Never Build Your House On Somebody Else’s Land

As Growth Hacker your main goals is to grow the number of users. Have you ever had the problem: one of the big platforms, like Google, Apple, or Facebook changed their policies and you lost a big part of your user acquisition funnel. Below you can read how you can solved this issue.

This week I read a post; Facebook is changing its platform policies. As of November 5th, 2014 Facebook does not allow publishers to ask for a “page like”. Win related publishers will have a major hit. They will lose a big part of their user acquisition process.

Some months a go I talked with my co-Founder Richard Musch. Richard viewed a presentation about Facebook marketing. One of the lessons he brought back to E2Ma was:

Never build your house on somebody else’s land!

What it means is: if you build your user acquisition strategy on only one platform you have a major risk on your hand. When the platform is changing its policies you lose a big part of your user acquisition funnel. Now it is Facebook who changed its policy, but have you forgot the big Google Panda rollout. Over night SEO marketeers lost their position within the google ranking, and as an effect they lost their traffic source.

My solution for this issue is relatively simple:

Never put all your eggs in one basket!

This strategy is used for decades by the financial sector. They call it Asset Allocation!

You need to implement a Bucket allocation scheme. Test multiple traffic sources and try to build an acquisition funnel consisting of at least 5 channels. In this way each channel has a 20% risk of default.

So the next time Google is changing it’s search algorithms, or Facebook its policies you will not be screwed. Yes you lose 20% over night but this is relative easy solved by adding an other channel.

And be sure Big Platforms will change their strategies. They will compete on all verticals!

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