By 60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year.
The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every source of referral traffic — Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, the AI tools — every one is going to refer out less traffic this year than last year.
Let’s have a serious discussion about it on this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard 👇
Transcript:
This chart does not make me happy.
This data is very concerning. It’s a survey from the good folks at HubSpot of 211 senior marketing leaders and 107 marketing practitioners, done this year. So 318 total people, sixty percent of whom said that their top website priority for the next year is increasing traffic.
Friends, I I don’t know how to make this message more clear to you: Traffic opportunity is dropping dramatically. It has been dropping the last four years.
Traffic is a vanity metric.
Growing it is unlikely to help your business compared to many other marketing things you could do. If your boss, your team, your client is telling you that you need to drive more traffic to the website, you need to have the hard conversation with them about why that is both much more challenging than it’s ever been in the past and much less likely to produce the kinds of bottom line results that you want.
You cannot be measuring the success of your job based on overall traffic growth. Lead generation, conversion rates, those are fine. Search engine result rankings for a variety of zero click reasons probably much less useful.
Landing and product page views are not a terrible metric, weirdly. Weirdly, this is a fine metric in my opinion because I believe that all the brand things that you’re gonna do at the top of the marketing funnel, right, be in the places where your audience pays attention even if you’re not driving the click back to your website, that should drive the right people back to your landing and product pages. Let’s let’s just walk through a little example together. So imagine that you’re in the real estate industry.
Right? And and so you’re trying to attract home buyers to your website, and then they’re gonna use your software or your products or whatever to to, buy their house. So steps to take when buying houses, frequent search done here. And look, you know, this is just this is not this is gonna answer the user’s search query very comprehensively, and then it’s going to take you to YouTube where you can watch a clever video, right, about this, and it is not going to send traffic to your website, whether your NerdWallet or Investopedia or Business Insider.
And if you’re a private company, those publishers, right, are taking the traffic and so is Reddit, right, which is a very popular place. In fact, I looked for people who search for first time home home buyer in SparkToro and you can see you can see what’s going on. First off, diminishing search demand over time.
And second, these people are in, platforms like like Reddit where millions of people are going and consuming content on the platform.
They are not gonna go to your website, driving traffic to your site versus being a helpful, useful resource in these places. Right? Contributing to these subreddits, potentially starting your own, getting into those YouTube channels, right, getting mentioned by those folks, advertising in those places. Like, those are gonna bring you the brand attention that you used to get from just publishing on your site and getting the traffic to your own domain. And it it worries me a lot to see traffic growth and increasing traffic as as the metrics and the goals.
That was a reasonable thing to do ten years ago, maybe even five years ago. But this is 2025, friends. We are living in a zero click universe.
The the only way to succeed is is to reject these. You you need to have these conversations.
I I can’t do it for you. What I what I can do is give you the tools and the data and the resources to arm you for that conversation, but but you’re gonna have to you gotta bring it to your boss, man.
It’s it’s gonna be look. I recognize that this is this is a challenging time to be going through. There’s a lot of pressure on marketers to perform. There’s people claiming that AI is gonna take your job.
AI is gonna take your opportunity to get search traffic. It it it has done that the last five years. It’s gonna keep doing it. The way to keep your job is to make these metrics make sense for what the business really wants to accomplish, which is almost certainly more customers, more sales, more revenue, not more traffic.