, everything else gets easier. Your creative improves, your reporting gets sharper, and your results they'll compound over time. So keep it simple, get the strategy right, and then you can scale it from there.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I love that. I love that. Definitely, strategy, right, is so important to everything that we do in marketing. And I think it's a step a lot of people skip, unfortunately. I know that I've seen a lot of my clients skip that step. Um, and I've tried to like or rain them back, right? Um, a lot of time it's the shiny object. Um, progress over perfection, though, right? It's never going to be um perfect, but you can scale when it works and you can make adjustments as you go and identify what's working and not working. So I think that that's that that's hugely important. So thank you again, Anthony, so much for joining me today. Thank you for all the information that you shared. I am a huge fan of making people aware that vanity metrics are not what they should be looking at because I think way too many people are priding themselves on fantastic vanity metrics that don't mean anything. And I'm so disappointed, but yet encouraged by the fact that there's an agency out there paying for bot traffic just so that they could show, you know, good results. I mean, it's just so it's so disheartening that that exists out there. But again, as we bring more light and shine more light onto these vanity metrics and that they should not be used and you need to be looking at other things or they should only be used when certain things are your goals, right? And so there is a time and a place for them, but it is not 99.9% of what you're looking for. So thank you again so much for tuning in. If you would like to get in touch with Anthony or learn more about his company, we have those links in the show notes. Um, so be sure to check that out below the video. Uh, and uh look forward to seeing you on another episode of Imperfect Marketing. Have a great rest of your day.
