230: Zero-click marketing broke the measurement layer, so what should ops teams do now, with Amanda Natividad

Phil: you pretty much coined the term zero-click marketing with Rand back in, like, 2022, Amanda: it's not that people aren't seeing your marketing, it's actually that more people are seeing it while fewer of them click one of my favorite examples of this is HubSpot, they lost 80% of their organic traffic that same year, they reported record high revenue, so I don't think they were crying about that organic traffic. I'm not suggesting never look at attribution or things like that.

especially in mature or larger organizations, I do think it's just healthier to go into it with eyes wide open, we ran this experiment where we sent over 1,100 visits across 11 social networks, and then we measured what Google Analytics reported. TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, 100% of that traffic is reported as Direct. ​ In This Episode - Phil: What's up, everyone? Today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and the founder of Zero-Click Marketing, built around the framework she co-created with Rand Fishkin, and they have an upcoming book together as well.

In this conversation, we explore why attribution breaks down in a zero-click world, what the alligator graph means for ops teams, how to run a zero-click launch week you can actually measure, what audience listening adds to the marketing ops stack, and how to turn audience research into an operational system. All that and a bunch more stuff after a very quick word from two of our awesome partners ​ Phil: Amanda, thank you so much for your time today. Really excited to chat on a Friday.

Thanks for doing this. Amanda: You know what? I didn't wanna be here at all, and I'm really busy. I just...

No, I mean, okay, you guys, so anyone listening or watching, Phil gave me a note in advance that says, in response to this, "Say anything but thank you for having me." And so I just kinda said whatever popped into my head just now. I was like, "Don't say it. Don't say it.

Say Phil: I don't wanna be here. It's funny, that actually happens to a lot of people 'cause it's like that, that thing of like naming the elephant, like don't name the elephant. It's the, the only thing you think of. Amanda: How many people say like, "Thanks for having me.

Fuck." And they're like, "I'm so sorry." Phil: actually happens quite a bit, and I'm just like, "You know what?" I'm like, "No, we're, we're not starting over.

It's fine. It's not a big deal. We're diving into it anyways." Amanda: We're just gonna cancel this episode.

It's fine. We'll just delete it. Phil: Amanda doesn't want to be here. She'd rather be pickleballing right now, Amanda: I'd rather be watching pickleball, not even playing it, just watching Phil: But on seriousness, I, I really appreciate your time.

Like I said in our first email, such a big fan of yours and Rand's, and been following you guys for, uh, many moons. And, uh, it is really honestly an honor to, to have you on the show here. I know you're writing a book about zero-click marketing, and we're gonna get un- into some of the topics here. But, like, you pretty much coined the term zero-click marketing with Rand back in, like, 2022, and since then the term has reached what I think is, like, mass appeal.

Like, I looked at Google Trends, and it's like 2025, like boom, huge spike of people using that term. It spawned a book for you, like a podcast, wave of conference talks, lots of podcast episodes. And I feel like most of the stuff when you talk about zero-click marketing, the focus is on, like, why it works and what to publish, the content focus. Um, feel like you've covered that ground really well on a lot of other conversations.

We wanted to take this in the depths of martech and, and marketing ops, and more about the measurement infrastructure. So if people are doing more zero-click marketing stuff that we can't really track that well, what does that mean for measurement? And if the click is the lagging indicator of trust, most attribution models inside t- ops today probably measuring the wrong thing. So that's where we wanted to get started on today.

Um, but yeah, Darrell, I'll let you tee off the first one. Darrell: Yeah. I mean, so I'm bought into zero-click marketing, and many other content teams are, but the attribution infrastructure is still built for the first-click world. Um, you know, events triggered by clicks and scoring models, et cetera, et cetera.

So if the content strategy is working but the measurement layer isn't, I feel like that causes a lot of problems. 1 - Why Attribution Breaks Down in a Zero Click World - Darrell: So Amanda, what breaks downstream in the attribution stack when the zero-click marketing strategy is actually working? Amanda: Ooh, I like that. Okay, so what breaks down?

