Vibe Check Part 2: Feel Something, Measure Everything

You might not associate vibe marketing with metrics. After all, vibe marketing is all about feeling, right? Not exactly. In fact, measurement takes on added importance when you’re using vibe marketing.

In other words, even feels need follow-through. Let’s get into how to measure what matters:

• Measuring the results of your vibe marketing—but skip the vanity metrics
• Tracking emotional connection, engagement depth, and downstream impact
• Using Amplitude to turn fuzzy vibes into clear business signals

The promise and pitfalls of vibe marketing

As I explained in part 1 of this series, the term “vibe marketing” is a riff on vibe coding. It describes the practice of using generative AI to ideate campaigns, create content, summarize customer research, and automate outreach with just a couple of prompts.

It’s an approach that comes with tremendous promise (who doesn’t want to get more done, faster?), along with a caveat: vibe marketing is a shortcut. Because you're bypassing the labor-intensive hands-on side of cultivating connection with your customers, you also risk losing the nuance and accuracy that often comes from that work. That’s why it’s so critical to build in vibe checks to make sure your work is resonating.

But taking full measure of those results is not as straightforward as it might sound. The challenge is that traditional marketing metrics often miss what matters. Click-through rates and impressions won’t tell you if your brand made someone feel seen—or if that feeling led them to share, return, or buy.

That’s where behavioral analytics comes in. With tools like Amplitude, you can translate vibes into hard data. You can understand how deeply people engage, how brand affinity affects retention, and which moments in the journey matter most.

How to tell your marketing is vibing with customers

Vibe marketing is not only designed to resonate but also to drive action. To understand whether your brand’s vibe is working, you need to track signals that reflect a behavioral response across four key areas.

Content engagement

Are users spending time with what you create? Do they come back for more? Depth of engagement and repeat interactions tell you if your messaging and creative work are clicking with customers. Here’s what to measure:

• Time spent with key content
• Scroll depth and completion rate
• Shares, saves, and return visits

Community signals

Are users participating, posting, or sharing in your vibe-branded spaces? Community activity is often one of the clearest signs of brand alignment and emotional investment. Here’s what to measure:

• Participation in vibe-brand communities
• User-generated content
• Mentions and referrals

Brand affinity

After running a vibe campaign, are more people searching for your brand, talking about it organically, or referencing it in user-generated content? Affinity is the outcome of consistent emotional relevance. Here’s what to measure:

• Branded search growth
• Direct traffic
• Qualitative sentiment reflected in surveys and feedback

Conversion, retention, and LTV

Are users converting faster and staying longer? The ultimate test of vibe marketing is whether it improves downstream metrics like retention and long-term value (LTV). Here’s what to measure:

• Cohorts that engage more and convert better
• Lifetime value of most engaged users

Do it in Amplitude

Amplitude’s digital analytics platform gives you the tools to track, segment, and compare the behaviors that reflect their vibes—so you can quickly recalibrate your offerings and drive results. Below is just one example of how you can use it to measure vibe marketing.

Step 1: Instrument Custom Tracking

Start by setting up the right events and channels to capture the signals that represent your customers’ interactions with vibed content, as well as their emotions in the touchpoints that define your brand.

Example events might include:

• Content_Viewed: when a user watches or reads branded content, which you can then split by a property of being vibe content or not
• Community_Posted: when a user contributes to a forum or group, indicating positive engagement
• User_Generated_Content: when a user uploads their own photo, story, or review, also indicating positive engagement

For your vibe-generated ad campaigns, try adding a custom channel to track users who arrive at your site via specific domains or utms.

Use Amplitude’s event taxonomy best practices to name and organize your events clearly. This ensures you can later build funnels and cohorts without guessing what each event represents.

Step 2: Build Behavioral Cohorts

Once events are established, try building cohorts in Amplitude to group users based on shared behaviors or traits. This is where you bring your “vibe audiences” to life. Try building cohorts such as:

• Users who viewed at least three pieces of vibe-marketing content in the last seven days
• Users who participated in your community more than once
• Users who gave positive feedback

Amplitude cohorts sync regularly as new data streams in, so you’re always working with the most up-to-date audiences—perfect for personalization, retargeting, or even syncing to your ad platforms.

Step 3: Analyze Funnels

Now, see how your vibe marketing converts. Create a funnel chart in Amplitude to see how those users move through your funnels, looking at such paths as:

• Vibed content → Community → Conversion
• First visit from vibe channel → Emotional engagement → Retention

You’ll be able to see where users drop off, compare conversion rates between cohorts (e.g., vibe-engaged vs. not engaged), and uncover which moments drive the strongest downstream impact.

Step 4: Monitor Trends

Once you’ve nailed your funnels, it’s time to zoom out and look at the long-term impact of your vibe marketing. That’s where Segmentation and Dashboards in Amplitude come in.

Segmentation lets you slice your data by almost anything: behavior, cohort membership, acquisition channel, campaign, or even emotion-based events like “reacted with ❤️.” This helps you understand not just what happened, but who it happened to and why.

For example:

• Compare users who engage with vibed community posts vs. those who don’t to see which group converts faster.
• Break down vibe-campaign performance by sentiment—does “inspired” content drive more repeat visits than “funny” content?
• Analyze engagement by geography or demographic to see where your vibe is strongest.

Each segmentation view gives you a live, behavioral pulse on your audience—no waiting for weekly reports or static dashboards.

Then, once you’ve found the metrics that truly capture your vibe performance, Dashboards become your home base.

Use dashboards to:

• Track your key vibe metrics over time (content views, community participation, UGC creation, sentiment score).
• Combine multiple charts—funnels, retention curves, engagement breakdowns—into one cohesive view.
• Spot early shifts in audience behavior or campaign momentum, so you can react before the trend passes.
• Share insights easily across marketing, product, and design teams so everyone’s tuned into the same signal.

Dashboards make your vibe strategy measurable and transparent. Instead of relying on gut feelings (“people seem to love this campaign”), you have a living, breathing view of what’s resonating—and where the energy’s fading. Check out our dashboard template library for an idea of how to get started.

Catching the Amplitude vibe

Amplitude gives marketers the ability to connect the efforts of their vibe marketing to outcomes. It’s not just about seeing what users click on—it’s about understanding how emotion and experience shape behavior across the full customer journey.

Vibe marketing should help you drive business, not hinder it. Amplitude helps you connect the emotional to the analytical, so you can focus on what moves the needle.

And in a world where AI accelerates everything, knowing where to focus can be your unfair advantage.

Join us in the next installment to learn about some of the common pitfalls with vibe marketing and how to avoid them.