Rand Fishkin: Zero-Click Marketing

"The digital world has become a zero-click world. Traffic referrals from every major network have fallen precipitously. Searchers and browsers expect native content and instant answers. Brands, especially those looking to gain a foothold in the ruthless competition for web traffic, are left struggling for scraps.

A mindset shift is needed—marketers can’t be stuck optimizing for clicks, measuring impact based on referral traffic and single-visit conversion rates. The old tactics are dying. To survive, marketers must prioritize earning engagement and growing audiences on the platforms themselves. We have to conform to new algorithmic rules and new user expectations—that's where Zero-Click Marketing comes in. In this presentation, Rand will show how it works, why it's needed, and how to apply this tactical shift to every channel and campaign."

Transcript

1. Rand Fishkin, CEO Zero Click Marketing Why It's Time for Brands and Creators to Give Up on Click-Based Attribution and, Instead, Embrace Impact.
2. In 1937, Coke put up this San Francisco Billboard
3. Then along comes Digital Marketing… Buying billboards is throwing away money! With digital, we can track every view and click a customer makes before they buy from you, so you’ll never waste a marketing dollar again.
4. How did it all go sideways?
5. 3rd-Party Cookies Are Nearly Dead Source: StatCounter Once both browsers block 3rd-party cookies, this tracking system is kaput.
6. 1st-Party Cookies are Getting Less Effective & Accurate, Too Source: Clearcode
7. Users are manually blocking our fancy tracking techniques Source: DuckDuckGo
8. Ad Blockers don’t just block ads… they block most of how we stitch together user journeys, too Source: Hootsuite
9. Multi-device journeys are now standard Source: Cisco
10. What’s Possible & Legal in the US Isn’t Most Anywhere Else Source: In Country
11. OK… So maybe we can’t reliably track views, but we can still see clickthroughs!
12. What Happened to Clicks?
13. At First It was just Google
14. Convenient for users (and infuriating for creators)
15. Hey! We had a deal: you can crawl & index us, free; but, in exchange, you send us traffic
16. In 2024, what happens after Europeans search 37.4% Nothing. (the browsing session ends) 22.3% Another search. (in Google’s “all” tab) 40.3% One or more clicks... (to one of the 3 options below) 74.6% (to unpaid, organic results) ? 59.7% “Zero-Click Searches” 24% (to YouTube, Maps, Images, News, or another Google property) 1.4%* (to a paid ad) That means… For every 1,000 EU Google searches, 374 clicks go to the open web. The full report is here, assembled & analyzed by Source: clickstream panel provided by
17. Clicks here are declining (and they’re dominated by big brands) Searchers who are happy with these “Google answers” keeps rising
18. And now there’s predictive answering, too! Is that a “Negative-Click” search?
19. AI Overviews could compound this problem.
20. Assembled & analyzed by Zero-Click Searches in the European Union vs. United States (measuring all searches in Google performed by the panel’s mobile* and desktop devices, January-May 2024) Source: clickstream panel provided by * Study panel includes desktop & mobile browser searches only; zero-click searches may be higher in Google Assistant/Google Search App queries
21. Then it expanded to The Rise of Zero-Click Everything
22. 🚫 Instagram: No Links Allowed! 🚫
23. 🚫 TikTok: No Links Allowed! 🚫
24. 😐 Twitter: Link at Your Own Peril… 😐 Twitter reduces the reach of posts with links (until they do well despite being kneecapped)
25. 😐 Threads: Link at Your Own Peril… 😐 Meta’s Threads algorithm hates links, too (they’re nearly impossible to find in “For You”)
26. 😐 LinkedIn: Link at Your Own Peril… 😐 Link in Comments or GTFO (literally a 90% reduction in reach for posts w/ links) ~10X the reach with zero-click content
27. This one has a link. This one has no link. ~10X the reach with zero-click content 😐 Facebook: Link at Your Own Peril… 😐
28. Every Platform Prioritizes *Native Content* Source: SparkToro
29. And then there’s Dark Social
30. 76% of our visitors come from “Direct?!”
31. Yet, only 29% land on the homepage…? Are people really typing or bookmarking these long URLs?
32. We ran an experiment to measure Dark Social, and found entire networks hiding referral data: 100% hidden 100% hidden 100% hidden 100% hidden 100% hidden 75% hidden 30% hidden 14% hidden If these sites & apps send you traffic, your analytics will report those visits as “Direct”
34. Does Anyone Still Send Clicks?
35. ** Sites with a single owner that pass referrals via multiple entities have been grouped (e.g. Twitter.com, Twimg.com, and T.co; Live.com, Bing.com, MicrosoftOnline.com, Office.com, and Office365.com; etc.) &
