[Analysis] ZTG001 — Grow Traffic from Medium
The time is upon us to report on our first Zero to Grow experiment. As you know, these experiments are split in two parts. The first is the set up, the second is the analysis.
Please read the ZTG001 Experiment Setup Card if you haven’t yet.
Experiment results
Republishing on Medium brought, on average, 16 new visitors per article back to my website.
Republishing on Medium brought, on average, 1 new Lead per article republished.
Republishing on medium brought, on average, 1 new Sales Qualified Lead per 15 articles republished.
Overall, the experiment can be qualified as a success. My objective was to test Medium as a source of traffic. Though I didn’t reach the full expected amount of traffic (5,000 visits), I did come pretty close. I also generated twice the amount of Leads I expected to generate from the experiment, which is very encouraging.
What I have learned from this experiment
Three things I have learned from this experiment.
Start-heavy
Traffic from Medium seems very ‘start-heavy’. Once you republish a piece of content, you might see a quick surge in referral traffic from that piece, then notice the traffic quickly die off. You can almost compare it to Twitter traffic in that sense.
Here’s an example of that:
As you can see, the article quickly produced about 15 visits then died off. Most republished articles followed that pattern. It is worth noting I have found one article to produce a consistent ‘trickle’ of traffic.
Clear CTA
Article 5 (see chart above) produced 10 visits to my site. Out of the 10 visits, 5 converted into a lead. There is clearly something going on here.
After a closer look, I noticed this particular article had a specific section about an downloadable piece of content (content upgrade). This section is a clear CTA to go and grab that piece of content.
I dug deeper, and 6 out of the 10 clicks from that republished article came from that CTA. Out of these 6 clicks, 4 converted.
This is a powerful display of what a clear CTA can do. Something to follow up on.
Get in the (right) publications
Two articles out of the 15 were not added to any publication. They performed terribly (guess which ones they are!).
More interestingly, the second most viewed article had the second worst click-through rate. This is most likely due to me trying to be a bit funky and add the article to a semi-related publication as opposed to one that is bang on my audience.
This shows the importance of a) publishing into publications and, b) picking the right publications.
Action items
What now?
- Two articles weren’t added to any publication. They performed terribly. Add them to a publication (2min).
- Create a new experiment to validate the CTA idea. If I was to add a clear CTA to each republished article, how would they perform versus this experiment? (1hr)
Thank you all for reading! I hope you found value in this experiment and the data shared. If you did, please follow our publication — there is a lot more to come!
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