One of the things I learned very early in my engineering career is that the answer to almost any complicated question is the same:

It depends.

Engineers can be incredibly annoying that way.

Ask whether something will work and we'll want to know the operating conditions. Ask which design is better and we'll ask what you're optimizing for. Change one variable and suddenly the answer you got five minutes ago may no longer be correct.

After moving into marketing, I've realized we don't say “it depends” nearly enough.

Take one of the most common questions in marketing: Do we need more traffic?

Maybe. (See, I told you it was annoying!)

If you have a funnel that's generating a predictable, profitable return, more traffic could be exactly what you need. 

On the other hand, if you're pouring people into a system that isn't converting, isn't nurturing leads effectively and isn't maximizing the value of the customers you've already acquired, more traffic could simply help you waste money faster.

The answer depends on the system.

Before I make any recommendation about traffic, the first thing I want to understand is what we're trying to accomplish.

Are we primarily trying to generate leads? 

Are we trying to acquire customers immediately? 

Are we willing to acquire a customer at a loss because we know what that customer will be worth 30, 60 or 90 days from now?

The purpose of the funnel determines which numbers matter.

I want to know the cost to acquire a lead and the cost to acquire a customer. I want to know how quickly we break even, what the return on ad spend looks like after 30, 60 and 90 days, and what a customer is ultimately worth to the business.

I also want to know whether we're even buying the right traffic. 

I've seen businesses struggle with paid acquisition not because paid traffic didn't work, but because they were trying to force a platform or audience that wasn't a good fit for their business.

Once you understand all of that, traffic becomes another dial you can turn intelligently.

Here's where I disagree with another piece of conventional marketing wisdom: traffic isn't necessarily expensive.

Bad traffic is expensive. Unprofitable traffic is expensive.

But if I can put $1 into a system and reliably get $2 back at an acceptable margin and within an acceptable period of time, I don't want to spend less. 

I want to know how many dollars I can feed into that system before the economics start to deteriorate.

That's where all the other dials become important:

Improve the conversion rate and ROAS changes

Increase average order value and it changes again

Improve retention, email follow-up or customer ascension and suddenly you may be able to afford significantly more to acquire a customer than you could before.

That's the part that's easy to miss when marketing channels are evaluated individually.

The amount you can afford to spend on traffic isn't just a traffic question. It's affected by what happens everywhere else in the system.

There's nothing wrong with wanting more traffic. In a healthy system, scaling traffic may be exactly what creates the next stage of growth.

But the decision should come from the numbers, not from the assumption that more people entering the funnel will solve whatever is happening downstream.

Before you spend another dollar acquiring leads, review the systems tied to lead onboarding, nurturing, customer ascension and ongoing monetization. 

Fix the leaks you already know about because the best time to convert the next lead you acquire is when they enter your world, not six months from now after you've finally fixed the system.

Then look at the economics.

If the numbers tell you that putting another dollar into traffic will predictably produce a profitable return, turn the dial.

Keep turning it until the numbers tell you to stop.

Sometimes the answer really is more traffic.

Sometimes it isn't.

It depends.

And that's not avoiding the question.

That's Revenue Engineering.

Jon Stoltzfus
Chief XRO