I Accidentally Killed 50% of Our Traffic… and It Wasn’t the Facebook Algorithm

Seriously, last month when our traffic suddenly tanked, some days dropping below 2K sessions, I couldn’t understand why. Our reach and engagement still looked good (or at least not that bad), yet the traffic just wasn’t there.

When I dug into our posts, I noticed something: the CTR to our links was insanely low. Like… 200K impressions → only 100 sessions. And after rereading all those low-CTR creatives again and again, one thing became very clear.

The topic of the creative and the topic of the article were way too far apart. The connection was so weak that fans had zero interest in clicking the link, even though tons of people saw the articles in the comments section. They simply had no reason to read our articles.

These creatives are what we call “slant” creatives, instead of talking directly about the article topic, we “talk” about something related that we know fans would like (based on data). And yes, engagement on those slant creatives was great… but traffic to the actual articles was basically nonexistent. After fixing the issue, our traffic bounced back to around 5K sessions a day, which is kind of normal for us.

Have you seen anything similar to the above? Please feel free to share it.