Software Marketing: How to Deal with Dips in Traffic
Posted by Patrick Hopkins on Wed, Aug 01, 2012
You’ve been focused on growing your online audience. You’re adding content into your software marketing mix. You’re even paying attention to keywords more than ever before. As you analyze your monthly traffic stats, there’s a dip. What went wrong?
Before going into a tailspin of frustration, it’s important to analyze the situation carefully. Even the most well planned marketing strategies experience dips in traffic from time to time. As long as there isn’t a large drop off, it could be the result of some adjustments to the search engine algorithms and a number of other factors.
Look at the Overall Trend
What’s important with software marketing traffic is to look at the overall trend of your traffic – and not just one month of statistics. Compare the last three months of traffic, and then look at the last six months and the last year. How does your traffic this month compare overall? If it’s a tiny drop that occurs the same time every year, you could be experiencing a seasonal issue. For example, a lot of B2B buying decisions are made during the first quarter of the year. If your software site is experiencing a lull in the third quarter each year, it may be because your target market isn’t actively seeking out a solution.
It can also be helpful to get a second opinion from a separate web traffic tool. While Google Analytics is a great tool, having a backup analytics tool (like the Hubspot platform that we recommend) can be helpful to provide a more balanced view of what is happening on your site.
Evaluate Your Marketing Approach
If you’ve had a change in your marketing approach over the last few months, or dropped a campaign, you may just now be seeing the results. Did you stop publishing content? Did you have a flurry of optimized press releases and drop them this month? Did you scale back your PPC advertising? All of these factors could contribute to an overall drop in traffic. It may be time to bring something back that was working better than you had initially thought.
Try to look at all your marketing as a big picture (Hubspot does this by centralizing your dashboard). If there’s a particular aspect of your software marketing that’s changed, it could affect your traffic as a whole.
Watch Out for Technical Glitches
Despite our best efforts, sometimes websites don’t function quite right. If there have been some changes in your coding, or you’ve tried to do some tweaking, your traffic could suffer. Before you update your website make sure you aren’t messing with the tracking that’s in place.
Alternatively, your hosting could be to blame. Downtime and other hosting side issues can have a major impact on how much traffic actually gets to your software website. In either case, bringing it to their attention should help get you back online and collecting traffic stats.
Regardless of the source, a small dip in your website traffic shouldn’t hurt your software marketing results much. Just continue to work with an inbound marketing partner, produce great content and keep your marketing plan running. Viewing your traffic dips as a natural part of long term growth will keep you from wanting to tear your hair out over every small adjustment up or down.