The Traffic Trend Of Content Marketing VS Advertising Campaigns

There are different up-and-down trends that you’ll see in your website’s traffic. This is dependant upon the type of marketing that you implement.

Advertising Campaign Trends

When you start an ad campaign (either through a website, Facebook, or Google Adwords), it’s like you’ve turned on a switch, and traffic immediately starts coming to your website. This is illustrated below on this traffic graph.

As you can see, traffic is relatively steady once the advertising starts. It fluctuates minorly, but no major changes occur once the traffic has started.

The obvious disadvantage of an advertising campaign is that once you stop paying for advertising, the traffic switch is turned off.

Adversely, when you run a content marketing campaign, the traffic you “earn” stays with your site, even when you stop producing content. This obvious advantage has vast implications; your site all of a sudden has a tangible value with real equity, because organic search-engine traffic can equal dollars.

Content Marketing Campaign Trends

When you start putting content up on your website, you’ll find an up and down trend starts to occur. This is less stable than the type of trend you see in an advertising campaign, which typically sends you steady traffic (illustrated above).

Below you can see a graph of about 6 months of traffic data.

You can see where the content marketing started, where the graph jumps up. From there, you can see that traffic wildly jumps up and down depending on the month and day. But if you compare the first bout of traffic (around 1,000 page views per day), to where the traffic was near the end of the graph (around 3,000 page views) you know that there’s been huge increases.

That’s why it’s so important to take the average traffic over a month, or 3 months, to really know if you are seeing increases.

Being Patient – Play The Long Game

If you’re looking at your traffic stats every day, you’re doing it wrong. As you can see from the graph above, traffic gained organically tends to go up and down, but the averages are slowly raised (and they go up faster if you output more content).

You may even find that some months have overall lower traffic. As long as that trend doesn’t continue for 3+ months, it’s nothing to be concerned about. Content marketing is the long game – with big rewards. Even after you stop writing, traffic continues pouring in.

Let’s see a Google Ad pull off that trick!