What are some KPIs that you find over-hyped and/or unimportant?

• Not necessarily over-hyped, but I think it is important to find the balance between being too focused on top-of-funnel (Traffic, leads, MQLs) and having targets that are out of your control to drive (closed / won, revenue). If your marketing team is ONLY KPI'ed on MQLs and nothing else, you may be incentivized to drive a ton of volume at the detriment to quality. Then your sales team might come back and say that the 'leads' you are sending aren't good quality. If you don't have other metrics further down funnel (I recommend tracking SALs - sales accepted leads, and SQLs - meetings booked or opportunities created), then it becomes hard to identify where you need to optimize and lean in.
• I also see a lot of fuzziness around the word 'leads'. In my world today, lead means a net new name to the database. But, I will often hear BDRs talk about leads in terms of the people they are working (so an MQL or SQL), and AEs might talk about leads in terms of the deals they are working (an SQL or SQO). It's really important to make sure you have clear definitions for the KPIs that you are driving and that you are working over time to build a shared language in your organization. 

A lot of the digital, social metrics tend to be overhyped, especially impressions, page views, followers, etc.

What helps to sift through these is do a deeper analyses of these, e.g. who are the followers? Are they prospects/customers or mostly job seekers?

What is driving the page views? Source of the inbound traffic? Profile of visitors?

If you have to track the above metrics, it helps to double click and get a reality check to understand how much of it is relevant to your business. Otherwise, these can be just vanity metrics.

Similar to the question about worst KPIs, I believe vanity metrics and volume KPIs are often too easy to manipulate and can be used to tell a misleading story.

Metrics like email open rates and click-through rates can be artificially inflated by bots. Lead counts and sign-ups can also be influenced by acquisition campaigns that don’t necessarily bring in high-quality prospects. Likewise, a low cost-per-lead (CPL) is often over-hyped; in the end, what matters is quality, bottom-of-funnel conversion. Constantly feeding the top of the funnel with low-quality leads won’t actually move the needle.

The KPI that I believe is important but not solely by itself is `lead counts` (e.g., sign-ups or MQLs). I’ve seen over and over again how focusing only on counts without understanding quality just backfires. While this KPI can show significant improvements, the question to ask is, what is the downstream impact?

This may be an unpopular opinion, but looking at this KPI without additional quality metrics is marketing of the past. I recommend stitching together the full customer journey to understand the impact. For example, if a user signs up but never uses your product, is this a meaningful result?