13 Comments
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Paul Stansik's avatar

Love the decision tree framework - and a great reminder of the stuff you should be tuning behind the scenes (especially to pay attention to the highest traffic/most important landing pages along the way).

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Max Cherkas's avatar

good article, tnx

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Anastasia's avatar

Love this. Algorithmic approach always brings satisfaction.

Wanna clarify few things here:

- how did you come up with this figure here: "Most startups need to spend north of $75k over 6+ months"?

- do you see virality as an absolutely essential part of the product to be built from day one?

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Bill's avatar

Really great article. The decision tree is super helpful, worth a share with leadership to help share that type of context. 👍

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im's avatar

love the decision tree. share it within my community, got backlash that no one has that unique product or have enough time to wait for organic. but i agree with your take

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Dan Wood's avatar

Excellent article! This should be the first thing you see when you create a new Google Ads or Meta Ads account.

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Javad's avatar

it is an excellent article about when to start paid marketing and marketing in general. it explained whys and hows, really helpful thanks

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Rose's avatar

Thanks this was super informative!

A couple questions: First, is Hubspot blog's sudden jump in organic traffic a result of AI like ChatGPT scraping their pages?

Second, I'd like to learn more about number 5(data and tech being in order) because this is something I'm currently dealing with. Do you recommend any additional resources for diving deeper?

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Sarah Charlton's avatar

Some SEO experts have looked at that graph and suggested that Hubspot's drop was not due to decline in overall traffic, but due to redistribution of that search term traffic to other sites. I'd want to look deeper at the metrics, but for now I'm assuming there wasn't a massive behavioral change (yet), but rather a Google algorithm change that redistributed search results to "higher-value sites." I believe AI will significantly reduce SEO traffic, but over a longer time horizon than shown in the Hubspot "smoking gun" graph.

What specific issues are you having with your data and tech? This is an area where general advice is not typically as useful as specific, and honestly most useful is working with an expert who looks at your system and setup and advises on how to improve it!

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Rose's avatar

Hi Sarah thanks so much for the response! I just started a new role at a startup so our resources are limited and I'm setting things up from scratch. I don't have experience implementing analytics tools so this is all new/overwhelming to me. It sounds like you'd recommend hiring someone instead of doing it in house?

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Sarah Charlton's avatar

It really depends what the startup does, and how important analytics and paid advertising is at this stage! If you're going after PLG, then it's worth getting a bit of help to set up measurement and tagging correctly. For SLG this can sometimes be punted, especially if you want to focus on building out sales deals.

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Tom Orbach's avatar

I support this tree

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Elena Verna's avatar

the tree supports you back.

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