I tracked which marketing channels actually make money vs just send traffic. The results surprised me.
Spent the last month marketing a $39 product across every channel I could.
Finally looked at the data properly. Sharing the full breakdown because I think most of us track the wrong thing.
387 visitors. $117 revenue. 3 sales.
Channel by channel:
X/Twitter: 107 visitors, 0 sales. This was my biggest traffic source at 28%. And it made me exactly zero dollars. My followers are devs who like my build-in-public content. I thought they are the people who need my product, but I was wrong
Reddit: 32 visitors, 2 sales. 8% of my traffic, 67% of my revenue. Conversion rate: 6.25%. These were people I found in threads asking about distribution and customer acquisition, the exact problem I'm solving.
Indie Hackers: 22 visitors, 1 sale. Smaller traffic but the audience is right. The sale came from engaging in discussions, not from any launch post.
Hacker News: 24 visitors, 0 sales. Decent traffic, no conversion. Similar to X smart technical people but not necessarily in pain about this specific problem.
LinkedIn: 24 visitors, 0 sales.
Google: 18 visitors, 0 sales. I've been building free SEO tools (calculators for churn rate, CAC, LTV, etc) and they're starting to get indexed. GSC shows relevant queries appearing with an average position of 11.6. But organic isn't contributing to revenue yet.
Cold DMs were interesting: 35 sent, 31% reply rate, 1 sale. That's a 2.9% close rate. I stopped too early because I assumed cold DMs weren't working. Turns out they work better than most of my "content marketing."
Random surprise: UK was my #1 country at 86 visitors, above US at 65. No idea why.
What I changed based on this:
I'm cutting my time on X almost entirely. It feels productive to get likes, replies and follower growth, but it's producing zero revenue. That time now goes to Reddit and IH where the buyers actually are.
And I'm sending more cold DMs. 2.9% close rate on a $39 product seems quite good. I just need to do more of it.
The mistake I was making was treating all traffic as equal. 100 visitors from X felt better than 30 from Reddit. But 30 from Reddit made me $78 and 100 from X made me $0.
Anyone else tracking revenue by channel? Curious if others are seeing similar patterns where the "big" traffic sources aren't the ones making money.
This breakdown is the kind of data most people don't publish — thank you.
The Reddit vs X split you're seeing makes complete sense: Reddit has threads of people actively describing their problem. X has people who follow builders. The intent gap is enormous.
The IH sale from 'engaging in discussions, not from any launch post' is the same thing. Someone saw you being genuinely helpful, clicked your profile, and bought. That person was already in pain and looking for a solution — you just happened to be visible at the right moment.
The 'treating all traffic as equal' mistake you mentioned maps to a parallel one I see in SaaS businesses: treating all churn as equal. Founders track total churn rate but not voluntary vs involuntary. Involuntary churn (failed payments — customer wanted to stay, card just declined) is fixable in ways voluntary churn isn't. But if you only look at the aggregate number, you optimize for the wrong thing.
Same lesson: disaggregate the metric before optimizing. What's your product?
My main product is a Distribution Framework for Claude Code, that helps founders with coding experience manage sales/marketing
https://beyondfolder.com/distribution if interested