So the thing that I've been saying is, and there's a lot of tension that I have in talking about attribution and measurement, because when I talk about measuring things like incrementality and measuring some of those leading and lagging indicators, I think some people reflexively, and this is partly because of the way we've trained ourselves, digital marketers, right? Some people reflexively feel like, "Oh, but that's less rigorous," like h- like w- you need attribution. But here's where I'm going to say attribution is not as, it's not as rigorous as it used to be, and it's not as rigorous as we were once promised.

So the iss- the quibbles that I have with attribution are this: it's only about, like, 30% of users who accept third-party cookies, and then Safari rejects third-party cookies by default, so there's already that. And then there's also people who use, um, ads, uh, uh, ad blockers on their browsers, right? Like, I use one. Do you either...

Do you guys use an ad blocker? I know we're, we're, the worst, right? And it's something like 20 to, 20 to 60% of people use an ad blocker, and in the case of tech-savvier audiences, that number is probably closer to 60%. So, you know, I think if you're, especially if you're in the B2B industry where you're working with a lot of knowledge workers, most likely you're working with, uh, with people who, who, a, a big chunk of that audience is already blocking those analytics tracking.

There's also the multi-device journey, right? So we have three point, an average of 3.6 devices per person worldwide, and so good luck to us in trying to track people pre-login. And then the last reason is privacy regulation, right?

Things like GDPR, CCPA, LGPD. What's possible and legal here in the US is not possible or legal most anywhere else. So that compliance burden alone makes persistent tracking impractical, especially for teams who have global audiences, and that's before we even get into the messy stuff. So we're already starting at this point where things are not as rigorous as they were when, you know, all this digital tracking and attribution first launched.

Um, I might pause there to see, like, I don't know. Like, do you... Is there something I'm missing there? Is there anything you'd push back on right now?

Phil: Yeah, for me, I- there's nothing I would push back on 100% agree there are clear limitations, especially when we're talking about, like, that visible online trackable journey. Like, even though there are some things we can track, it's oftentimes broken, and it's really hard to do. Like, some tools try to do it really well and have, like, a good data foundation for it, and a lot of folks are gravitating more towards what else can we do to round out that, like, measurement picture?

Because, like, n- understanding and knowing that, like, this methodology for tracking people isn't perfect isn't then a good enough reason to tell leadership that we don't have to track marketing anymore. Like, we, we, we, still need to figure out a way to measure what's working and, and what's not working. So that's the part where it's like, all right, like, we're looking at MMM now, we're looking at, uh, incrementality. What else can we do from, like, geo-testing?

Are there holdout testings that we can do while still having MTA for, especially for ads, like, on, on the ad stuff, like, when you're doing, like, DTC-type purchases. Like, you know, you don't have to worry about that cross-device stitching, uh, ID resolution. Like, it's all happening in one single session for some products. In SaaS and B2B, it's a whole different picture, long sales cycle.

So 100% agree. I feel like there's, there's a whole episode to unpack there. Darrell just finished, like, a town hall, uh, with the marketing ops community last month. Was it Darrell?

And just, like, MTA and the state of attribution, it's like, uh, it, it's, it's tough right now for marketers to justify spend on specific topics. Darrell: Yeah. I love the data. I mean, I feel like you really bring the data, Amanda, to...

I think m- many of us are li- are, like, kind of sensing that multi-touch attribution, and attribution in general, doesn't tell the whole story. But, I mean, the stuff about the ad blockers and the, you know, third-party cookie limitations, uh, that's just on- proof right there Amanda: Yeah. Yeah, I, Darrell: it's not enough Amanda: totally. And I, I, you know, and I, I'm not suggesting never look at attribution or things like that.

I, of course I understand, especially in mature or larger organizations, you know, there's... It's also already there, so why would you not look at it? Um, I do think it's just healthier to have, to go into it with eyes wide open, right? To understand, like, okay, these are the limitations that we now have, so what can we do next?

Now, before we unpack that, there is another messy thing I did wanna talk about, which is dark social. So this is the other piece where attribution has really broken down, especially, I think especially in the recent, like, three-ish years, three to four years. And so at SparkToro, where I work, you know, the audience research tool, uh, about two years ago now, we ran this experiment where we sent over 1,100 visits across 11 social networks, and then we measured what Google Analytics reported.

