🍝 The Traffic Metric Your CEO Actually Cares About

Hey friends,

Starting this week’s newsletter off with a win on our website traffic for September: 3,557 visitors.

I know what you’re thinking. Patrick… 3,557 people? That’s abysmal 🙃

And yes, by “traditional” website traffic reporting standards, that number would be embarrassing considering our agency’s ARR, client portfolio, and brand strength. 

But it’s actually a huge win. 

Most marketers still use overall traffic in GA4 or Google Search Console as a KPI.

But, celebrating traffic graphs (the ones going up and to the right, filled with visitors that will NEVER buy!) isn’t the way to go anymore. 

Instead, I recommend marketers only track traffic from people who match your ICP. You know, the visitors who will actually impact pipeline and revenue. 

Here’s why you should make the change and how to do it 👇

Every time you log into LinkedIn these days, you see a post from a marketer upset about website traffic dropping off a cliff. 

It’s true. Website traffic has declined significantly this year, and marketers are freaking out. Ryan Law (Director of Content Marketing over at Ahrefs) summed this up better than I could when he analyzed Ahrefs’ own traffic collapse:

"In the past, blog traffic growth seemed well correlated with business growth. But today, I see that correlation weakening. This isn't a case of one blog bleeding traffic—this is an entire industry being recalibrated in real-time."

To be honest, traffic decline is one of the best things to happen to marketers in years. 

It’s the perfect time to do a hard reset on what metrics we report on and how they impact revenue. 

Instead of total website traffic, the metric we should use is ICP Company Traffic—the number of companies that visit your website and match your ideal customer profile. 

ICP Company Traffic tracks ALL qualified visitors to your site from:

Alongside SQLs, ICP Company Traffic is now our main marketing KPI at KlientBoost.

It's the only metric that actually predicts pipeline. We know the more ICP companies visiting today, the more deals we will close in 3-6 months. 

Here is the recipe to set up ICP Company Traffic tracking for your marketing reports👇

Step 1: Define Your ICP Criteria

Annual revenue, employee count, industry, geography—whatever defines the parameters of people who you want to buy from you. Be specific.

Example ICP criteria:

Then, set a monthly target. What is a realistic amount of people who fit into your ICP bucket to visit your website each month? 🤔

Step 2: Get a Reverse IP Tool and Set Up ICP Tracking

You need a platform to identify which companies visit your website. We use Dreamdata, but tools like Dealfront and HubSpot (which has basic reverse IP functionality) can also do the trick. 

For this step, I create custom reports to track ICP Company Traffic and use filters to measure specific channels in Dreamdata. 

Here’s a walkthrough of how to set this up: 

Step 3: Track ICP Traffic by Paid Channel

After you have the basics set up, dig into your data and analyze the impact of paid spend.

Go back into Dreamdata and change the "Channel" filter each time to:

This will tell you exactly how many ICP visitors you get from each channel.

Next, take your monthly ad spend (per channel) and divide it by ICP company visits to calculate your iCPC™️. iCPC™️ (ICP cost per click) is a new KlientBoost metric to track how much it costs to get each ICP visitor from a paid channel. 

For example, we had 272 visits from ICP companies from paid social in September and spent $12k on that channel. 

So, our iCPC™️ = $91 for each paid social visitor. 

Continue to calculate the iCPC™️ across each channel to measure ICP traffic against spend until you have something like this: 

Step 4: Make Better Decisions For Paid Spend

Look at your iCPC™️ numbers for each channel. Where are you getting ICP traffic efficiently? And where are you lighting money on fire?

If paid search is costing $500 per ICP company vs. $39 on review sites and $90 on paid social, that’s a sign to either:

Way too many marketers pump money into inefficient channels because they feel like they “have” to show up there. 

Don’t be that marketer.

Step 5: Use ICP Traffic as a KPI

Finally, track overall ICP traffic on a monthly and quarterly cadence to report your progress.

In step one, I recommended setting a realistic target of ICP visitors/month. For us, that target is 3,250 ICP visitors a month. 

It doesn’t sound like much, but remember these are people you are betting on to become actual customers, not just a line on a GA4 graph. 

Here is an example on how to report on this: 

Our CEO and CFO see one graph. And because it predicts pipeline, they actually care about it.

Your CEO doesn't care that you drove 50,000 website visits last month. They care that you drove $2M in pipeline.

ICP traffic is the most accurate leading indicator that revenue is coming down the pipeline.

Everything else is just noise.

Hope you've found this useful and I'll catch ya in the next one!

Patrick 🤘

P.S. We're building a tool called Kite that automates all of this—ICP tracking, iCPC calculation, the whole thing. It launches in a few months. If you want early access, hit reply.