The instinct is to buy more. More impressions, more clicks, more sessions in the monthly report. Volume is easy to show a board, so it feels like the safe move.
Traffic doesn’t automatically lead to revenue, though. Well-targeted traffic converts. Most of the clients we see arrive worried about their SEO traffic, or their visibility in AI search, because they’ve watched it drop. The first question we ask is always where exactly have they seen the loss, and whether that traffic was ever driving revenue. Chasing numbers that look healthy and pay for nothing is how businesses lose money.
Good reach starts with who you’re reaching, then how many. That’s the thinking behind Reach done properly, and it’s what makes every pound spent after it work harder.
Paid search should be adding to your revenue and your discoverability, working alongside SEO instead of in its own lane. When the two are run separately, paid often ends up bidding on terms organic already wins. You pay twice for customers who would have found you anyway.
When they’re aimed at the same audience, the job changes. What matters is that you have coverage of your high-revenue terms, and that they’re costed appropriately. That way you take a bigger share of search and give yourself more chances to convert. Content gives both channels somewhere worth landing, a page that answers the question the searcher actually had.
For Liam Driver, PPC Specialist at Door4, the conversation starts with the audience. Who do you want to reach? What does the funnel look like for re-engaging people who’ve already been on the site? How do you qualify them and turn them into customers?
“If there is no strategy behind engaging with users completely cold, the brand will just become noise. Targeting and re-engagement are absolutely key.”
Liam Driver, PPC Specialist, Door4
Our case study for Revival Beds shows what happens when the channels are pulled together. The premium bed maker’s paid account leaned too heavily on brand activity. We rebuilt it around category and margin, reduced the overlap with branded search and took lower-value products out of the feeds. At the same time, a technical SEO audit fixed crawl and indexation issues, and the buying journey was simplified. Six months in, deposit revenue had more than tripled month on month in June while spend fell 38%. Organic impressions were up 75% year on year by July. Read the full Revival Beds case study.
The metrics that flatter, and the ones that payWe see it far too often. Businesses pour budget into blog content that gets very little readership, chasing middle-of-the-road rankings in the name of domain authority. The traffic report looks busy. The revenue report doesn’t.
Apply the 80/20 principle to your traffic instead. A small share of it is doing nearly all the revenue work, and there are usually sizeable opportunities sitting right there, missed while attention is elsewhere.
If you want to know whether your reach is any good, these are the numbers worth looking at:
If your monthly report was cut back to those five, would it tell a better story or a worse one? Our upcoming event “What did we get for the spend?” covers this exact topic – it’s a must-attend if you find yourself nodding along to this article.
For most websites, informational content was never really about revenue. It was a trade: useful content in exchange for interest. That trade has changed. AI answers and voice search mean more people get what they need without ever landing on your site.
When fewer people click, the reach you do earn has to work harder. Building memorable branding matters more now. High impressions are a must, and top-of-mind impression rate within your core audience is far more vital to driving a purchase or a decision than it used to be.
Liam puts the weight on having a strong brand that stands out and interests people. That’s what gets you cited in an AI answer, surfaced by a voice assistant and remembered when the buyer is finally ready to choose.
Buying more reach will always be the easy option. The reach that turns into revenue comes from channels working together, a clear view of which traffic pays and a brand people remember even when they aren’t clicking.
If spend keeps climbing and revenue stays flat, look at who you’re reaching before you pay to reach more of them.
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“If there is no strategy behind engaging with users completely cold, the brand will just become noise. Targeting and re-engagement are absolutely key.”