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them successful? I wouldn’t.

The number of pageviews is a typical vanity metric

for almost all SaaS applications and many other web

startups. What’s a vanity metric? As Brad Smith nicely

put it: “Vanity metrics are things people love to quote

and obsess over, even though they’re almost entirely

useless to your business.”

Vanity metrics make the naive among us feel good,

but at the same time they push the whole business into

an endless depression of idleness. Vanity metrics are

absolutely unactionable and therefore useless. They’re a

waste of time that can destroy your startup.

To give you a couple more examples: time on site is a

vanity metric, so is the average number of pageviews

per user, or the percentage of new visitors.

Some vanity metrics are more tricky. In UXPin the

“number of projects with comments” was one of them.

It seems to be a reasonable behavioural metric that

was supposed to let us check the engagement of users

92 growTh and design hacking