by Brian Halligan, Founder and CEO, HubSpot

Historically, professional baseball has been concerned with stats like RBIs, batting average, on-base percentage and the like. But for over a century only one team, the Oakland A’s, considered that maybe those stats failed as KPIs for predicting the success of any individual player.  These things were vanity metrics, and the performance stats predictive of player success were undervalued in the marketplace. Identifying the metrics that nobody else was looking at, but were more closely correlated with likelihood to win a championship, gave lower-budget teams like the A’s back their competitive advantage against richer teams like the New York Yankees.

Fast forward to 2008 when I launched my software company HubSpot with Dharmesh Shah, and I found the same trend occurring in marketing. Marketers and business owners found themselves unable to tango with the massive marketing budgets of competitors in their space.

But that’s because most marketers have been competing on the wrong metrics.

  Conventional wisdom tells us what numbers we should be looking at and trying to improve. (Actually conventional wisdom told us half our marketing budget was wasted and we didn’t know which half. So we’re already doing better by attempting to make data-based decisions.) But some of the numbers lacked context and misled marketers to correlate those numbers with likelihood of success. 

Let’s take impressions for example. It’s a digital metric that helps us put some number around a loose concept like branding – something marketers with big budgets have the luxury of obsessing over. Marketers with small budgets shouldn’t be competing on this metric, dumping budget into ad campaigns to compete with brands with unlimited resources. If you’re trying to capture attention, focus on another metric like site traffic or page views on owned media, like your business blog. It’s not only cheaper and levels out the playing field, it sends traffic to owned media that converts traffic into leads more efficiently than you could with paid media.

One of the first trends I encountered when I launched HubSpot that flew in the face of conventional wisdom was the impact of earned PR on non-traditional channels, versus forced PR that aligned more closely with our space. After plotting leads relative to traffic against two marketing events – landing on the front page of Reddit, and a press release announcing our GroupSharp acquisition – it was clear the Reddit feature yielded a bigger bang for our buck than our traditional press release. The lesson? We didn’t have to pay for PR, and letting go of that engrained notion would actually drive better business results.

Inbound marketers tend to be more aware of false proxy metrics than less data-oriented marketers, but we all need to by hyper-aware of this now more than ever in the age of Big Data. With the technology available to collect and harness countless points of lead and customer data, we have to sift through the clutter and identify the numbers that are truly indicative of success for our own businesses, even when they fly in the face of conventional wisdom (or so-called  best practices). Remaining close to our data, breaking things, and challenging what we think we know about our data allows businesses to remain competitive by focusing on the right things, and not being distracted by the herd.