How to Stay Ahead in the Marketing Game

Rob at “Software by Rob” wrote recently that your traffic sources have a half-life.

In other words, your much coveted traffic sources often come in rapid spikes that go as quickly as they come, just as the decaying of natural radioactive elements that give rise to the term “half-life.” That’s a very accurate comparison, as Rob demonstrated the fleeting nature of these traffic sources through an in-depth study of his own website’s traffic sources.

Here is the lesson for every expansion stage marketing manager: all temporary boosts in traffic will go away eventually, whether the source stemmed from a TechCrunch mention, a reference in the Wall Street Journal’s technology section, or a feature article on Inc.com.

The same holds true in my experience with analyzing a prospect’s marketing performance as part of our due diligence, or with assisting portfolio company managers in identifying marketing channels and attractive traffic sources.

However, this is often forgotten in most online marketing channels reviews processes.

Many times, an inexperienced manager will become enamored with past viral successes and try in vain to replicate those instances. In other cases, a marketing team will focus solely on their competitor’s marketing sources and try to replicate their outstanding performance. That’s often done without realizing that their success was achieved by a more comprehensive marketing strategy, of which the traffic boosts were just the superficial outcomes.

Indeed, we encourage our companies to implement a regular process for reviewing and re-prioritizing their marketing channels. Furthermore, they have to be constantly on the market for new marketing channels and marketing opportunities. In order to evaluate new marketing channels or mediums, they will need to experiment with them in rapid iterations so they can arrive at a conclusion quickly.

For predominantly online software companies, the marketing mix should be reviewed and adjusted very regularly. For example, keyword groups — which are effectively traffic sources for search engine marketing — should be adjusted on a weekly basis. Paid advertising can be reviewed monthly (or more often if possible). And in the new, wonderful world of influence marketing, companies should always be looking for new market influencers, re-examining its list and regularly engaging with them.

Rob also sensibly points out that the key to sustainable success is to turn short term, high volume traffic into stable, long term sources. Here’s a quick rundown of his classification of those traffic sources relative to the length of their metaphorical half-life:

• Zero Half-life: Any form of traditional advertising

• Short Half-life: StumbleUpon, Hacker News, Twitter, Digg, direct mailings, and referral links

• Long Half-life: SEO, email subscribers, RSS subscribers, and Facebook Fans (in some cases)

Interestingly, based on that information, I would argue that marketers should not rely on short term spikes for business growth. Rather, they should view them as input into building and expanding the perception of the “brand.” Having your brand in consumers’ consciousness is almost as good as acquiring their names for your email list. Of course, it’s still better if you can eventually convert these brand conscious prospects into subscribed readers. But at least ephemeral traffic can lead to something more substantial in the long run.

It seems like, then, a marketer’s life is a constant uphill battle against diminishing returns and fleeting attention. However, there are a lot of resources out there to help aspiring online marketers through the continuing process of research and experimentation of all types of marketing channels.

If you need a jumping off point for your research, check out Conversion Rate Experts, and marketing analytics luminaries like Avinash Kaushik (who wrote Web Analytics 2.0), David Cancel at Performable, and Hiten Shah at KISSMetrics. Each of those resources constantly shares great ideas, insights, and practical advice on this process.

At OpenView, we try to apply the same web traffic half-life paradigm to our work and to our own resource site, OpenView Labs. We perform a weekly review of our key marketing statistics, which informs adjustments in our ongoing content marketing, influence marketing, and brand building activities.

We still have a lot to learn and would love to hear about your own experience in managing, experimenting, and adjusting your marketing mix. How do you handle the inevitable spikes and declines of half-life web traffic?