And so for for channel, for, for platforms like TikTok, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and if you care, Mastodon, 100% of that traffic is reported as Direct. Phil: Yeah, I was Amanda: right? So you can't even, you can't put a link in TikTok, right? But even if you could and someone clicked on it, it would be marked as direct.

I mean, do, why is that? I have a theory. You know, it's surprise, surprise. If TikTok says, like, "Well, if you pay us, advertising, if you join our ad network and you give us money, well, we'll bring you the traffic.

We'll sh- we'll, we'll show it to you." You have to pay for it, right? And that's when they can show it to you, so they just hide all the organic strings so that you don't know. But it's not just those platforms.

It's, like, Facebook Messenger, for instance, 75% of the time that referral string is hidden. For Instagram DMs, 30% of the time. For LinkedIn in general, about 14% of the time that referral string is hidden. Now, some people are going to say, like, "Yeah, but if it's Facebook Messenger, you know, that's, that's a one-to-one message.

It doesn't really count as Facebook." But, that's where it's coming from, you know? And it's also that, but we ca- but we can track that. They're just not giving it to us.

You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't, it's not that it's impossible to track, it's that the platforms aren't telling us. So that. Phil: Yeah.

But that, that's also a really good argument. I feel like there... It, it is hard to defend as this like end, end-all and be-all solution to measure what is working in marketing. I feel like it's one piece of the puzzle for the visible online journey.

Um, uh, we had an episode with Canva, um, their head of marketing measurement, and they actually pivoted 100% away from MTA, and they're like all on MMM and, and measurement for, uh, incrementality. And they actually like pivoted back because MTA, they were using it specifically to see real-time fast signals on what was working in their ads, people clicking through, like even though they weren't stitching into revenue or whatever, they were using it for like that first signal is, is some of our ads working, that like leading indicator of, of traffic and clicks.

Uh, we chatted with someone from Asana that still uses attribution to see like what content is actually being consumed in that customer journey, whether that actually led to a causal revenue increase lift or whatever, different conversation. But they were using it to see like of all the things we're doing and publishing, how many of them are visibly showing up in, in that model? And I feel like that's the part that like rounds the whole conversation for us today, because visible tracking, first zero-click marketing, like there is zero click there.

Like the name is perfect, and you kinda mentioned dark social there. So, um, like one thing that I wanted to ask you about, like when people do this really well, like we, we see a lot of these like alligator graphs out there. We'll, we'll put some up on, on the screen for folks that are watching on YouTube, but like alligator as in, um, you know, clicks are going down, but impressions are going up and you're doing well on other platforms. People are seeing what you're doing, but it's not translating into like traffic on your website.

It's usually described as content strategy observation. But for marketing ops teams, um, it's a bit of a different problem because the dashboards are showing failure even though the strategy on zero click is technically working. Impressions are growing. So the measurement tools for ops teams to use to justify their programs are built to kind of undercut exactly what zero click is producing.

2 - What the Alligator Graph Means for Ops Teams - Phil: So the question I have for you is like what does an ops team actually do when they get that alligator graph? Um, and, and they see that showing up in like GA and other tools. Like what do you tell the executive team when the dashboard says like, you know, "Traffic is dipping, but impressions are going up"? What are your thoughts there, Amanda?

Amanda: Yeah. I mean, when that happens, when we have the, the jaws opening or the alligator graph, I mean, the core problem, right, is it's not that people aren't seeing your marketing, it's actually that more people are seeing it while fewer of them click. So in this case, what I would challenge people to look at is, is like, this is assuming these are rising impressions and reducing clicks to your website. I would look at, well, what are the other places, platforms, channels where traffic or engagement or whatever it is, right?

We'll say c- we'll say traffic and conversions, right, are increasing, right? So one of my favorite examples of this is HubSpot, right? Where this was, I think it was last year, right, where they like went viral for a while, where people were talking about how they lost 80% of their organic traffic, Phil: Yeah, like half of the posts on, on LinkedIn from SEO experts were like calling this out. Like, "HubSpot's dying.

Look at their organic SEO." Amanda: like, "Oh, they're done, they're cooked," whatever. But what actually happened was, one, it was, you know, it wasn't a straight up 80% decline out of nowhere. It w- had been happening slowly over a couple of years with each Google update.

