Every marketer has experienced the painful trajectory that Andrew Chen famously codified as the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs. A new marketing channel emerges and delivers spectacular results. Early adopters generate leads at unprecedented efficiency. Then, gradually but inevitably, performance degrades. Costs increase. Conversion rates decline. What once felt like a competitive advantage becomes just another struggle to maintain acceptable returns.
This pattern is not coincidental or avoidable. It represents a fundamental dynamic of marketing competition that sales and lead generation professionals must understand and anticipate. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs states that all marketing strategies eventually lose effectiveness due to diminishing novelty. Understanding why this happens and how to respond strategically separates sustainable growth from temporary success.
Understanding the Decay Cycle
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs describes a predictable pattern that plays out across every marketing channel and tactic. The cycle begins with discovery, peaks during early adoption, and inevitably declines as saturation sets in.
Phase One: Discovery and Early Success
New marketing channels or strategies initially deliver outsized returns because they offer something genuinely novel. When Facebook advertising first became available, businesses reached engaged audiences at minimal cost. When content marketing emerged as a strategy, companies that published helpful articles dominated search results and attracted qualified prospects effortlessly.
During this discovery phase, competition remains minimal. Audiences encounter the new format or channel with fresh eyes and genuine interest. The novelty itself drives engagement independent of execution quality. Even mediocre implementations perform well simply because the approach is new.
Early adopters during this phase gain substantial advantages. They acquire customers at low cost, build audiences before saturation, and establish brand presence before competitors recognize the opportunity. These early wins often create lasting competitive moats.
Phase Two: Competitive Flooding
Success attracts imitators. As word spreads about a high-performing channel or tactic, more companies rush to capitalize. What began as a competitive advantage becomes standard practice. The channel that once felt like a secret weapon turns into a crowded marketplace.
This competitive flooding accelerates rapidly. Marketing conferences share case studies. Industry publications write articles about successful tactics. Software tools emerge to make implementation easier. Within months, hundreds or thousands of companies deploy similar strategies.
For lead generation professionals, this phase brings the first signs of decay. Costs per click increase as more advertisers bid for the same inventory. Organic reach declines as more content competes for attention. Conversion rates drop as audiences become desensitized to similar messages across multiple sources.
Phase Three: Saturation and Diminishing Returns
Eventually, channels reach saturation where nearly everyone in the target market has been exposed repeatedly. Audiences develop banner blindness, email fatigue, or content exhaustion. What once felt novel now feels intrusive or irrelevant.
At this stage, only exceptional execution generates acceptable returns. The channel does not become worthless, but it no longer offers the efficiency advantages that made it attractive initially. Companies must invest more resources for smaller returns. Marketing budgets stretch further to maintain previous lead generation volumes.
Why Decay Is Inevitable
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs operates because of several interconnected factors that make performance decay essentially unavoidable.
Novelty Cannot Be Sustained
Human psychology responds strongly to novelty. New formats, channels, or approaches capture attention precisely because they differ from established patterns. However, novelty by definition cannot last. As exposure increases, the new becomes familiar and then eventually tiresome.
This psychological reality means that no marketing channel maintains its initial effectiveness permanently. The very factors that made a channel powerful in early stages guarantee degradation over time. Audiences adapt, expectations shift, and what once stood out becomes background noise.
Competition Eliminates Advantage
In competitive markets, successful strategies spread rapidly. Companies that discover effective approaches share their success stories, competitors analyze their tactics, and soon the entire market adopts similar strategies. This competitive diffusion transforms unique advantages into baseline expectations.
When every company in your industry uses the same lead generation tactics, none gain differential advantage. You must continue investing simply to maintain competitive parity rather than to outperform. The channel still generates results, but not the outsized returns that justify aggressive investment.
Scale Reduces Quality
Early success in any channel comes partly from targeting the most receptive audience segments. Initial leads represent people actively seeking solutions, highly engaged with your content, or perfectly matched to your ideal customer profile. As you scale, you necessarily expand beyond these optimal prospects.
This expansion into less qualified audiences reduces conversion rates and increases acquisition costs. The hundredth lead from a channel typically converts at lower rates than the tenth lead. By the time you reach thousands of leads, you are reaching audiences considerably less aligned with your solution than early adopters.
Strategic Responses to Channel Decay
Understanding that channel decay is inevitable does not mean accepting poor results passively. Marketing teams can implement several strategies to combat performance degradation and maintain effective lead generation.
Constant Innovation and Testing
The most direct response to the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs is continuous exploration of new channels and tactics. While established channels decline, new opportunities constantly emerge. Marketing teams that systematically test emerging platforms and approaches position themselves to capture early-mover advantages.
This innovation mindset requires allocating resources specifically for experimentation. Not every test succeeds, but the potential upside from discovering the next high-performing channel justifies regular investment in exploration. Companies that wait until current channels completely degrade before seeking alternatives miss the most profitable adoption windows.
