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Podcast Summary: Marketing School - Episode #2988
Episode Overview In this episode of *Marketing School*, hosts Neil Patel and Eric Siu delve into the evolving landscape of digital marketing, focusing on how AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, are impacting conversion rates and user behavior compared to traditional search engines like Google. They also discuss the cultural shifts required for organizations to successfully integrate AI, workforce changes at Google, and strategies for spreading AI adoption within companies.
Key Topics Discussed
- ChatGPT vs. Google: Conversion Rates and User Behavior (00:00)
- Higher Conversion Rates: Patel notes that analytics show ChatGPT has a higher visitor-to-conversion rate than Google, although this may not reflect the full picture of user interactions.
- User Journey: Consumers often conduct research through ChatGPT before visiting websites, leading to higher conversions but lower website traffic metrics.
- The Evolution of Search: AI Assistants and Analytics (02:57)
- Search Behavior Changes: The rise of AI assistants has altered how users interact with content, with fewer direct visits to websites.
- Web Analytics Challenges: Traditional analytics may not accurately track traffic from AI assistants, leading to "invisible traffic" issues.
- Cost Efficiency in AI: The Future of User Services (05:58)
- Cost Reductions: AI tools are becoming increasingly cost-effective, which may lead to exponential growth in usage and adoption.
- Efficiency Improvements: As operational costs decrease, companies can expect to serve more users with less investment.
- AI Fluency in Organizations: Embracing Change (08:56)
- Cultural Shifts: Organizations must cultivate a culture that embraces AI and technological advancements.
- Resistance to Change: Some employees may be unwilling to adopt new tools, which could hinder integration.
- Cultural Shifts: Adapting to AI in the Workplace (11:58)
- Disruptive Innovations: Companies should establish dedicated teams to drive AI adoption and explore innovative processes.
- Championing Technology: It's crucial for leaders to promote AI fluency and encourage employees to see the benefits of AI tools.
- Google's Workforce Changes: Buyouts and Future Directions (18:11)
- Google's Buyouts: Google has initiated buyouts for employees as part of a broader effort to streamline operations and adapt to changing business conditions.
- Future Directions: The company continues to evolve its search capabilities amid the increasing competition from AI tools.
Key Takeaways
- AI Impact on User Behavior: The introduction of AI tools like ChatGPT is reshaping user research and conversion processes, prompting companies to rethink their marketing strategies.
- Need for Accurate Tracking: As AI usage grows, marketers must adapt their analytics approaches to capture the full extent of traffic and engagement driven by AI tools.
- Cultural Resistance: Successful AI integration requires a cultural shift, with the need for champions within organizations to advocate for new technologies.
- Strategic Workforce Management: As AI tools enhance efficiency, organizations may face workforce restructuring, making it essential to manage change thoughtfully.
Conclusion This episode highlights the transformative potential of AI in digital marketing and user engagement. As businesses navigate these changes, leaders must focus on both technological advancements and the cultural shifts necessary for successful adoption. The ongoing evolution in the AI landscape promises to reshape marketing and organizational strategies significantly.
For more insights and daily actionable marketing tips, subscribe to the *Marketing School* podcast and check out the associated YouTube channels.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01So does ChatGPT actually have a higher conversion rate than Google traffic? because a lot of people recently have been saying, oh my God, it converts way higher. Oh my God, you know, ChatGPT is the future. So I bet Neil has actually done a study on this. So Neil, what have you seen? So we see when you look at analytics and visitor to conversion rate, yes, it is higher. What analytics is not reporting is when you ask people their journey and when they go through ChatGPT to make a decision and then purchase, the amount of times they interact with the brand before they visit the website and do their research is much more higher.
0:42So instead of someone searching on Google, going to your website, doing research, then going to another link, doing research, then going to another listing on Google, doing research, and then deciding which site to buy, they're doing this research on ChatGPT, so you're not seeing the visitor account. When you look at true impressions to conversion rate, we don't think it's higher. I don't have exact data because they don't provide it. But we don't think it's higher because people are interacting with the brand way more often than they're actually clicking over to a website and then buying. Typically, they're doing their research on ChatGPT.
