Vanity metrics are frustrating because they don’t treat SEO like a profit-and-loss function, where each page has to earn its keep. Recently, I was working on an enterprise e-commerce site with billions of URLs.
I wanted to answer three questions:
- Can Google crawl all of these pages?
- How much revenue are they generating?
- How much are they costing the business?
Some answers were easy, like product pages tied to transactions.
But others, like long-tail content, category pages, and middle-of-funnel articles, were harder to measure.
That’s when the frustration hit me.
