A visit has never been so valuable

A visit has never been so valuable.

Dashboards have narrowed over the past few years. With double-digit growth giving way to skinnier, lonelier, single digits. We’re conditioned to smaller bursts of change, though on a bigger base.

But, string enough of those changes together, and the movement is material - even volatile.

Such is the case with traffic, where retail's -5% decline is of course hard to stomach on its own. Worse, it is exacerbated by some surrounding thorns.

The traffic landscape is ever-evolving - notably, paid sources are claiming more share, with 2 formerly unpaid percentage points redistro’d to paid, which now claims 42.6% of all traffic.

And, those paid sources are more costly. Paid traffic is anchored by Google and Meta. And with spend swelling on both, +17% at Google and +13% across Meta, budgets are feeling the weight.

Put it all together: fewer visits, more paid share, more spend on paid.

Factoring this across the entire marketing mix yields an expensive reality: the cost of attracting a visit is up 12.4% year-over-year.

Cost is only one side of the traffic story, and RPV begs to be considered in concert with it. But let this cost change set in - and before we pronounce ‘maturity’ in digital (I tend to knee-jerk to that sometimes) remember that we’re still capable of double digit change, even if sometimes those are red.