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.