Is brand traffic a proxy for Product-Market Fit?
Search demand for a brand and direct traffic can be proxies for Product-Market Fit and help companies understand where they are.
Product-Market Fit, the degree to which a market craves your product, can be measured in several ways: retention rate, NPS, or word of mouth coefficient. In fact, a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics is optimal.
One of the strongest indicators of demand is direct traffic, i.e., users visiting a site straight from their browsers instead of searching on Google first. However, many people use Google to navigate to sites either through google.com or the chrome search bar. That behavior is common enough to use brand search demand as a proxy for Product-Market Fit. In plain words, we can use direct traffic and brand search volume as Product-Market Fit proxies.
No metric is perfect. I wrote plenty about the flaws of search volume. "Techy" b2b brands and enterprise startups might go after a narrow market that's too narrow. For everybody else, however, brand search volume over time can be very indicative for Product-Market Fit. Let's look at three examples.
3 examples of startups with growing PMF
Descript, founded in 2017, allows you to edit audio and video editor through text. The first stop to assess brand searches is Google Trends. It shows a small inflection point around January 2019.
I could have used Google Keyword Planner, but its values are too broad and averaged over the last 12 months. Not very helpful to measure trends. But Google Trends is not the only way to look at search volume over a time span longer than 12 months.
"descript" in Ahrefs
It makes sense: brands bid on their brand keywords. How much Google Ads for brand keywords collide with Product-Market Fit is hard to say.
Substack, which started in October 2017, is a platform for newsletter creators that handles subscription management, payments, and distribution. I used to be on it as well.
Google Trends shows an upward trend starting around the beginning of the year.
We can clearly see that direct traffic accelerates around February 2019. That's when Substack introduced a new paid podcast feature (source).
https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/what-it-feels-like-when-youve-found
https://davidcummings.org/2013/07/04/5-ways-to-identify-product-market-fit/
https://www.kevin-indig.com/blog/how-seo-feeds-product-market-fit/
https://www.kevin-indig.com/blog/why-product-market-fit-is-so-important-for-growth-marketing/