One of our clients, Consulting-Portal, brought this meme to our attention via Twitter at the height of the Kanye-bashing fun. Since we’d redesigned their site and recently launched some upgrades, it seemed like uncanny timing and we all had a good laugh. The link was promptly buried by a steady stream of tweets and Google alerts, and, along with the rest of the world, we forgot about Kanye.

That is, until Consulting-Portal’s monthly analytics report rolled around.

Now, for those of you not familiar with our analytics reporting service, we synthesize a month’s worth of Google Analytics data and produce a report outlining relevant trends and strategic recommendations. And, as I took a look at their traffic sources, lo and behold: the top referring site for that month was that stupid (albeit hilarious) Kanye app.

Fine. Yes, things can go viral and drive traffic. We try to avoid that kind of campaign in favor of more measurable initiatives, because—most of the time—it’s not like the traffic actually matters. It’s not like it converts, or does anything other than click, glance and bounce.

But—surprise, surprise—the Kanye app didn’t just send traffic. It sent qualified traffic: the time-on-site for visitors from Kanyelicious was higher and the bounce rate was lower than the site average, and visitors from the Kanye app looked at just as many pages as visitors coming from more…ahem…traditional traffic sources.

Hmm.

So, what to do with that surprising information? We took away a few points:

• It’s hard to tell what’s going to drive traffic. So don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes, discovering what will resonate with your target audience is a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall—eventually, something is going to stick.
• That being said, for your efforts to be successful over the long term, you must track everything. It’s easy to get swept away by the latest marketing fad, but unless you can prove your campaigns are working, you’re probably wasting your money.
• Beware of making long-term decisions based on one-time anomalies. Sure, Kanye was successful for one month. The next month, Consulting-Portal’s referral traffic went back to its usual patterns. Trends are far more important than random blips—no matter how successful those random blips.

The final word? (With small apologies to Kanye….) You know, that app was pretty good…but trackable campaigns are one of the best marketing tools OF ALL TIME!