M&N SOFT RESEARCH / REPORT 004
Can a New Marketplace Keep Growing After Paid Advertising Stops?
Advertising can buy initial visits almost immediately. The more interesting test begins when the advertising budget is switched off. Using Ulitin as a live product, we examine whether a young marketplace can gradually create its own discovery surface through search engines, listings, internal links and user-generated content.
A young internet product can buy visitors. Building a mechanism that continues bringing people after the company stops paying for every click is a much harder problem.
That transition is what interests us.
Ulitin is an M&N Soft product and an active multilingual marketplace. That makes it not only a software product, but also a live environment in which we can observe how discovery develops.
What remains when the paid source of traffic is switched off?
Advertising and growth are not the same thing
Paid advertising solves a specific problem: it exposes a product to an audience now.
While a campaign is operating, the source of many visits is obvious. Someone sees an advertisement, clicks it and arrives on the platform.
That mechanism depends directly on budget.
PAID ACQUISITION BUDGET ............. ON IMPRESSIONS ......... AVAILABLE CLICKS .............. AVAILABLE TRAFFIC ............. IMMEDIATE BUDGET ............. OFF PAID CLICKS ......... STOP QUESTION: WHAT REMAINS?
A marketplace has an unusual property
A conventional company website may contain a few dozen pages and remain roughly the same size for years.
A marketplace behaves differently.
Every active user can potentially create new information: a listing, product, service, business page, category relationship or another publicly accessible entity.
Marketplace users can expand the searchable surface of the platform simply by using the product.
How does a search engine discover a new page?
Publishing a page and appearing in search results are not the same event.
Google describes several distinct stages: URL discovery, crawling, indexing and eventually serving an appropriate result to a searcher.
NEW LISTING CREATED
01 URL EXISTS
↓
02 URL DISCOVERED
↓
03 CRAWLER VISITS
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04 CONTENT ANALYZED
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05 INDEXING DECISION
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06 POSSIBLE SEARCH IMPRESSION
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07 POSSIBLE ORGANIC VISITA sitemap helps discovery, but guarantees nothing
For a platform with many dynamic URLs, a sitemap becomes an important technical mechanism.
Google describes a sitemap as a way to provide information about pages and files on a site and help search engines discover them efficiently.
Inclusion in a sitemap does not guarantee crawling, indexing or ranking.
A sitemap is a discovery signal, not an instruction forcing a search engine to display a page.
Ulitin as a live experiment
During its early stage, Ulitin used paid promotion to introduce the platform to potential users.
The paid campaign later ended.
We do not consider every visit after that point evidence of sustainable growth. The platform is still too young for such a strong conclusion.
But the observation did not end when advertising ended. Activity continued while public pages remained available for discovery and processing by search engines.
The important question is not whether one visitor arrived organically, but whether the system begins building a discovery channel of its own.
The accumulation effect
MORE USERS
↓
MORE USEFUL LISTINGS
↓
MORE PUBLIC URLS
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MORE DISCOVERY OPPORTUNITIES
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MORE SEARCH IMPRESSIONS
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MORE VISITORS
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POTENTIALLY MORE USERSThe important word is potentially.
A million poor pages are not necessarily more useful than one hundred good pages. Duplicates, spam and empty pages can create the opposite effect.
What we cannot claim yet
This is not a controlled scientific experiment.
We cannot claim that stopping advertising caused organic traffic to appear.
Search indexing, direct traffic, returning users, external links, branded searches and other variables can operate simultaneously.
A useful research report should document not only what the data suggests, but also what the data cannot yet prove.
M&N Soft Research assessment
REPORT 004 / ASSESSMENT PAID ADVERTISING ........... FAST TRAFFIC ORGANIC SEARCH ............. SLOWER SYSTEM SITEMAPS ................... SUPPORT DISCOVERY SITEMAP = INDEXING ......... NO USER-GENERATED URLS ........ CAN ACCUMULATE SUSTAINABLE ULITIN GROWTH .. STILL UNDER STUDY EXPERIMENT ................. CONTINUES
Primary sources and further reading
Google Search Central — How Google Search Works ↗
Related M&N Soft Research
Report 001 — First Contact and the role of mathematicians and IT specialists →