So that's one. But the other thing is they lost organic traffic to, to... Well, okay, maybe stepping back for a second. Remember for years and years, HubSpot was spoken about as, like, the gold standard of content marketing because they create...

Right, they created tons of blog posts that ranked for tons of traffic, and so they got that traffic that ranked for whatever. They got a ton of traffic from that. But where they lost that traffic was to pages that were called things like, "How to Type the Shrug Emoji," or, "Most Memorable Quotes," right? Those are things that are not tied to their business of automation software and CRM.

Now, the pages where they talk about automation strategies, marketing automation, CRM, they kept the traffic there, and so those were the money-making pages anyway. And meanwhile, that same year, I think it was Q4 of last year, they reported record high revenue, like all-time high revenue, so I don't think they were crying about that organic traffic. And the other piece is, I don't think enough people talk about, is when you look at HubSpot's content marketing or their marketing mix today, it's not the blog, right?

They have a number of podcasts. It's not just Marketing Against the Grain. They have a number of podcasts. They also have a YouTube channel.

They probably have a couple of YouTube channels, I would guess. They also have, what is it called, like, the HubSpot Creator Network or the HubSpot Media Network where they ha- they own a bunch of podcasts and other media. So they're also getting a lot of impressions there in those platforms and in those channels. So that's where they're doing really, really well marketing wise, right?

They're getting tons of reach, tons of impressions, and they are still making more money than before. Phil: Yeah, the, the, their stock isn't representative of that, but public stock ticker isn't everything. Uh, it, it's funny you bring up HubSpot 'cause just like just the other day, uh, Dharmesh, one of their co-founders, posted that he had just repurchased $1.8 million worth of his own stock at HubSpot trying to like reverse that, that ticker decline from the last like five years or so.

But such a cool case study and example of the alligator graph. I've worked at companies that were really heavy on that SEO organic play, and it was like that inbound engine where like we just drive people to a single landing page. I worked at, like one of my earliest startups was Klipfolio in the BI dashboard space, and we had, funny enough, like a, a really cool dashboard of SEO with like Rand's face on it, and we collaborated with Rand on it like, uh, it's like almost like 12 years ago now.

But we ranked really well on what is a KPI, and it was super high level, low intent, but that page we used to try to move people further down their intent journey. Like what is a KPI? Okay, like how do you create that into a dashboard? What are the most important KPIs per company and whatever?

And I think that's what like HubSpot kept with the top level pages that they cared about, was how to convert that like top page high level intent into people that could then like sign up for the newsletter and eventually like care about buying a CRM. That whole noise about like, uh, like random stuff that they ended up competing for that was really just like similar content to everything else. Like AI visibility just really took over that stuff, right? Amanda: Yeah, and I mean, speaking of AI visibility, I mean, HubSpot now has tools specifically for that.

Like, they have a nice, like, AEO grader where you can just type in your brand. I think, I think it's like you type in your brand, who you serve or something, and it can show you your general visibility score, which is a lot more of a reliable, um, a li- a reliable KPI for as you track your brand in the AI and LLM tools Darrell: Totally. Totally. And I'm a big fa- fan of HubSpot.

I'm like a recent HubSpot user, and I've just been impressed by what, what they're doing. I f- I feel like they've been ahead of the game for, you know, this is just their version of being yet again two steps ahead of the rest of the marketing industry. They started with inbound content and then now with their media network and AI. Um, so I've been a big fan.

But I wanted to ask you about, um, you know, in terms of experimentation with zero-click marketing. And so a common response to the attribution problem is experiments like incrementality tests, holdout groups, things like that to try to isolate, uh, which channels that zero-click marketing is contributing to. So that assumption is that, you know, more rigor fixes the measurement gap, but most experimental, um, design, uh, when, when people design experiments, the, the measurement is usually a little bit different and not really for that.

