Which traffic source actually pays, and how to find it in an hour

Count the hours honestly. Four evenings a week go on short video, one goes on the newsletter, and the forum posts happen whenever you remember. Now look at where the money came from last quarter. For a lot of creators those two lists are in almost opposite order, and the reason is simple: you allocated your week by where the visitors were, and visitors are not the same thing as buyers. store.fan reports traffic source alongside per-product views, buyers and revenue, which is enough to fix the allocation in about an hour.

Visitors are not the unit you are paid in

Every platform reports the number that flatters it. Video platforms report views, social apps report reach, your email tool reports opens. None of these convert into money at the same rate, and none of them know what happened after the click. So the week gets planned around whichever dashboard produces the largest figure, which is usually the channel where people are scrolling rather than deciding.

The honest limitation is that attribution is imperfect and always will be. Someone sees your post, does not click, comes back two days later by typing your name, and arrives as direct traffic. Links opened inside an app often lose their referrer. A recommendation passed round a group chat is invisible by design. Any creator telling you they know exactly which post produced which sale is describing a tidier internet than the one we have.

That does not make the exercise pointless. It makes it directional. If one source is producing several times more money per visit than another, that gap is far larger than the error in the measurement, and it is enough to move your evenings around with confidence.

Two ways to decide where the week goes

The comparison worth making is not between platforms but between how you have been choosing and how you could choose. Everything on the right-hand side comes from figures already in your dashboard — the analytics overview covers what is reported and from which plan.

The hour that reallocates your evenings

Set aside sixty minutes, a spreadsheet and ninety days of data. Ninety days rather than thirty, because one viral post can distort a month completely. Full analytics start on Starter, and the plans page sets out what each tier reports.

1. 1In your dashboard analytics, set the range to the last ninety days and note the traffic sources with their visit counts.
2. 2Write each source as a row in your spreadsheet, with visits in the first column.
3. 3Add revenue for the same period. Where the reporting cannot join a sale to a source cleanly, use the workarounds in the next list rather than guessing.
4. 4Divide revenue by visits for each source. That is revenue per visit, and it is the column that reorders everything.
5. 5Add an honest estimate of hours per week you spend on each channel, then multiply by thirteen to get hours per quarter.
6. 6Divide quarterly revenue by quarterly hours. Now you have revenue per hour of your own labour, per channel, which is the number that should be choosing your week.
7. 7Move two of your weekly hours from the lowest-earning channel to the highest, and only two. Then leave it a full quarter before you judge the result.

Three ways to sharpen attribution when the data is fuzzy

• Give each channel its own free product. A $0 lead magnet per channel means the download itself tells you where the person came from, and they land on your customer list either way.
• Use a distinct link per channel where you can, and keep the destination consistent for a whole quarter so the comparison stays clean.
• On Pro, give each channel its own discount code. Codes are the closest thing to a clean signal, because the buyer types the source in at checkout without knowing that is what they are doing.

A plausible quarter, reordered

Suppose ninety days produce 8,200 visits from short video, 950 from a newsletter, 600 from search and 1,100 direct. Revenue lands at $410, $780, $290 and $340 respectively. Video is about $0.05 a visit. The newsletter is about $0.82 a visit, so roughly sixteen times more per person, from a ninth of the traffic.

Now add hours. Video takes eight hours a week, the newsletter takes two. Over the quarter that is 104 hours against 26, which puts video at around $3.90 an hour and the newsletter near $30. That does not mean you stop making video, because video is probably where the newsletter subscribers come from in the first place. It means the two hours you were about to add to video should go to the newsletter instead, and that the next free product you build should have a sign-up in front of it. None of these figures are a forecast of your own — they are the shape of a calculation you can run this week on real numbers.

The mistake most people make

The predictable error is closing the low-earning channel entirely. Last-click reporting always flatters the final step, and the final step is usually email or direct, precisely because someone else did the work of introducing you. If you delete the introduction, the conversions it fed disappear a month later and the report will happily tell you the newsletter got worse. Treat the top of the funnel as an investment and the bottom as the till. The second mistake is running this monthly and thrashing your schedule every four weeks — a channel needs a full quarter of consistent effort before its number means anything, and the FAQ has more on what the analytics do and do not record.

The point of the hour is not a perfect attribution model. It is to stop your week being planned by whichever app shows you the biggest number. Rank the sources by what a visit is worth, put your hours next to them, and move two of those hours. That single adjustment, repeated each quarter, changes more than another year of posting everywhere at once.