36. But That’s Not Where People Spend Time…
37. Search may send the clicks, but it’s only the 5th most-trafficked category overall. Microsoft, Canva, Adobe, OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, and dozens of others are included in Productivity
38. What to Do?
39. Just Spend More on Ads, Right? Via AdWeek, NYT, Input, & HBR
40. “What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So, we’re not going to forget that lesson.” -Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb Via Campaign
41. The Parable of the Pizzeria
42. WHY WORK HARD TO MAKE MORE SALES, WHEN I COULD JUST GET CREDIT FOR SALES THAT WERE ABOUT TO HAPPEN ANYWAY?
43. Hard to swallow pills The best marketing opportunities are often the least measurable
44. the What’s Solution?
45. Go Where Your Audience Is…
46. Be Present in the Places They Hang Out
47. Don’t be afraid of Zero-click Searches Think of SEO as brand marketing > traffic driving (i.e. how we already do most PR and social media marketing)
48. Or Zero-Click Content No Link. Tons of Love. (these videos are some of our most impactful marketing, even though we cannot attribute a single conversion to them)
49. Zero-Click = More Reach
50. Zero Click Content Can Build a Following
51. It Grows Brand, Subscribers, & Connections
52. The hard conversation you’ll need to have: You should be able to attribute every marketing dollar spent to the sales it produced. Sorry, 2010-Rand, attribution is dead. Demand it and you’ll overspend on paid for sales that would have happened anyway. And you’ll underinvest in the serendipitous, hard-to-measure channels with the highest ROI
53. Find a source that reaches your audience Provide unique value that earns their attention Wow them. Turn their audience into your audience Nudge ‘em to your site. A podcast. A YouTube channel. A media or blog site. An event or webinar. An email newsletter. Create content. Engage them on social. Invite them to your platform. Help them w/ a problem. Get a warm intro + rec. Provide value they can’t get anywhere else. Comb through their previous work and uncover which ones rocked (and didn’t). Go above and beyond. Don’t push; nudge. Watch Google Trends for branded search lift. Engage their audiences on social. Follow up with everyone you can. Use non-promotional calls to action. Free tools. An email newsletter. Free research reports. An engaging blog/news section. An episodic content series. The Zero-Click Flywheel A Flywheel Like This Might Work For You:
54. To measure, do what Coke did in the 20th Century
55. #BONUS A few extra tips…
56. What does this mean for marketers?
57. #1 Those who focus exclusively on traffic acquisition are stuck with search. Not a lot of channel diversity here.
58. #2 Trying to prove acquisition via referral strings will make you Google’s fool. Almost everything that happens in these categories… Leads to one of these… Guess who gets credit in your analytics?
59. #3 To win at social, you’ve gotta embrace zero-click content. All these sites combined send ~1/7th what Google does.
60. #4 To determine platform prioritization, research where your audience engages: e.g. If I wanted to reach graphic designers, I’d take a close look at Behance, Pinterest, and LinkedIn
61. Human Content > AI Content (yes, even in 2024)
62. The Minimum Bar for Content Better than nothing Better SEO’d than the competition Better than what’s on page two of Google Better than what Buzzfeed-style content mills are spitting out Better than what ChatGPT can create 1995-2001 2002-2008 2009-2012 2013-2018 2023-20XX 2019-2022 Better than what the Big Tech platforms can zero-click answer* * E.g. instant answers on the front page of Google’s results, native content in the algorithmic feeds of social platforms, etc.
63. Spelling AI’s Content Advantages Human Content Advantages Quantity Speed Cost Quality Novelty Creativity Artistry Humor Resonance In every algorithmically-driven field, someone is going to invest in these and win with them.
64. Threads is Probably Going to Crush Twitter
65. Via AppFigures & Insider
66. ~Same metrics, 1/100th the followers. Threads’ engagement rate is HUGE.
67. The Return of Barnacle SEO
68. Via r/dataisbeautiful
69. Via Detailed
70. Despite breaking this story (and being linked-to in every one of these), SparkToro can’t rank for it
71. 98% YouTube on page one of Google
72. Want to appear? Better use YouTube.
73. Want to appear? Better use Reddit.
74. Want to appear? Better use Pinterest.
75. There is One Channel Where Engagement Hasn’t Fallen Off a Cliff
76. 20 years of doomsaying, yet email marketing stats are nearly unchanged!
77. Thank You! Want to chat more? I’m @randeruiter on Threads or rand@sparktoro.com.