Advertisers
The below image shows the data for an advertising campaign for our own website. We can see from the data just how many users arrived on the website each month.
Advertising traffic is steady month-to-month.
As the graph demonstrates, there’s not a huge increase in the saudi arabia number number of visitors for the months shown. Some people might even call it “flat.”
This traffic is “rented.” If we want to keep generating traffic, we have to keep continually paying for it.
So advertising marketers will analyze the revenue earned, or the number of leads they obtained over these months and directly compare them to the cost of the campaign.
Content Marketers
Here’s the data for a blog post I created in 2014 called 5 Chinese Search Engines You Need to Know About.
The blog posts traffic over three months was not great.
For argument’s sake, let’s say the post cost 400 USD to create.
In a quarterly review, a CEO or a boss might look at this report, see the total number of page views (160 in this case), and decide that 400 USD for such a small amount of exposure is not a worthwhile investment. Upon seeing figures like these, companies may stop doing content marketing altogether.
It shouldn’t, or it doesn’t have to be this way.
The First Effect: Evergreen
Now, by changing the date range and “zooming out,” we can see the bigger picture and get a better sense of how this specific post has performed over time.
Strong blog traffic over 1.5 years.After its initial publication in 2014, the overall number of views initially dipped before increasing exponentially. Towards the end of the year-long period under review, the number starts tapering off.
However, zooming out even further, we see a different story.
Traffic trends for one blog post over eight years.
Analyzing a much larger time frame (from July 2014 to August 2022), we can see the traffic increasing steadily before peaking in mid-2017 and 2018. After receiving close to 3,000 views in the latter half of 2018, there’s a gradual decrease in traffic from then onwards.
This data is for an eight-year period, and despite the traffic dying off a bit in recent years, the article still amassed a total of 78,039 page views during this time.
Now, what’s the value, and how can you predict future results?
The content you upload, publish, or post is evergreen. That means it will be online for a significant amount of time.
From my experience publishing content on my website, the average blog post has a shelf life of approximately six years.
After the initial publication, I look at the first three month’s traffic, which gives me an idea of what to expect in terms of traffic and page views over six years. I might expect this three-month traffic to quadruple in the first year, and then multiply that by six to estimate the total future results.
All in all, start thinking of your content as something evergreen—a long-term investment yielding results over time.
The Second Effect: Blow Up
The data below is from one of our own campaigns (not for a client).
Social follower growth was steady at first.The lines show that the social follower growth for Douyin and Shipinhao is growing steadily. Now, it would be reasonable to predict that this increase would continue at the same rate well into the future, and based on these predictions you would decide whether these platforms are worthwhile investments.
However, if we were to extrapolate in this way, we may be missing something i