Search Is Changing: Shift Your Strategy & Tactics to Adapt 

Today I came across this statement regarding recent and future changes to digital marketing: “Advertisers who rely  only on high-intent targeting will struggle as competition drives CPCs higher. The brands that win will be those that nurture leads across multiple touchpoints.”

“High-intent marketing” means search ads and other conversion-driven marketing tactics. We are at the beginning of a shift in how successful digital marketing works.

We can continue to apply tactics to the same strategies, but it will get more expensive and less effective over the next year or two.  Strategy and tactics need to be ready to change with the times.

Google Has Already Been Preparing

We have seen Google preparing for the change in search and privacy-first marketing over the last several years.

Keyword match types have changed significantly to focus on intention and not specific words or word groupings (exact-ish match and loss of broad match modifier).

Campaign types are now designed to work within the broader scope of intent-based targeting. With P-Max, there are no true keyword targets. We add examples of what we believe to be relevant terms used by our target audience, literally called “hints” by Google.

Landing page content, not keywords, has the greatest influence on targeting ads to people and searches. In this light, audiences, demographics, interests, and geography are limiting factors, not positive targeting factors.

Demand Gen videos and responsive display ads now use PMax targeting and bidding AI. This results in a big push for site owners to collect and apply their own first-party data.

Related reading: Yesterday’s Logic: A Warning to Change with the Times

Change Your KPIs to Measure What Matters

Another signal that digital marketing is changing is encouragement from generally respected SMEs who suggest that the KPIs we rely on will need to change over time.

This is from Rand Fishkin, who formerly owned MOZ and now co-owns SparkToro. Rand points out that his company considers web traffic a “vanity metric.” His reasons for this include:

• Today’s websites get less traffic due to “clickless search” where the user’s query is answered in the results page, so there’s no reason to go to the website.
• AI Overviews in Google search results will reduce site traffic even more.
• As AI search and answer engines proliferate, there will be even more reduction in non-paid website traffic.

If web traffic is falling and there isn’t much chance of its recovery, it’s time to start measuring what matters.