Traffic Source Teardown

It’s easy to spread yourself thin trying to optimize for every traffic source. You hear that you absolutely have to start publishing on LinkedIn, that Twitter is blowing it up for your market, or that a community forum like GrowthHackers brings in crazy viral traffic. These things might be true—but you can’t blindly chase down trends just because they work for someone else. More often than not, hunting them down will spread you thin, with only mediocre gains to show for it. Instead, ask yourself: “What are we doing today that’s already working? Can we start there?” It goes back to the simple rule of marketing: figure out what works, and do more of it. Different companies have different makeups of traffic that are highly specific to the stage of growth they’re in. A software blog that receives under 150k visits in a year operates under a completely different set of parameters than one that receives millions. At each stage, you see different results—but patterns begin to emerge. Let’s walk through them. Caveats on traffic sources:

  • Direct traffic is basically unattributable. It could be from social networks, email links, mobile devices or any number of other sources. Direct traffic lessens with more visits, probably because blogs with more visits start to use more sophisticated tools to measure traffic.
  • Social traffic looks low and is difficult to pin down because it often gets labeled as direct traffic. A lot of mobile phone apps, for example, don’t track the referral website.
  • Referral traffic isn’t nearly as big as it used to be. This is in part due to changes in Google’s search algorithm, as well as an increasing number of people who actively block tracking.

I did a breakdown of 15 different blogs, from software to community to personal, and sorted them into buckets based on traffic volume.

**1. Traffic sources for blogs with less than 150k visits in 2015**

  • In the early days of your blog, think about SEO, but focus on producing high-quality content. Organic search was only a massive source of traffic for the software blog. There’s a tension between search and quality, and when people focus on SEO early on, quality tends to drop.
  • A high percentage of direct traffic at this stage is a signal of quality. Though direct traffic could mean a number of different things, a high percentage this early signals that you’re doing a good job of spreading brand awareness. Visitors care enough about your content to bookmark your site and go directly to it.
  • This bucket of traffic has the highest percentage of social traffic compared to blogs with higher volume—somewhat oddly, at 19% across the board. Prior to content getting indexed by a search engine, social is a key channel for distribution—and also builds links for SEO. Social is key for distribution because it means that you’re leveraging networks, just as we did at Kissmetrics with #measure.

2. Traffic sources for blogs with 150k-600k visits in 2015

  • By this stage, organic search is already the largest traffic source for both software blogs. Visitors use organic search to either search for branded keywords, like a company name, or for a solution to a problem. In comparison, the two others A and C both have relatively small SEO traffic, but it’s huge for both software blogs in this bucket.
  • Consumers (and everyone else) love and rely on email. C has a massively high percentage of traffic through email—the largest, proportionally, across the board. It makes sense. Traditional consumer brands were the masters of mail-in advertising campaigns, and they apply the same strategies to email—offering massive discount markdowns in the subject lines.

3. Traffic Sources For Blogs With 1.5m-3m visits in 2015

  • In this bucket, organic search begins to take over as the top traffic source for all of the blogs, across types. The one outlier to this is B, the community blog. This makes perfect sense because the majority of content comes from visitors so there’s no organized keyword or content direction.
  • Once you’ve built brand awareness and ToFu, direct traffic and social tend to diminish proportionally. B is again the outlier, but given that it’s direct and other traffic sources are so high, it’s also possible that they don’t properly sort through their traffic.

4. Traffic Sources for Blogs With 8m-15m Visits in 2015

  • At high volume, organic search dwarfs all other traffic sources. It strengthens ToFu and acquires new visitors like nothing else.
  • As a channel, email needs to be actively nurtured and invested in at large scale. Email is a good channel because it nurtures high-quality, repeat visits—if you can get someone to roll in through search, and then have them return repeatedly, you nudge them further along your funnel.
  • The personal blog gets a high percentage of email traffic. Other companies in this bucket don’t come anywhere close to this. What’s especially interesting here is that it shows you that you can carve out a niche on channels like email and social, if you make it a core part of your strategy.

Blended breakdown of traffic sources

  • Organic search is massive, and the top traffic source for content marketing. At higher levels of traffic, it grows like crazy, and turns into the gift that keeps on giving. This is the biggest lesson to take away from all of the charts above.
  • Direct traffic is the second highest traffic source. This is true for almost every blog regardless of traffic volume.
  • Email isn’t as high in terms of sheer traffic volume generated. It’s important to keep in mind that quality of traffic matters too. Email is king because it nurtures high-quality repeat visitors—the best kind, that can be nudged through your funnel.
  • Social is on the rise. In order to tap into social, however, you need to break it down further and look at how your brand can leverage specific networks.

Organic Search is (still) King

Organic search remains the top source of traffic when it comes to content marketing—blogs are perfectly designed SEO fodder. The more content you have, the more organic search you’ll pull. On a base level, higher quantity just means there’s more stuff that gets indexed by Google. The mistake people make is trying to optimize around SEO too early on. If you start developing content from a perspective of quality in the early stages, it’ll organically build up backlinks and shares and you'll start rising in the search rankings. If you start putting out 3-4 posts a week, the organic search will come. It’s hard to get SEO going, but once you spark the flames, you can coax it into a forest fire. While there are more channels of distribution today than ever before, organic search still blows everything else out of the water. Organic search occurs (for the most part) organically:

  • Research with Google. We’ve already discussed this, but it’s something so basic that people still forget to do it so it’s worth reiterating. Type in the keywords you’re targeting, and let that inform your content strategy. If you search for a list post, for example, and the top result is “25 ways to…”, write one with 35.
  • SEO is still all about backlinks. Not as much as it used to be, but links are still important for juicing organic search. High-quality links are important.
  • Think carefully about keywords. Highly competitive keywords and terms are much harder to rank for in SEO, whereas less-common “long-tail” keywords can get you more bang for your buck.
  • Don’t be shady—hiring a “black-hat” SEO firm that fills your site with spammy backlinks, or stuffing your tags full with keywords is a good way to get penalized by Google and wreck your traffic. People like to get fancy trying to mess with Google’s search algorithm, and it’s typically a waste of time. The algorithm itself is constantly updated and tweaked.

It’s not enough just to have the numbers though—you have to get behind the patterns and behaviors that lead to them. Decipher the intent in the keywords, and get a directional sense of what you’re ranking for. For example, “how-to” articles are some of the most commonly searched for content on the web. People want to figure out how to do things—if you want to cast a wide net and capture warm leads, write some “how-tos” and help them solve their problems.

Email Capture pop-up

If you’ve ever poked through the Quick Sprout blog, you’ve probably noticed a pop-up that asks for your email. No one likes it. It’s annoying and interrupts the experience of the content. There’s one reason why we’ve kept it around: it works. Email accounts for around 16% of Quick Sprout’s total traffic, and that's a loyal audience of engaged, repeat visitors. A lot of times, people shy away from these more aggressive strategies because they’re worried they’ll alienate their visitors. But my co-founder, Neil Patel, sends out an email for each and every blog post that he writes—nothing long, people can ignore it if they want—and it’s effective. Some people will unsubscribe. A few will even get mad and email you back to express their anger. At the end of the day, if you’re providing rich, valuable content to your audience, it’s going to be worth it. Shift the framing, and ask yourself, “Can I try a nicer way to do this? Can I write copy that’s compelling even when it’s interruptive?” It’s something that Brian Balfour does well on his blog, Coelevate:The pop-up acknowledges that it’s inconvenient, but owns it. When the copy is compelling, and the content is quality, people are more open to the actual tactic. Bottom line: it may seem aggressive or annoying, but you'll never know how huge it could be for you if you never try.

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