Despite the popularity of AI discovery tools, fund marketers must not assume they lead to all direct traffic from researching investors.
TL;DR: hear directly from LPs about how they found your firm.
As it turns out, there is little supportive evidence for an assumption made by many B2B marketers: that a rise in direct traffic across websites reflects users’ discovery through an AI assistant before typing in an address.
‘Growth Memo’ newsletter writer and analyst Kevin Indif examined Google Analytics 4 data across twelve B2B sites, as well as a correlations study into four brands covering 632 tests.
Direct sessions rose sharply between January to September on eight of the twelve sites. But engaged Direct decisions were relatively flat, indicative of automated traffic. One site recorded 409,000 Direct sessions where only 198 were engaged.
The Direct sessions that did carry a traceable AI signal averaged around 0.003% of Direct traffic. A strong 0.72 correlation between AI visibility and Direct traffic on one site was not found in comparative tests.
A positive sign did come from self-reported attribution at a fintech company, where customers themselves said some visits came from AI tools.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
The study was conducted using a modest dataset by one analyst, but is useful for gauging the effect of AI on website engagement that fund marketers are grappling with in the current climate.
Bot traffic is one of the most glaring issues. If traffic spikes across web pages and investor portals rise, bots need to be filtered out. Determining bots traffic can be done by splitting activity by day, landing page, countries, browsers, and screen sizes, to spot spikes with little to no engagement.
Like the fintech company example, directly asking allocators how they heard of you (and which tools were used for that discovery) is a valuable task. The question can be asked subtly in contact forms, event registrations, and first-call notes. Funds that have smaller high-value leads will see this information as more reliable than any traffic figure.
Monthly reports around behaviour and outcomes helps to avoid over-reading singular traffic numbers, too, such as insights into brand mentions, engaged visits and meetings made.
Source
Kevin Indig/Growth Memo, “Does AI drive more direct traffic?”
