Most dev marketers chase vanity metrics. Learn why your data’s flawed, what to track instead, and how to drive real product engagement.
Let me start off with this:
Impressions are the worst vanity metric you can think of.
Someone scrolling past your social media post without properly noticing it still counts as an impression. That’s the metric we’re chasing? Not cool in my book.
If you want to do developer marketing properly, stop chasing big numbers and start asking harder questions:
Every blog post, every landing page needs a goal. Not a fluffy goal like “raise awareness.” A real one. For example, you have a blog post that is mentioning your product, here’s what I’d like readers to do:
Don’t expect direct conversions and signups from content if the buying process involves more people. And please don’t push sales targets on the marketing department.
Growth managers and founders often get obsessed with “conversions from content.”
That’s not how this works.
Nobody from a bigger team reads a single blog post and converts on the spot. That’s not real. A developer might read it on their phone, drop it into Slack, someone else opens it at the office, they talk about it a week later, maybe come back to it from a different article.
There are multiple people involved, and multiple steps. So if your metric is “did we get a sign-up from this article today,” you’re setting yourself up to failure.
What you should be measuring is engagement over time, where people drop off, and how many of them get from A to B to C, whatever your funnel looks like.
Here’s something most marketers don’t even realize:
Developers block ads. And if they’re blocking ads, they’re also blocking your analytics.
I’ve done the research. At minimum, 30% of your audience is invisible to tools like Google Analytics. Realistically? It’s closer to 70% in case they need to accept cookies.
So if you’re only looking at GA numbers, you’re missing a huge part of the picture. Use better tools, the ones that are GDPR-compliant and actually give you raw numbers you can trust. Plausible is my favourite if I have to name one.
For example, for one of my clients, I placed specific CTAs that link to product pages depending on the tech mentioned. I track exactly how many people click through. Not just “time on page” or “bounce rate” but actual behavior that leads somewhere.
In that case, clicks from the blog outperform paid ads. With zero extra cost.
At the end of the day, if you're doing developer marketing, you have to think like a founder.
That means:
It’s not about traffic. It’s about whether the right people are moving through your site in the right way and whether your product makes sense to them once they get there.
If it doesn’t, no metric in the world is going to save you.
Let’s discuss how we can turn your technical expertise into clear and engaging content. Book a call and start leveling up today.
