Increase Quality Site Traffic
Gitab’s inbound marketing engine is a strength that has contributed significantly to the growth of the business. The Marketing site plays a pivotal role in the customer journey. From 2021 to 2023, GitLab’s Marketing site experienced year-over-year declines in traffic. The month-over-month decline was minimal, but when compounded over the year, the decline was noticeable and was concerning when reviewed over three years.
Late in FY23, a working group had been set up to address the issue but failed to move the needle. I raised my hand to lead the initiative to reverse the declining trend. I hoped first to reduce the decline, flatten it, and then increase the traffic to the Marketing site. With my experience working at GitLab for over two years, I had an idea of which cross-functional team members I needed to collaborate with on the initiative.
After getting support from the relevant leaders, I set up an action plan framework with loose actions for each function and asked the team members to apply their expertise and iterate on the plan.
The two quarterly plans are detailed here:
Results
Due to the effective cross-functional collaboration, it only took us one month to flatten the declining traffic trend. By the third month of the first quarter, we saw a meaningful increase in year-over-year traffic. During our efforts over the second quarter, we experienced big wins: increasing sessions by 12% and pageviews by 9%. For the remainder of the fiscal year, we delivered 20% annual growth in site traffic and a 30% increase in site sessions.