3 - How to Run a Zero Click Launch Week You Can Actually Measure - Darrell: So I wanted to ask you, like what makes a zero-click marketing measurement experiment worth running, and what are kind of like the wrong types that produce stuff that the team can't actually use? Amanda: Oh, interesting. I think it's more of that as you're designing experiments, it's more about thinking about the things, the, like, the events or campaigns that you can isolate within, you know, a, a reasonable timeframe, which, you know, depends on everybody's marketing mix, right?

But it might be a couple days. So maybe the example right now I can give, because it's very timely for me, it is sales of my book, Zero Click Marketing. So my colleague Rand Fishkin and I, we co-authored this book together. We just announced pre-orders for it about a week and a half ago or so.

Uh, it'll, it's, it'll be out this fall. Pre-order today at zeroclickmarketing.co/book. Anyway, so but we announced these pre-orders, and we had all these assets planned out, created in advance.

I think, you know, I think maybe, like, four years ago, marketers would've been like, "Well, we have all the assets created. Let's go. Let's, it's launch day. Launch all the things," you know?

I'm imagining, like, in Lord of the Rings, they have, like, all the archers lined up. Um, it's like that, or like in Game of Thrones. Anyway, I don't know why I thought that. Sorry for the ADHD, like wah.

anyway, anyway, so but that, but I mean, is that right? Right? Like, you would have all of your launch assets lined up. It's launch day, so you go That makes, that made sense, or it makes sense intuitively.

However, I, well, Rand and I don't see... We don't believe in... Uh, I'll just say what I believe in. I don't believe in launch days.

I believe in launch weeks or launch months, and a big part of that is be freaking for real with yourself. Like, when you launch something on a given day, do you think the majority of your audience is going to take action on that day? They're not, you know? So, no.

So what I say is, like, most almost literally everything, no one's gonna convert... Not no one. The majority of your audience is not going to convert on day one or hour one, right? They need...

They're gonna think about it. They're gonna... Maybe they'll click on it, and they'll be, "Oh, I'll add to cart later," or like, "Oh, I'll, I'll process it later." A week later, they come back, right?

That's just, that's just how people buy. So when we treated this as... So we treated this as a launch week or biweekly sprint. So day one, you know, I prepared the, the announcement on my Substack.

My Substack reaches about 16,000 people. That went out there. Uh, several hours later, I think it was pro- probably like four hours later or so, I, I published it on LinkedIn, right? So meanwhile, we have, like, a live dashboard, a dashboard meaning a Google Sheet that pipe, that, that pipes in the book orders, right?

So we're seeing that come in. I know, like, oh, okay, uh, it was something... I would have to look, but something like 50 to 60 pre-orders came in from my Substack. Like, cool.

I know that's where they came from. If I really wanted to, I can go to my Substack subscriber base and, like, match up the emails if I wanted, but is it worth it? No. I mean, like, we know where it came from.

Then my, then I got the next bucket of conversions from my LinkedIn post, and then I think, you know, Rand engaged with my LinkedIn post, right? The next day... So day one, I think we got to 131 pre-orders. Cool.

So we know that is from my Substack and my LinkedIn. Sure, yes, the power of Rand Fishkin commenting on my LinkedIn post probably did something. Now, do I need to know if that drove two conversions or five? Like, is that important?

I really don't think so. I don't... I, that's where I don't, I don't think getting that granular matters, and I'll s- I'll explain why a little bit later. Next day, that's when Rand did his LinkedIn post, did a video post announcing the book.

we got, uh, 80 more orders, right? So cool, that's looking good. Next day, nothing happened, right? We're still just kinda like riding the high, replying to comments on Substack and LinkedIn.

Um, for people who are pre-ordering and forwarding their confirmation to us, because we also did pre-order bonuses, you know, we reply. We're like, "Great, thank you so much for your support. Here is the SparkToro credit that we promised you." Right?

So like we're - it's a real reason to engage back. That's happening. Orders are trickling in for the next couple of days, and then, uh, so we hadn't even sent the email to our SparkToro database of like 50,000 plus marketers, right? We were saving that one, and again, it's like when you zoom out on these launch days or weeks, does it matter that you did it all on day one?

No, it doesn't. But now we're seeing our organic channels in real time working their magic, so to speak. So we're letting those sales come in. At this point, Rand has probably also published this on like Twitter or X.