Data-driven teams establish processes for identifying promising new channels early. This might include monitoring adoption curves of new platforms, analyzing where target audiences spend attention, and tracking early success stories from adjacent industries.
Channel Diversification
Relying heavily on any single marketing channel creates vulnerability to performance decay. Diversification across multiple channels provides stability as individual channels experience inevitable decline.
Effective diversification requires building expertise across different marketing approaches rather than simply spreading budgets thinly. A company might combine content marketing, paid advertising, direct outreach, partnerships, and events into a comprehensive strategy where no single channel represents more than 30 to 40 percent of lead generation.
This approach cushions the impact when any individual channel degrades. As performance declines in one area, other channels continue delivering results. The company maintains overall lead flow even as specific tactics require adjustment.
Execution Excellence as Differentiation
As channels mature and competition intensifies, execution quality becomes the primary differentiator. In saturated channels, exceptional work still generates superior results even though the overall efficiency has declined.
For content marketing, this means producing genuinely useful, well-researched material rather than generic blog posts. For paid advertising, it means sophisticated targeting, compelling creative, and rigorous optimization. For email marketing, it means personalization, segmentation, and value-driven content rather than promotional blasts.
Lead generation platforms that provide detailed performance data enable this execution excellence. When you can measure which messages resonate, which audiences convert, and which approaches generate qualified prospects, you can optimize systematically even in mature channels.
Audience Relationship Building
One response to channel decay involves shifting from channel dependence to audience ownership. Rather than relying on rented attention through platforms, companies build direct relationships with prospects and customers.
Email lists, communities, content subscriptions, and other owned channels provide insulation from platform-level degradation. While the channels used to build these audiences may decay, the relationships themselves maintain value. A company with 50,000 engaged email subscribers is less vulnerable to Facebook algorithm changes than one entirely dependent on social platform reach.
This relationship focus requires long-term thinking. Building owned audiences takes time and consistent value delivery. However, the resulting stability and reduced acquisition costs justify the investment.
Recognizing Decay Early
Marketing teams need systems for identifying channel degradation before performance completely collapses. Early recognition allows proactive adjustment rather than reactive scrambling.
Key Performance Indicators
Several metrics signal channel decay. Cost per acquisition rising steadily over quarters indicates increasing competition or declining effectiveness. Conversion rates dropping across campaigns suggest audience saturation or fatigue. Click-through rates declining while impressions remain constant shows reduced engagement.
Lead quality degradation often precedes volume decline. When leads from a channel require more nurturing, convert at lower rates, or generate less revenue, the channel may be entering decay phase even if total lead volume remains stable.
Sophisticated analytics that track these metrics over time reveal patterns that single-point measurements miss. Marketing platforms that provide historical trending enable pattern recognition that identifies decay early.
Competitive Monitoring
Tracking competitor activity in marketing channels provides early warning of saturation. When competitors increase investment in channels you currently use, expect performance pressure. When industry conferences feature case studies about tactics you employ, recognize that competitive advantage is eroding.
This competitive intelligence should inform resource allocation. As more competitors crowd into channels, consider whether continued investment makes sense or whether resources should shift to less saturated alternatives.
The Perpetual Innovation Requirement
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs creates a perpetual innovation requirement for marketing organizations. Sustainable success demands constantly exploring new opportunities, testing emerging channels, and adapting to changing competitive dynamics.
This requirement has important organizational implications. Marketing teams need slack resources for experimentation rather than optimizing every dollar toward current channels. They need permission to fail since not every test succeeds. They need long enough time horizons to identify and scale new channels before current ones completely degrade.
Companies that build innovation into their marketing culture rather than treating it as optional maintain competitive advantages even as specific tactics rise and fall. They accept that today's winning strategy becomes tomorrow's baseline expectation and prepare accordingly.
Conclusion
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs represents an uncomfortable reality that every marketer must accept. All marketing strategies eventually lose effectiveness as novelty fades, competition intensifies, and scaling reaches less qualified audiences. The channel that delivers spectacular results today will generate mediocre returns tomorrow.
This inevitability does not mean marketing becomes impossible. It means sustainable success requires continuous adaptation rather than finding one winning formula and riding it indefinitely. Marketing teams must constantly explore new channels, diversify across multiple approaches, execute with excellence in mature channels, and build direct audience relationships that provide insulation from platform-level decay.
For lead generation professionals, understanding this law transforms strategy from finding the perfect channel to building systems for perpetual discovery and optimization. Data-driven approaches that measure channel performance over time, identify decay early, and test alternatives systematically enable organizations to stay ahead of degradation curves.
The companies that thrive are not those that discover one amazing channel but those that build capabilities for continuously identifying and exploiting new opportunities before competitors saturate them. They accept the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs not as defeat but as the competitive landscape requiring strategic sophistication, organizational agility, and commitment to innovation. In the dynamic world of B2B marketing and sales, this adaptability proves more valuable than any single tactic, regardless of how well it performs today.