Google Organic and Paid CTRs Hit New Lows

0:00Google organic versus paid CTRs hitting a new low. Have you seen the article of the Sears data? I'm opening it. So Sears published data, and I'm going to read Jan 2024 versus Jan 2025 numbers. So when you look at organic CTRs when the AI overviews is not shown, from Jan 2024, it's increased from 2.68 to Jan 2025 of 3.97%. Okay, percent. When you look at organic CTR with AI overview shown in January, 2024, it was 1.41 % to Jan 2025 was 0.64%. So there's a big drop when there's AI overviews. When you look at paid CTRs, when the AI overviews is not shown, it's gone from 23.07 % all the way down to 17.27%.

0:56And paid CTR, when the AI overviews are shown, it's gone from 8.76 % all the way down to 6.56%. Wow. Yeah. This was for 10 ,000 informational keywords, and they just looked at the top 20 positions. I don't think what data we've seen when you actually look at Google as an aggregate, I don't have on, you know, we probably have it somewhere in our system and we should look it up. But when we look at overall organic traffic, we're actually seeing Google drive more organic traffic than before and more paid traffic. That doesn't mean CTRs are up. It just means when we look at over time, more people are just using Google, right?

1:42So you're able to get more traffic in total, even though the click-through rate is lower. And when you look at keywords, the study was done on informational intent, a lot of these informational intent keywords are not really driving direct conversions. Yeah. And that's why people like HubSpot, for example, are losing all that traffic, but it doesn't matter because it's a lot of irrelevant stuff. Correct. Yeah. This is interesting. In our industry for you and I, most organizations get their business from word of mouth, employee referrals, client referrals, RFPs. They're not necessarily in that order, but those are usually the four ways to get the most business for a consulting shop.

2:22In none of those ways that I say ranking number one on Google hurts, I do think it can add more revenue than decline or than hurt you, but it's not going to change your business. And the reason I would say that is when someone goes to the RFP process, it takes them so long to choose a vendor that a lot of times they want to have that contract for multiple years. So it's just more stickier. You know what's funny? Side note with the RFPs, when we talk to the enterprises, they're just like, dude, procurement with us is going to take forever. The move is you guys go to one of our agencies and slip in through one of the agencies that have gone through procurement already, and that will make it way easier.

3:00And so they'll try to find ways around their own organization. It's funny like that. But I mean, look, here's a question before we move on. For us, I see website traffic slowly declining over time, but it's not like drastic declines for us right now. How's it look for you guys? uh aggregate or just our own website your own website our blog or our corporate website your blog blog has been going down but we've intentionally shifted resources years ago to our corporate site corporate sites climbing fast it has been yeah corporate sites what do you put on a corporate site do you have your webinars there uh webinars uh i don't know what's on our corporate site.

3:42I just know the team focused on it. A lot of press news. We're adding a stats section on our corporate site that we'll end up pushing, but corporate sites been actually growing really fast. And what we found is wherever we spend our time and resources, we can direction usually move things up. The number one reason our blog started going down is years ago, we started looking at the pages that drive revenue, like the specific pages on our blog. Then we looked at the keywords that drive traffic to those pages. The pages that get generated as the most amount of leads were things like how to generate more traffic from Instagram, how to get more Instagram followers.

4:28The pages that drove the most revenue, because we look at what pages are driving leads and what pages are driving revenue, the leads actually are closing into customers, are really detailed pages like how to do SEO on a blog that's in 10 different languages. And it doesn't drive much traffic, but it drives a ton of revenue. So what we started doing is we started shifting our SEO efforts from the pages that were driving leads to focusing on the pages that were driving leads and those leads that converted into revenue. So in essence, we're focusing on the revenue metric more versus the lead metric.

5:05because for organization like ours, we have a massive sales team. Salespeople are expensive. If they're calling and following up with leads that come from an Instagram page and getting tons of Instagram traffic and it never in a year, and we looked at our data literally over a 12 month period, like lead quantity to revenue. Some of these pages, like that Instagram followers page drove a ton of leads, never one customer. And then we started calculating how much time our sales rep spending following up with the leads turned close. It was costing us an arm and a leg. When I say an arm and a leg, hundreds of thousands a year.

