By It’s weird times in the digital marketing universe.
For decades, traffic and sales went together like peanut butter and jelly, cacio and pepe, palak and paneer. But, in the last few years, we’ve seen a deeply strange trend where the two have become unbound. In example after example, traffic can fall while revenue rises.
Why is this happening? And is this a phenomenon we should be leaning into rather than fearing? This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard has the answers:
Transcript:
Howdy, SparkToro fans. Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboard. This week, a very important topic: Traffic down, revenue up.
Traffic down, revenue up…? That doesn’t make sense, at least not in the last quarter century of the Internet’s history. Whenever traffic falls, customers go away. Revenue falls.
Except now we’re seeing something different. This is a trend that has only just emerged in the last three or four years where lots of people in digital marketing, like Brendan here, have started talking about, gosh, traffic is down 20%. Yeah. But revenue’s up 40%.
Yeah. But I want you to fix our traffic. Why? Wait a minute. Are we doing something that doesn’t make sense for our business? Brendan isn’t the only one, by the way. Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive gave a great presentation at Brighton SEO all about this. Wrote a stellar blog post about it: the divergence between traffic and revenue.
Red line goes down. Blue line goes up. How is this happening?
And here’s my favorite recent example. This is from Tim Soulo from Ahrefs who, is talking about a a trend that’s been going on in the search search marketing world, which specifically refers to HubSpot’s blog traffic. So take a look at HubSpot’s blog traffic. I’m blowing it up real big here.
You can see the chart of, gosh, that is millions of monthly visits lost because all their Google search traffic rankings have fallen. A lot of that’s going to Canva and Microsoft and Adobe and AI tools and Indeed and all these other places instead of going to HubSpot site.
So guess what?
HubSpot’s revenue is doing fantastic. It’s growing great. In fact, this chart of revenue growth is almost the inverse of this chart of their blog traffic.
It’s kind of unnervingly so. And you can see that their their Q4 guidance has now been revised up and the the stock’s gone even higher. So what’s going on here? Well, I have this graphic that I made a couple of years ago, and it talks about, where and how buyers are influenced to buy. Right? What what do we choose to buy? What, how do we make that those buyer decisions?
And in this case, right, in in the case of someone who’s considering a product, you discover a problem that you might have. Right? This if you’re a consumer, it’s a consumer problem. If it’s a B2B thing, it might be a b to b problem, like missing a CRM tool, like what HubSpot provides, with their software.
And so, you know, if you’re trying to figure out why is it that traffic can go down and revenue can go up, I believe the answer lies right here.
It lies right here in these three steps, in the problem discovery, brand awareness, and further education sections of where influence happens because what is happening and you can see this, very, very well, very nicely in the sources of influence that, are reaching people who search for best CRM. Right? This is the audience who searches for this particular keyword or we could look at the audience who visits HubSpot’s website. And you can see that what’s happening look here in the social networks… and I’m gonna see that, yeah, there’s more and more attention and awareness going to places like, you know, LinkedIn and GitHub and WhatsApp and Medium. Oh, yeah. These don’t send direct traffic. Right?
That not what’s gonna happen. Same thing in when we look at search and AI tools. ChatGPT is getting used way more. OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity. Bing and Google, not much more than normal.
And so places that could send traffic to HubSpot in this model are less likely to be in the buyer journey and places that no longer like to refer traffic like LinkedIn, like a Reddit, like a ChatGPT, like a Perplexity.
They don’t send direct visits. What they do is influence people to buy, to to choose a brand. And then the people who really wanna buy are gonna go directly to HubSpot. So when you look at HubSpot’s numbers and you see that, you know, stock prices rising, sales are up, revenue is up, number of buyers is up, That doesn’t have to correlate with traffic anymore because we are no longer in the world where you need to get traffic in order to have influence on your audience and your customers.
We live in a zero click Internet world. The platforms are trying to keep you on the platform. Brendan’s post here on LinkedIn did quite well because it contains no link. And you can try this for yourself.
You can see it in our data. We basically get get 10x the reach with posts that contain no link versus ones that do contain a URL. This is true on Threads. It’s true on Twitter. It’s true on LinkedIn. It’s true on Reddit. YouTube obviously sends very little outgoing traffic. ChatGPT obviously sends very little outgoing traffic.
Google is answering more and more searches right in the browser. So look, if I search for best CRM tool oh my gosh.
There it is. Right? If that doesn’t put the hammer on the nail, I don’t know what does. The best CRM tool depends on your specific needs, but some top contenders include HubSpot.
See? Why why send traffic? Why worry about traffic when you could keep it for yourself, which is what all these platforms are doing? And maybe maybe we as marketers need to start thinking like Wil is thinking in terms of traffic down, revenue up.