1:18Then when they're ready, they're clicking over and buying, but they've already done a lot of the research and they don't even have to go to the website to finish their research in many cases. It's interesting because I saw these numbers this morning, but it took chat GPT about four years to get to a billion queries a day. And then Google, it took much longer, right? But the caveat is there wasn't an LLM in the past. The way now we're asking a lot more questions. So naturally there's gonna be more queries, right? So it's not exactly apples to apples. It was just like Threads was the fastest app to, was it a million or a hundred million signups?
1:51Yeah, a hundred million in like a week or two weeks. But it's like, dude, no, you just piggybacked off the distribution you already had. And so, but in this case, it's like, no, the search behavior actually changed. And so it's not apples to apples. But again, like we're not saying we don't love ChatGPT. We do. But, you know, Google's not exactly dead yet. No, Google's not dead yet. And Sundar even, let's say ChatGPT is getting a billion queries a day. All right. Google's at 13.7 billion a day. And that was last year. During the Google I.O. event, Sundar said search has already grown like more than 10 % or something like that because of AI.
2:25No, their search, I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but their coding velocity has increased 10%. So actual productivity in their organization. It's not just like Meta, it's like Mark Zuckerberg, it's like, oh, we're 30 to 40 % more code. Sundar is like, what's more productive for us? It's actually looking at engineering velocity. That's the 10 % that I remember. There was also, you could be right, but I thought I saw some stat that he was saying search. Oh, cool. AI Overviews is driving over a 10 % increase in usage for the type of query. So they're seeing a 10 % plus increase in usage on Google.
2:57And what do you see on X now? Oh, oh my God, Google is stealing our traffic. It's like, what are you gonna do about it? But let's just use rough numbers. If they're at 13.7 billion a day and you got a 10 % increase, you're at another extra 1.3 billion searches a day. Yeah. Which is kind of crazy to think about. It's just like, oh, our AI just helped us increase our search volume by roughly the amount that ChatGPT gets on a daily basis. This is also interesting. So Patrick Stocks, this product advisor, technical SEO guy, brand ambassador at Ahrefs, he wrote this post on how AI assistants are breaking web analytics and hurting their future.
3:34So the premise of this post, and it's a six minute read, but his whole premise is, look, search is moving from traditional search engines to AI assistants, but traffic from many of these sites isn't being tracked properly in your analytics. And it's not necessarily your fault, it's their fault, right? So he was just saying, look, you know, their LLM filter in Ahrefs web analytics. Notice some common AI assistants missing from the list. They're in our filters, but we aren't seeing any data from their sites, right? So you see chat, GPT, Gemini, whatever. And it talks about the invisible traffic problem comes from these systems stripping the referral value.
4:05So I think this is a minor problem for right now, but just keep in mind that we're still very early days right now. Even the CEO of AMD yesterday said we're very early endings of AI right now. Yeah, so just keep in mind this stuff evolves. Like Google didn't become what it became like overnight. No, and I do believe that i do believe that when you look at google and ai and everything that's happening with chat gpt i think eventually they'll catch up to google with a lot of the data and the analytics and the reporting functionality because they announced that they're doing 10 million dollars or 10 billion in arr and they are trying to gpt uh-huh and they're trying to hit or open ai yeah and they're trying to hit 120 something billion by 2029 dude it's crazy because a couple years ago it was like two and then three and then now it's like 10 and so it's compounding pretty quickly yeah i don't know if it went from two to three i think the numbers i'm sorry that number that number comes from anthropic that's actually anthropic two to three that's recently yeah but but chad gpt's numbers is growing at a rapid pace all they got to do is release more features ads and all this kind of stuff and then boom i actually think it'll grow much faster yeah so open eyes revenue through the years oh here's an ai overview oh this is a helpful ai overview year.
5:11Look at that. 2023.5 million, 2024, 3.7 billion. Okay. 2025 projected to reach 10 billion in annual recurring revenue and 82 % increase. They expect to generate 12.7 billion total revenue for the year. And then 2029 to your point, open it aims for 125 billion in revenue. So I was talking, I was talking to a guy named Daniel George and Daniel created this startup, Sequoia backed or Sequoia scout backed. I don't know what you want to end up calling it. It's called TwinMind.ai. Here's an interesting staff for them, okay? They have a lot of users. They're growing virally, just mainly through word of mouth.