5:37And then when we looked at all the pages, we were spending millions of dollars a year on sales efforts that were driving zero revenue because these pages were just junk. So we're like, you know what? Forget these pages. Delete some of them. Let them wither away. Focus and double down on the ones that actually drive revenue. And when we look at our company right now, we generate less leads than we used to by far, by magnitude, right? By I think one third. Yeah. But when we look at the revenue per lead, it's way more than 3x. So the numbers have panned out for us. This actually brings me to a good point here.

6:11How to generate enterprise leads using inbound and outbound AI reps. And this will be helpful. I think you'll like it. I actually tested this in the last two weeks. And so Maya, the chief of staff, was moving over to the marketing. She set this up. So my friend sent me this thing, this email written by an AI. I didn't know it was written by an AI, right? And so what it does, it's called AISDR. And so I'm going to talk about the good parts about it. I'm also going to say where it actually screwed up on something. So sorry, guys. I just got to tell the truth here. So what it does is you can add a tag to your website.

6:45Let's go back here. I'm a little bit confused. Is this a tool that you, what's a tool that you're using? It's an AISDR tool called AISDR. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. I thought you were just talking about AISDR. I didn't know that was an AISDR.com. Okay. And I'm not being paid to say this. um and so what it does is let's go imagine you have a sales development representative let's focus on inbound first and then we'll move to outbound okay okay all right so it's simple you can add a tag to your website and what it does is it just looks at all the people visiting your website so this is first party data you can see uh neil patel visited your site um there's five he has 500 to 1000 or 10 000 employees or something he's a vp of marketing you know does this fit your icp and i'll scan through all the people in there and then you can have it flow let's go back okay i just want to make sure i get this so i go to a website it's a neil patel i'm assuming it knows this neil patel because i filled out a lead form correct how's it assuming i'm neil patel then it's first party data so you can do this in america um so they didn't fill out a form okay it's like using rb2b or something like that there's like 37 different competitors right now.

7:50Yes. So which doesn't work for all the visitors as a heads up for anyone listening. No, it doesn't. But if you have a good amount of traffic, which you do, whether it's corporate or on your other site, what it does, it crafts these AI generated emails and then they're actually really good. What it does is the first line, they'll look at your LinkedIn, right? And they'll say, okay, oh, so I saw you share this about, you know, this company over here. And then you give it a prompt and it'll just write about like what it is that you do. Maybe it relates to the page that they're visiting right but sorry to interrupt i just want to make sure i get this right let's go back a little bit so i use this tool aisdr and it's saying all right this is neil who visited the website because it has it on a lot of websites and they're probably paying for data from other sources they know they know my email address yep okay and then because it knew i visited the site is also tracking which pages that i visited yes okay and then it's spitting off the email to them right away or is it waiting it's basically right away okay um continue so let's say you visited a page on seo services or something right you could have a persona that's just dedicated to talking about the things you do around seo and it'll customize every single one and it's not like all the emails look the same because you've given it a prompt for that campaign right um and so it'll send out an email and i'll say okay um neil saw you visiting this oh saw that you posted this about SEO over here.

9:17By the way, we have this SEO software called Answer to Public that you might be interested in that can help you do X, Y, and Z, right? Would you be interested? Let's say they don't respond. I'm going to finish off the sequence here. What happens next is they'll automatically add you on LinkedIn, okay? Two days later, it'll automatically send you a message on LinkedIn. And that LinkedIn message will look at what you've said on LinkedIn recently and try to tie something in that relates to it. And it writes pretty damn good emails. The problem I had with a lot of these first party data tools is like, okay, I have the data.

9:48What do I do with this? Right? Now you have something to do with it. And I will say that I just, we just set the inbound one up, but the outbound one, and I'll move over to outbound in a second to see if you have any questions before you do. The outbound one is actually generating us demos. So let's go back to the inbound one before one last question. Yeah. Add someone on LinkedIn. So it would take your personal profile, your corporate profile, your personal. Okay. And then add me on LinkedIn. What does it do after it adds me on LinkedIn? So it'll wait a day or two. You can decide how you want to space it out.

10:18You can message every day or every two, three days. So I have it where it will take an action every three days, right? And so two, three days later, I'll send you a message on LinkedIn. And again, it'll scan what it is that you talk about on LinkedIn and it'll like try to follow up with something creative. And from there, if they don't respond again, I'll send them another email. Basically, it's like five touch points before it gives up. And the whole logic here is if you don't get them in the five touch points within this quarter, try again next quarter, right? Try with something new, not just keep following up, keep following up, keep following up.

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13:35I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't. That's up to you. We don't use it at our organization. But just keep in mind, it's a state by state. It's not federal for privacy laws in the United States. So you have to filter by state too. Yeah. Okay. Let's move over to outbound now. Outbound, I wasn't sure that this would work. But the messages that send, like I looked at it yesterday, it was like, oh, hey, Neil, saw you talking about, you know, ABM, you know, XYZ on LinkedIn, right? We have something that will help you generate scalable, personalized LinkedIn ads in minutes instead of weeks, right?

14:09Would you be interested in chat? That's all the message is. It's not complicated or anything. And it came up with that itself. And then by the way, a lot of the emails look pretty different, but they're all very simple. It's like, you know, once you prompt it well, it's like good, right? Yeah. So it has done a good job. It's we've sent probably like five or 600 emails. We got five meetings booked. That's awesome. Yeah. That's incredible. Right. And so here's where it screwed up. So that part's amazing. Here's where it screwed up. Imagine because it scans your LinkedIn. Imagine if you reposted something about your friend's home getting burnt down.

14:48Okay. I message you, I say, Neil, I'm so sorry you lost your home because you reposted something about your home burning down. That's what it did. So it, it misinterpreted one of the recent LinkedIn posts and it said, Oh, I'm so sorry you lost your, that's really bad. Right. Um, so you have to be very careful there. And I've been like, cause my team's been setting it up, but I'm in that Slack group. So I've been on them like, guys, you can't do that. You like anything negative, you got to flag it or just do not post that. Is it able to show you all the messages it would send out and it's queued before it actually goes out or no?

15:23They claim they can. I don't think they can quite yet. Because then you can just say send, send, send, deny, deny, send. I think eventually they'll be forced to add that. Right now I think it's more on the automated side because it's still early days from the... But I think there's like 17 of these AISDR tools right now. I think it's pretty saturated. But I think for you and me it's going to become table stakes um at some point yeah so i i haven't tested out ai sdrs whether it's this tool or another tool um i do like the concept of using it for outbound i don't like the concept for using it for inbound even if it can drive leads i think uh a lot of people just be creeped out and will be pissed off i think from a privacy standpoint you you you're you're right to an extent i think but if you think about all the stuff you generate the webinars you have the eBooks, you have the data that you have, if you just send them that stuff, um, maybe that's more disarming than say, Hey, come buy my shit.

16:21We believe for our organization, and I'm not saying we're right on this. We like having sales reps. So even for our webinars, we have BDRs and following up, uh, or no SDRs is SDRs or BDRs. The ones who first call, um, or it's not account executives, but we, we have people dialing. and we like the human touch, even if like AI could send out mass emails or do mass phone calls. And I know it's a little bit archaic. We really do like the human touch in a consulting business. And we believe that our sales reps should be humans and they should be the ones reaching out. We don't mind using tools to help them become more efficient, but we still love that human one-to-one connection versus AI just doing it at a mass scale and trying to handle phone calls eventually.

17:14I don't think we should get rid of humans. So I'm with you on this. I think to your point though, what I'm looking for, the key point you said is I'm looking for more efficiency so my humans can go work on things that are higher leverage. And to me, higher leverage is like a relationship like this because you can't, at least for the next decade, I don't think you can just have a human, you can't outsource relationship building to a robot in person. I don't think you can. Yeah. All right, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to markingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster.

17:44And we'll see you tomorrow.