Measuring the ROI of marketing is challenging.
Half of marketing spend is a waste as they say, you just don’t know which half.
And although platforms like Meta Ads or Google Ads are trying to make it look simple, the reality is they’re just attributing whatever they can to themselves. If you don’t believe me, run a campaign across multiple ad platforms. Add up their reported conversions. It’ll be way bigger than the actual conversions you registered in your CRM.
Rand Fishkin at SparkToro has been saying it: attribution is dying, clicks are dying. The way we’ve done digital marketing for twenty years is ending.
Precise attribution is a myth.
Even SEO Tracking Was Never Accurate
In SEO, tracking used to be focused on “organic” traffic in Google Analytics.
But even that wasn’t precise. Tons of traffic has always been branded: people searching for your brand name and landing on your site. Depending on your industry, 40-60% of your “organic” traffic is people who already know your name. That’s not SEO. That’s brand recall. I’ve written about why measuring SEO ROI is so hard, but the short version: most of what counts can’t be counted.
Should this really be attributed to your SEO efforts?
AI Made It Even Messier
What’s the value of being the recommended option in an AI overview, vs. having a link point to your website on the side?
I’d take the recommendation every time. But you might have to report hard numbers to your CEO who likes to see channels next to investment and ROI.
We know that traffic from LLMs converts at a much higher rate than any other channel. Microsoft analyzed 1,200+ publisher sites and found AI referral traffic had a 1.66% sign-up conversion rate. Organic search? 0.15%. That’s 11x higher. AI traffic also grew 155% while search grew just 24%.
However, we only know that about the part of LLM answers where there was a clickable link to our site.
What about the other times?
What about every single time where, based on an individual user’s location, situation, or challenge, your brand was mentioned as the recommended option?
And what about all the times where an AI, due to a lack of knowing your brand, couldn’t surface your products and sent a potential client of yours directly to your main competitor?
Where Tracking Should Stand
Here are a few thoughts on where tracking should stand.
- SEO is a foundational element of marketing. It helps people who search what you sell find you, in different ways, on different platforms.
- Some of the most important marketing activities will not show in any reporting, but they make logical sense and ultimately will help you grow.
- Getting mentioned more often in the context of your target ICP, their challenges, and competitors’ brands.
- Getting more people to learn how your product solves a problem.
- Building links from relevant websites in your space to your site.
- Participating in industry-leading online magazines.
- Don’t demand precision in marketing attribution if you don’t demand it everywhere else. What’s the ROI of the salary of a CMO? Of the CFO? A lot of things can only be seen as impactful when looking at the bottom line after a longer period of time. The same happens with proper marketing.
This is the thinking behind Search Everywhere Optimization: be visible where your buyers look, not just where tracking works. Build the foundation first. The measurements follow.
The Cost of Waiting for Hard Numbers
The problem is, because tracking is hard, brands aren’t doing the most fundamental things that should be part of any marketing mix.
I’m seeing 7 and 8 figure Shopify brands lacking the most basic SEO optimization and now struggling in LLMs.
I just saw a 7 figure consultant with a website as crowded and outdated as it could be, leaving probably hundreds of thousands on the table over the last 2 years just because website work didn’t seem to have a measurable ROI.
Or what about the ecommerce site migrating to WooCommerce on their own, only to find themselves drop 80% in revenue in the process. It then took me a few months to get them back up.
Some Decisions Need to Be Made from Logic
If you’re convinced in your heart this makes sense, delay seeing the outcome in numbers for a bit. Focus on getting the things right that you know, logically, just make sense.
The numbers catch up.
Not sure which fundamentals you’re skipping? Book a diagnostic call and I’ll tell you what you’re missing →