Removed Three Vanity Metrics From a Client Dashboard, Nobody Missed Them

The dashboard had seventeen tiles. I asked the marketing director to walk me through what decision each one informed. For fourteen of them, she had a clear answer — budget reallocation, campaign pause/continue, channel mix. For three, she paused and eventually said some version of "it's just good to know."

Those three were total impressions, total social followers, and a page-views-per-session average nobody had ever acted on in either direction. I removed them and waited to see if anyone noticed.

If nobody can tell you what decision a metric drives, it's not a KPI, it's wallpaper — and wallpaper has a maintenance cost.

What happened after removal

Nothing. No one asked where the metrics went across the following two reporting cycles. That silence is the actual finding here — not that the metrics were wrong, but that they'd never been load-bearing in the first place, and the dashboard had just been accumulating them the way any shared document accumulates things nobody wants to be the one to delete.

• Impressions had no corresponding spend-allocation decision tied to it — it moved, nobody acted on the movement.
• Follower count was tracked but never once referenced in a planning meeting over the prior two quarters.
• Pages-per-session had no target, no benchmark, and no owner who could say whether a given number was good or bad.

The fourteen remaining tiles got slightly more attention from the team afterward, which I think is the real payoff — a dashboard with three fewer tiles that don't matter makes the ones that do matter easier to actually look at. Cutting metrics feels risky because removing something visible always does, but the actual risk was invisible: a dashboard too cluttered for anyone to use it the way it was intended.