5:48It's never forget anything. It's pretty much your second brain. That's their model. So it can listen on everything that you're doing, create AI notes, to-dos, answers before you've been asked during meetings, lectures, conversations. It can pretty much help you with anything they're doing in multiple languages. It's free. When you look at this company, they're leveraging open ai's api and gemini and some of these other uh players their cost per user i believe was roughly 30 a month when they first rolled out now their cost per user is around three dollars you're talking about just cost of goods sold really costs to service a user the cost for all the apis okay yeah so it's gone down around 10x in like a year year and a half yeah What's the cost going to be?
6:36That's 90%. Yeah. What's the cost going to be in another year or two years? Because these models are getting more efficient. They're buying their own energy nuclear power plants and the chips are getting more efficient. So it's like, what's the real cost going to be? You know, every two generations, it basically goes down like 100x, something like that. Every two generations for these models. Yeah. Like what used to be really expensive two years ago is now like cents. Well, let's go back here. what do you mean by two generations? You're talking about like models. Like it's like, so right now we have 03 Pro, right?
7:08And then you had 03 and then you had 4.1 and you had 4.0, right? But then you had ChatGP3 before, right? Those, the cost for tokens used to be way more expensive. And to your point, they're dropping like 90%, 99%, right? And then you have DeepSeat come out, this 99 % drop, right? From these tokens. And so to your point, it's becoming a lot cheaper. And they call this, remember we talked about Jevon's Paradox, the more something gets used, it actually proliferates even more. And so the costs are coming down. You're going to see a lot more queries, a lot more energy being used, a lot more compute being used.
7:39And to go back when you're saying every two generations, you know, like there's four, there's four mini. Is that considered, do you consider that another generation? Like four, three, going from three to four would be one generation. Okay. So you're not considering all the like sub variations. Yeah, yeah, no. Okay. That's so, you know, crazy to think about. I don't know when they're coming out with five. chat gbt they say they're holding off a little bit i remember um oh mid to late 2025 yeah so they're holding off a little bit like they're pretty close already but sam altman said like they're gonna wait a little bit because it's that amazing chat gbt 5 expect to be a significant upgrade potentially surpassing the capabilities of 4.5 have you used o3 pro i don't know which version i'm using so i just know i paid 200 so you have o3 pro so they just came out with this like two days ago, right?
8:26And what it does is, 03 is a really good reasoning model, but 03 Pro, here's what I did. I was like, okay, tell me what are the highest leverage things that I can do with this model that I cannot do with 03 or any other deep research, whatever other model out there, right? And then it basically talks crap to me in the beginning. It's like, you ask very like, the things you asked me are like how to do things, right? It's like, no, here are the highest, like 12 leverage, highest leverage prompts. And this must be your kids. No, there you go. They're calling for me. Oh, they know you're here. Uh-huh.
8:58Okay. So going back to three versus four, when you're talking about, I thought when we're just using the interface on the website, we're just using the latest four model or whatever. No. So by default, you're on four, right? But I keep switching it to O3 Pro. I wanted to see how good this is. Let me read you some of the prompts, right? So here's what it said. It's hard truth. Unless you push the model beyond straightforward, tell me what to do request, you will keep getting answers. You could have stitched together from me, O3, plus a few hours of Google, a chat, GPD, and Excel. The O3 Pro tier only earns its keep when you force it to synthesize large, messy, multi-domain inputs, run deep quantitative or algorithmic reasoning, and deliver personalized decision-grade output that you struggle to reproduce manually.
9:37So let me give you two prompts and then we can move on. So the exact question to ask, in just these five years of single-grain and care P &Ls plus my personal spending and create a Monte Carlo forecast runway of A, runway, B, probability of hitting 200 million ARR by 2030 under three hiring plans, show the top three levers that shift the distribution greater than or equal to 10 percentage points. I dropped the same thought for 20 minutes and then it gave me an answer. I'm gonna give you one more. So write Python that optimizes my LinkedIn ABM pricing tiers using historical close rate data and price elasticity curves.
10:11Recommend the three highest EV price points and expected churn impact. So highest EV would be expected value. And then you would ingest data here, your preload data from your like, your close one loss data, your pricing and usage metrics. And so this stuff just getting a lot better. You're a data guy. Imagine all, so I just take all of these prompts and I just, I have them all running at the same time, thinking about these 12 things. And they're all right, like thinking for 15, 20 minutes, taking all the data you have. It's an even smarter strategist in your pocket now. Yeah, and I think it's just gonna get better and better.
10:44I'm just curious to see what five is gonna do. Yeah, we'll see. But it's already really good. I do believe it hallucinates. For sure. And I have that in one of the topic sheets because I was just in Calgary and I asked everyone in the audience, how many of you guys have used chat GBT or any AI model and seen that the answers are just really off? And I forgot what percentage in the room raised their hand, but it was something significant, like 40-ish plus percent. Yeah, and I think the rest are lying. I mean, it's like humans. We're wrong all the time. Yeah, but even the ones that are hallucinating, I asked them, you know it's hallucinating.
11:19How many of you still use it to do research, figure out what products to buy and get help? And almost all of them still raise their hand because they're like, we know it hallucinates. You double check it. The value it provides outweighs the times it hallucinates. Right. And the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes. So, you know, nothing else is certain. Even if you have a genius computer, who cares? Like, it's just never that 100 % right. That is true. Death and taxes are certain. But depending on where you live, because some countries have no taxes. Yeah. But they'll find a way to tax you some way, shape, or form.
11:50Something else in your life will tax you. Inflation will tax you. Something else in your personal life might tax you. You never know. You're always taxed in some way, shape, or form. Did you see the inflation numbers that came out? No, no. What was it? What was it? Was it down? It was down. Yeah. Less than expected. But see, now the narrative is like, oh, well, wait till the terrorists kick in and wait until this and that. Dude, that is what they actually said. They're like, well, we feel that the terrorists will kick in in the next few months and then go from there. I don't know. The world's unstable, man.
12:16It's like, so our mutual friends Syed and Yaniv came in yesterday. Once they left, I'm like, holy God. So country got attacked, right? I'm like, what is going on? So, yeah. Anyway, not a politics show. No, not a politics show. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.
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14:31Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. Here's another one that's really interesting to me. So we, I guess I'll experience here here. So you weren't here the other day, but I was gonna have you come to this founder's dinner where we went to eat hot pot at Haidilao and with Syed. Yeah, Syed was there. And then we had some other founders and we were just talking about AI. So one guy brought his head of AI. I brought my CTO and the same thing. I don't know if this thread is happening with you right now. It's like we don't really I don't think anybody takes any joy in having to cut people.
15:04But we are looking for ways to spread AI throughout our organization. So obviously you the founders will trumpet it from the top. But that's not enough. Right. You have to look for people who are willing. And if you're willing, like I will teach you. Right. But you're going to have people in your org, like, especially when you have, you know, thousands of people, you're going to have people who are unwilling and resistant. Right. And that's the problem. And so our whole thing is, and Syed was actually the one that brought this up. It's like, you want to find, you want to get people to the aha moment where like you start using ChatGP or cursor, you realize you're all of a sudden you're 10 to 15 times faster.
15:37You just need to get people to that point. And then they can activate on their own. Right. But I think the problem is like, you know, the people that are kind of fighting against this. It's like, dude, it's like, it's the equivalent of saying like, oh, don't, don't use power tools to build a home. It doesn't make any sense. Right. But I guess my question for you is like, how are you guys spreading AI fluency throughout your organization? Or are you even thinking about it? We don't think about it from that way of spreading AI fluency. We have a mandate. We tell people to use AI whenever it makes sense.
16:09It's a little tricky because quite a few of our enterprise customers don't allow us to use AI. So just some of them were not allowed to even use it contractually. And if we want to use it, we got to let them know what tools, get authorization, even if their data is not shared. And then there's also liability issues that we have to worry about on our end if we use it, even if it is allowed by them with their notification. But we have quite a few contracts that are just saying you cannot use it. so on our end the way we think about ai internally is if you can do things more efficient by all means use it when you're we're legally allowed to use it i know that sounds really crazy to think that way but at size and scale you also start to think about wealth preservation versus uh wealth generation um because for us it's more important to keep what we have yes i want to grow but we first optimized for keeping what we have and not losing it.
17:10The way we really think about things is we have a team that's dedicated on disruption. And their goal is to just disrupt every single department through AI or any other forms of technology or efficiency or processes. And we found it's easier to have a team that focuses on disruption than it is to get every single department to try to disrupt themselves. That's just what we found internally. So, So, you know, that central team has been doing some really cool work. And then when they find some huge wins, we roll it wherever we can out legally. So this is interesting. So Yaniv and I were talking yesterday and then we were a friend of ours and they do well as a company.
17:54And he was just saying, you know what, like, I'm just hiring a lot of people who are 17, 18, 19 years old. Right. And these people are very motivated. They're coming out of college. Right. Right. And some of these people sometimes they'll ask that they're so motivated because they're just trained on this stuff. They don't know any other world where there is no AI. Right. And they're just like, hey, can I sleep on the couch? Like they go to office and can I sleep? I'm like, dude, that's amazing. Right. And so they're fully bought into this and they're kind of driving this world forward. And in his mind, it's like in my mind, too, I'm like a lot of people I talk to from UCLA over here.
18:26I'm like, I'd like to recruit more. And so because, again, they come equipped with this. And so, again, I have no issue. And what we talked about at dinner is like we have no issue teaching people who are willing. It is the issue where if the people who are unwilling, that means they don't align with they don't necessarily align with maybe the future of where we're going. And that's going to become more and more of a thing. And so I think my opinion is the founder has to keep trumpeting it from the top. But you need champions within the organization and people who identify other people and kind of spread this positive virus throughout the organization.
18:58Yeah. If you don't have a culture where people want to embrace it, I think it's going to be hard. There was a guy that we hired a long time ago. He didn't end up working out. He worked for one of the largest ad agencies out there, publicly traded, massive, call it 100 plus thousand employees. And his job, this is before all the LLM stuff that was really coming out. His job was to automate as many departments as possible and reduce headcount. So when he would go to the departments and try to help them automate and reduce headcount, No one wanted to help him out because it was just going to cause...
19:31This guy's going to cause chaos. Yeah. So you got to really have a culture that wants to improve and they want to embrace this stuff. Or I just think it's really hard to get things implemented. Like we have a culture and a lot of people do want to embrace this technology. We're just restricted in a lot of ways legally or legally is probably the wrong word, contractually with many of our clients not allowing us to use this new modern technology. It's not even just that. I mean, you also have to make sure that from a security standpoint, things like we're talking like actual security in your company too like you can't it's not like if you're starting a company you can kind of do whatever you want instantly it's not like that and that's what we were talking about yesterday too it was coming from a preservation angle but how do you how do you push how do you push this on people who are willing again so and i think by the way if you're listening to this and you work for a company you know you're hearing about all these companies uh okay this company cut 300 people over here this company saved 8 million in payroll.
20:22Google is paying people to leave. Microsoft just cut 6 ,000 people, right? And so I think, don't worry about AI slashing headcount. It's more so if you can adopt a willing mindset and once you hit that aha moment where you've become 10X or 100X faster, that's all you really need to do. You just need to flip that mindset and you'll be okay. Yep. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's kind of great. Like what was the deal with Google? What will they pay you? Do you know the terms no but i saw google recently made a buyout offer for employees yeah google buyout uh let's see google offers bio for employees in search across or to employees across the company including search let's see the bios are part of companies after reduced headcount which google has continued to do in waves since laying off 12 000 employees in 2023 if some teams are mandating office returns for remote workers who live within 50 miles of an office which is a lot of traffic depending if it's in Northern California or where it's at.
21:20Or LA. LA's pretty much. 50 miles is like two hours in LA. Yeah, but it's their way of saying come to the office or quick. Or else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's not sharing how much they're offering, but I bet you it's really nice from a severance standpoint. They can afford it. And it makes sense. You just start buying off people saying like, all right, you can leave. Well, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.
