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
The traffic vs. revenue split is the data most founders never look at — and it's where a lot of "growth" turns out to be vanity metrics.
What I've found: channels that convert tend to have one thing in common — they reach people already searching for a specific solution, not just people vaguely interested in a topic. Content that ranks for "how do I structure my ChatGPT prompts" outperforms "prompt engineering tips" every time, because the intent is concrete.
I built flompt for exactly that specific intent — people who want structured AI prompts, not general advice. Positioning for a narrow intent before scaling traffic made a real difference.
A ⭐ on github.com/Nyrok/flompt would mean a lot — solo open-source founder here 🙏
i have seen trends like this too with my own product. reddit has been the best for me also but my engagement from reddit is mainly from posts in subreddits.
Doubling down on Reddit but honestly growth has been real slow...
Hard to market something without actually sounding like you are doing marketing
The traffic quality finding matches everything I've seen — 30 Reddit visitors buying vs 100 Twitter visitors not buying is the difference between audience-in-pain and audience-entertained.
One thing worth adding to the tracking: once you have paying subscribers, watch how many you lose to failed payments vs actual cancellations. It's usually 4–7% of monthly revenue and completely invisible in standard analytics — involuntary churn looks identical to voluntary churn in most dashboards. Your churn rate calculator will show the same number whether the customer cancelled intentionally or their card just expired and nobody followed up.
I've been building around this problem (RecoverKit — automated recovery for failed Stripe payments). The channels that get you buyers matter, but so does not silently losing them on the backend. Worth adding a 'payment failure recovery rate' row to your tracking spreadsheet once you're in subscription territory.