vanity metrics are, in 📝Eric Ries's account, metrics such as website "hits" that he sets against actionable metrics, writing that his favorite example has "no built-in measure of causality."
In a December 23, 2009 post on his blog titled "Why vanity metrics are dangerous," Ries wrote that he had earlier "defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics." He calls "hits" his "personal favorite" vanity metric and lists its faults: it counts a technical process rather than a number of human beings, it is a gross number rather than a per-customer one, and most people do not understand what counts as a hit.
Ries argues that when a company relies on vanity metrics, people credit rising numbers to whatever they were working on and blame someone else when the numbers fall, which over time allows each person "to live in their own private reality." He writes that charts annotated with "key events" can at best show "correlation, not causation," and that vanity metrics "can be easily used for gross distortions." Actionable metrics, he writes, "don't guarantee you'll make good decisions," but they put "facts in the room at the time."
Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of 📝The Lean Startup. The methodology page on theleanstartup.com places measurement inside the build-measure-learn feedback loop, which starts with a 📝minimum viable product (MVP), and states that this measurement and learning must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect.