The impact of AI overviews on SEO, Google starts testing ads in AI overviews, Google CEO is ’empathetic’ to content creators Search has wiped out, The economics behind a $100k creator deal

0:00Quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain. Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies.

0:30do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Let's just talk about the impact of AI overviews on SEO. First, let's explain what AI overviews is. It's basically SGE, so search generative experience. um it's the answers yeah it's basically david sacks put this in a good way it's it's basically perplexity so perplexity it's like when you search for something you get um the answer and you get like everything it's cited right that's what it is um and so far so siege media so this is a ross hudgens tweeted this and i'll just say that he did a post on this and it shows that um so far there's like a slight CTR increase and when I say slight CTR increase for AI overviews for all industries average CTR this is May 8th to May 11th this is pre-AI overviews 3.64 % average CTR and then 5.15 % to 5.18 % the CTR jumps up to 3.75 % and this is on a sample size of 65 million impressions for both here's the thing He even concludes this at the end.

1:53It's too early to say anything, right? This thing's in. It just came out of beta, and it's going to continue to get better over time. And some people are making fun of the citations, saying they're inaccurate and everything. I just think we need to give this at least another six to 12 months before calling it out. I think too many SEOs are trying to dive into this a little too early right now. That being said, I am trying to get new data. I know you're getting data too, so you'll share it. I'm getting more data from Bright Edge's CEO, Jim. And I said, whenever you got some new stuff, share it with us, and we'll talk about it on the podcast.

2:21So I think, you know, hold your horses a little bit. Yeah. And then do you see Google's testing ads within, um, you know, the AI overviews? No. Yeah. So they're testing ads. So what ends up happening is, is they have the air or reviews, they're citing the sources. And then as you scroll a little bit more, they're showing you paid ads right then and there. Hmm. I wonder how they'll do for them. I don't know, but you know, they're going to end up doing stuff that's going to make, make their earnings go up in the long run and not down. and they're going to keep experimenting and testing until they get the formula right.

2:54And at the same time, did you hear what Google CEO said about, what is it called? About being empathetic to content creators that search has wiped out? Pretty much, and this is from Search in the Line. Google CEO is empathetic to content creators search has wiped out. It's basically like you're shit out of luck. He's being nice. He's saying like, of course that's not Google's goal. and then they talk to him about certain websites. He's like, well, I had to look into those. Those could be edge cases. And he's empathetic, but do you really think he actually cares? Eric's shaking his head, yeah. I think for them, it's just a business.

3:34They're here to monetize and do what's best for them. Yeah, and here's the thing. I got a text from a mutual friend the other day and they're just saying, dude, our site's lost all its traffic, blah, blah, blah. What else can we do aside from trying to get Reddit traffic back? Who do you know? and I just made an intro to someone else. But this just goes to show again, like their business, and you know these guys, but their business was all affiliate, right? And when you put all your eggs into one basket like that, just, you know, you got to be prepared to deal with the repercussions. And most people don't know how to deal with them because they haven't prepared for it.

4:08Their income was affiliate, as in they monetize their organic SEO traffic and then send it to affiliates. Yeah. Yeah, most of those businesses really got hit hard. And we have a lot of friends in the affiliate space that got hit. And you know, one thing Neil did that was really smart, previously you were getting, what, like four or five million visitors per month, something like that? Something like that, yeah. And now you're down to what? I don't know, I haven't checked. At least a few million visitors a month. The point is, Neil was so diligent about collecting emails and building his audience within that, that that insulated him from any potential hit.

4:43The hit would hurt him for sure, but at least it's insurance. It was not even that. We did something else that insulated us even more, but we didn't focus too much on emails. We focused on targeting. We focus actually more on account-based marketing. Who's our ideal customers? How do we get just in front of them and start winning business that way? And even in this bad market this year, we'll probably grow 20 to 30%. Organically. Some organic, some M &A. So what I'm hearing is, you can call it ABM. Some people like to call it signal-based selling now, but it sounds like of the millions of people visiting, there's going to be a small subset of people that fit your ICP.

5:22And then your salespeople will be able to spot the signals, how much they're engaging with your content, and then reach out to those people. Bingo, you got it right. So signal-based selling, that's a new term, guys, but it's basically account-based marketing. Yes, I still like the account-based marketing. But it works really well. And instead of being like, hey guys, we need to go create 30 pieces of content this week and get this many views. We're just like, okay, well, we do all that. Here's how many leads that generates when you have four or five, six million visitors a month. And here's how much of that turns into revenue.

5:52And no joke, our traffic has gone down at least two X, I would say during the, from the peak. But our revenue has gone up more than three or four X from that time period. And what we learned through this, which was a hard lesson for us as marketers as yes, traffic is great, but if it doesn't convert into revenue, who cares? So we started focusing on traffic that converts and we ignored everything else, even if that meant our rankings would drop for all the other terms. Sure. Some of the algorithm updates didn't go our way. Some of them did go our way, but it was more so we focus on updating the piece of content that were actually driving revenue.

6:29We're looking at our lead sources and which lead sources were caused by certain content pieces, write more of those pieces of content, ignore the others. And what we found is the stuff that was driving the majority of the leads was like, or majority of the revenue, not leads, but majority of the revenue was like, we have a blog in five different languages. How should we structure our blog? Or we have, we have a blog in multiple languages. How should we structure it? That's an enterprise type question. It can be for small businesses too, but yeah. Yeah. And those type of posts were driving the smallest amount of leads, the most amount of revenue.

7:06Most of our leads were coming from things like someone Googling digital marketing, SEO, and no joke, our close rates from those leads were pathetic. It was just non-qualified businesses that were like, Hey, I just found out what SEO is. I want to hire someone. What can you do for a hundred dollars a month? Yep. And it just wasn't working. So we shifted our strategy to go after ultra long tail. That's very specific to enterprise. All right, everyone, quick message from the agency owners association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well.

7:41And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. We also, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions, personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io slash agency. once again that's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more and we hope to see you inside what other creative deals have you worked out from sponsorships I'm sure you have some dude my best deal that I ever did maybe not the best deal but one of my favorite deals they still hit me up I tend not to do it PayPal they hit me up typically through Edelman that's a fat deal yeah and every time you create a quick video hundred grand like just deposit in your account and I used to do them two to three times a year.

8:39So it was a quick two to 300 grand in pure profit. Those were pretty good deals. They don't have to travel anywhere, lo-fi content, just taking a video, just shooting it. The hardest part with the Edelman deal, no joke, or the PayPal deal, because Edelman would pay me for it, was actually not even signing the contract, submitting the invoice and getting paid because it would always come like three months late. But I didn't care. It was pure profit. So you got paid, what, every quarter for that? I didn't do it four times a year. I would do it max of two or three times a year. And my finance team or AR team would chase it down.

9:16So it's not like I had to do anything to get the money. I didn't really pay attention to it. Creative deal, well, I mean, we actually have people reaching out to us. But the way these creative deals are structured now, there's no 100K deal. But there's a lot of people offering 10, 20 grand just for us to sponsor their podcasts. or sorry, their product and service and it could be for like two, three episodes and they might pay like shots of like 10, 20 grand or so. And they're not really monitoring the metrics and that's pretty easy. There's a well-known software company out there. They don't track ROI.

9:49And so - Ahrefs? You know, these people are easy to work with. Yeah, this is a good company. Just in general, they're a good company. The way I look at a lot of these deals is you can end up doing them. It makes money in marketing, but like, You got to look at the long-term game. Do you want a quick 60 grand a month or 100 grand here or there? Or would you rather try to build a multi-billion dollar business and focus all your energy on that? And there's honestly no right or wrong answer. There's a lot of people who did really well just through influencer marketing. That's the Brian Johnson quote again.

10:22Making money is the most expensive thing you can do. I still don't think it's the most expensive thing you can do. We didn't get to clarify it from him. So now it's open to interpretation. Yeah, it's open to interpretation. You're totally right, but I don't think it's the most expensive thing to do. I think it is the most expensive to do as a CEO on your health. I do think it takes a toll on your health. We'll just have to do a round two with him. I'll probably have him come to the YPO Miami thing. Let's see if we can do that. And I do agree, yes, you don't want to monetize too early, but there's also a thing of monetizing too late.

10:54And I learned that from Ramit Sethi. I remember when I first started blogging on Quick Sprout, I wouldn't monetize. And I would just keep emailing and emailing, giving value for free for like six plus years. Yeah, you trained your audience. Bingo, you got it right. And Ramit's like, you trained your audience to expect everything for free. You got to actually train them to be open to paying for stuff. And it was a hard transition and we weren't able to monetize well at the beginning. And it took us a year and a half to two years to get that long. Longer, I think. Because in the beginning, like people hated you for changing like that, just like they hated Ramit for like charging$5 and they called him a sellout.

11:29You did the same. I can tell when you're making that transition, it was very unnatural. And then you moved into selling courses for a little bit. Eventually it was some group coaching stuff. Eventually it translated to agency. I feel it was in there too. That's right. But it took a few years to really figure out how to make money and the audience to be okay with it. And it was tough because you're losing a lot of your existing audience. You've got to bring in new people. I do think if you monetize too early, you're not building your top of funnel big enough. if you're monetizing too late it hurts you because you train your audience to expect it for free a great example of a company that did it right in my opinion is microsoft with teams remember during covid hey yeah looks like it's framing but we're free and it would really hurt slack at certain points with their stock right because people like yeah it doesn't matter if your user interface is better teams is free yeah like we as an organization just use teams because we're like it's free it doesn't matter if you say slack's better or not who wants a six-figure bill a year when you can get something for free.

12:30Dude, a lot of people are coming off of it. There's a lot of alternatives now. Have you just seen David Sachs' alternative, Glue? Which uses AI. Yeah, it uses AI and then you have Once from 37 Signals where you just pay once. Yep. Are you still paying for Slack? Or you're on Teams? We're on both. Teams now costs money. But Microsoft eventually ended up making a transition where they started charging for Teams. And I think they did it at the right time. But what's funny is for a lot of corporations, people talk about like G Suite. A lot of corporations just use the Microsoft Suite because it's cheaper and it's good enough.

13:05Is that what you're on? Outlook? I'm not on there. My company is on there. But your Gmail is connected to like your company email. I know I don't have a corporate email address. It's just neilpadel.com. Yeah, I refuse to use Outlook. It's hard to use Outlook. I'm one of the few people. It's just like our company laptops or PCs. I refuse to use a PC Wow, who mandated that? I have no idea You're an IT person Someone picked There's a point where you don't know everything It's just too hard to be on top of everything You're just on what you like That's it for today everyone Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe We're going to show you all how we build this community And if you have an agency We're going to help you build your agency faster That being said, we'll see you tomorrow