The search engines are liking FunDraw more and more. I'm on track today to hit a traffic record, both in terms of page views and unique visitors. And, for those of you who want to sound web savvy, never talk about "hits". The two important metrics in measuring the success of a site are page views and unique visitors.
But as traffic has increased by high double-digit percentages every month (just Feb over Jan and March over Feb, so not a "long-term" trend), thinking about how to keep up those increases has made me realize that traffic is like velocity.
In Bonehead Physics (the low-math version for humanities majors needing to fill a science requirement), they drilled into us that as velocity approaches the speed of light, mass approaches infinity. Essentially, the greater your velocity, the more difficult it becomes to increase it.
Now comparing the velocity of an object to the traffic of a web site isn't a 1 to 1 correlation, because I've been thinking about sustaining growth rates, meaning accelerating by percentages (geometrically) instead of accelerating by increments (mathematically).
What do I mean by accelerating by percentages? I mean measuring monthly growth as the percentage increase over the prior month rather than the absolute increase in the two metrics.
First, when things are small, monthly growth as a percentage can be a much more encouraging metric. For example, if in your first month you were averaging 100 visitors a day, and in your second month you were averaging 200 visitors a day, which sounds better?
- We added an average of 100 visitors a day.
- We doubled average daily trafffic. That's a month-over-month growth rate of 100%!!!!
We've all heard the story of the laborer who offers a king a deal. He would work for the king for a month. On the first day of the month, the king only had to pay him a penny. On the second day the king had to double it. On the third he had to double it again. Thus, for the first five days, the laborer's wages would be $0.01, $0.02, $0.04, $0.08, $0.16. The king thought this was an amazing bargain and agreed. But there was a problem, the king was to find out. In the early days, the doubling didn't mean much, but this is called "exponential growth". On the 31st day, the laborer's pay was over $10.6 million for the day, and his total earnings for the month were over $21 million.
That's why 100% month over month growth sounds a lot better than 100 users a day growth. If you could keep up 100% month-over-month growth, in the space of a year, you'd have grown from 3,000 unique vistors a month to 6,144,000 unique visitors a month. If every month is 100% bigger than the last, the 12th month is 204,800% bigger than the first.
But like approaching the speed of light, as traffic approaches 6 million uniques a month, costs approach infinity. Let's say you're using pay-per-click advertising and paying 20 cents a click. Well, to get that first month's gain of 100 daily visitors, you're paying $20 a day. But when you're at the 6 million unique visitors level, you'd be paying $40,000 a day.
And this doesn't factor in diminishing returns. Most advertisers know that reaching a certain segment of their target market is easy. They congregate in groups by reading the same publications or watching the same television shows. So those ad buys are easy to identify, even if they're not cheap to make. But as your reach grows, increasing it becomes harder because you're having to identify smaller and smaller pockets of the market and having to identify ways to reach them.
Along with that comes resistance. A portion of your market will be "gimmes". They'll see your ad and immediately respond. But once you get past the "gimmes", you'll find market segments that are harder and harder to elicit a response from. Maybe they're more cynical or jaded, maybe you're having to overcome increasing levels of loyalty to a competing brand, maybe they perceive your product as less of a necessity and more of a luxury, and so on.
So, you might be able to get the first 500,000 of that 6 million relatively easily. But the second 500,000 requires 50% more effort than the first, the third 500,000 requires 50% more effort than the second. If each 500,000 is 50% harder to get than the prior 500,000, then the last batch, the one that gets you from 5.5 million to 6 million will be 86.5 times harder to get than the first 500,000 was.
But maybe you're not using advertising. You're using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Each step up in the search engine results becomes more competitive and harder to get. If you're optimizing for a hotly contested key term, getting from 20th to 19th may be a snap compared to getting from 11th to 10th and getting that prime first-page real estate. And remember, even when you get to #1, there are two factors to consider...
- There are a finite number of people searching for any term
- Even if you're #1, you might not get clicked
So, with all that said, what wisdom do I have to impart about maintaining and sustaining growth rates without hitting that plateau at which growth begins to slow or even stops? If I had that secret I'd be selling it at $10,000 a seat seminars, not giving it away on a blog.
This post is not about a secret to sustained growth, but a reality check about it. When you've had high month over month growth in the early days, it's easy to get carried away, fantasizing about how much money you'll be making in a year if you can keep it up. But because the physics of site traffic is like the physics of velocity, you need to step back and realize that keeping up that growth rate will be harder and harder each month. That 80% or 90% month-over-month growth in the early days is easy precisely because it's early days and doubling a small number is a lot easier than doubling a big one. So just because my average daily numbers in March are 123% over February, I can't expect to keep growing this fast, however wonderful it would be. It will slow down.
So enjoy the wild ride while you can, but keep a level head and remember this physics lesson.
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