Dilute Clickstreams
The changes in Google Ads have affected marketing projects, making leads more expensive. SEO and social media are suffering, and networks are responding by reducing organic reach.
The Google Ad Flip
Google flipped its targeting. Instead of targeting the 5% ready-to-buy, we must exclude 95% of lower intent words.
Or do we?
The impact
- The dilution means a wider range of clicks and a deeper, earlier, full-funnel click profile.
- Google now serves ads against other topic words it chooses until we stop them.
- SEO is less effective because automatic and larger-format ads push down organic results
- Tracking and data are broken, making it hard to decide what will work best.
Many companies have seen their costs double, at least.
How do we restore performance?
Formulaic content around keywords and landing page templates is the old way.
Treat this as an opportunity
What we see now is a greater variety of clicks and more earlier-stage visitors. We are moving away from individual keyword clicks towards full-funnel audiences.
This could be seen as an opportunity to engage with visitors at an earlier stage of their research before they decide on a course of action. The innovative and solution sales conversations happen earlier.
A focus on the problem often brings solutions into sharp relief.
We go deeper with our understanding of the visitor and website experience to
- Create more content to serve the different intent of the new clicks
- Understand our audiences better, who they are, what they want and what to say.
- Organise around hubs to increase traction, conversion and progression.
- Make the case for our products and services more persuasively.
Topic Hubs change the way we build websites.
They help us address more needs in a more granular, integrated and complete fashion
We can address more visitors across the sales timeline; we can finally serve earlier-stage SEO visitors better.
Leveraging content normally reserved for blogs and social media, we integrate early-stage content with late-stage content.
Problems and opportunities belong to solutions before you get down to products and services.