We probably both talked about this on Threads. Like, it's probably all there. We're getting more orders, so week two we launch, we, we, we kick off week two with over 300 pre-orders, right? So we're feeling pretty good about this.

We know the channels and platforms that, where we've launched, right? Next comes the email to 50,000-plus subscribers. And again, like, when you, you know, when you're, when you reach scale, you don't expect conversion to be higher or stay the same, right? You know, you, you...

If you email a highly segmented group of, like, 50 people, then yeah, you, you expect conversion will be higher. But for something like this where it's kind of our, our broadest audience, right? Where I'm su- a non-significant amount of people probably don't even know who I am. They're like, "I don't know, this girl Amanda at SparkToro is emailing me, whatever," right?

That, that's how people think. Anyway, we email them on Tuesday, and then we see more orders coming in, and at this point we know, like, okay, the vast majority of today's orders are coming from that email. And so now we are, like, 10 days into launch, I guess. I, I, I, you know, as we record this, about 10 days in, we have well over 460 pre-orders.

So this, I, I go through all of this painstakingly to point out you don't need sophisticated tools to look at impact, right? Especially in this case where a book is, it's not very expensive. You know, it's not like we're trying to sell $1,000-a-year software. That is SparkToro.

Um, in this case, it's like a $30 book bundle. And the other thing I'll say, there was something I, else that I said I'll explain later. Oh, the thing about- The thing, uh, the, uh, the thing I'll, I'll end this kind of rant on is when you look at the things like, well, how many orders did that drive? Was it 10 or was it 12?

You know, and I, and, and how I can tell you, like, yeah, see, I already forgot the numbers as I was saying it because I was looking at the spreadsheet. So, you know, over 100 pre-orders in the first couple days. Great. That's a g- that's a great data point.

But let's say instead of 130, we had a flat 100, right? That's like 30% less sales or whatever. That's probably the wrong math. Don't check it.

It's fewer, and if you're doing a post- postmortem on this, would you say, "Oh, you shouldn't have launched on Substack"? No. Right? You, you might say, like, "Oh, maybe we should have written it better.

Maybe we should have po- put the link higher up." Sure, and that's fine, that's fair, and those are things you can do. But my problem with a lot of this, like, nitty-gritty, you know, analysis of these numbers is it doesn't always make you make better decisions. It doesn't change the decisions you make.

You know? I mean, like, yeah, okay, if I launch on my Substack and we got to 16,000 people, and we got one order, okay, something is messed up there, right? That's where, like, okay, something went wrong. I don't know what, but we gotta diagnose that right now.

So my whole thing is if you want to look at these numbers, if you wanna track them, cool, but think long and hard about how it's going to help you make decisions moving forward Darrell: yeah. I mean, I'm on- I'm 100% on board, and I, I really love... 'Cause you've b- you've kinda put to words what I've been thinking about marketing in general, and, and, you know, I personally do my own personal stuff, like I have a town hall and, you know, um, I have like my own Substack, and I can kinda see exactly what you're saying with the book sales.

Like, I can kinda tell what works and what doesn't, you know? You don't, you don't need to. I think the only, the f- the, the part where things are different is when it comes to spending a lot of money. When you spend a lot of money, all of a sudden there's tons of questions, and actually, a- again, not saying that this is wrong.

All I'm saying is there's, it's like almost a different problem when you're spending, you know, a- and, you know, at the big companies I've worked with, it's, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, and these small things actually matter a lot. So I think that, that whole, um... And this is kind of like a larger marketing question. 4 - How Incrementality Testing Works at Enterprise Scale - Darrell: I think the large, big advertising budgets of some of the leading marketers out there have really messed up marketing for a lot of people, because what works at that level doesn't work at, like, s- the startup level, the medium size level, the SaaS level.

You know? These are, like, almost completely different games. And, um, so I will say that, that, you know, uh, I, I, I'm 100% there, but, but attribution is, is, um, it, it, when it comes to spending a lot of money, it, they're they, they need, they need something. They need like, they need data, they need, they need answers.

You know, I, I, I know we could talk all day about this, Amanda: No, I, no, I, I really, no, genuinely, I'm really glad you brought this up, because what I walked through just now painstakingly, I think that's very, very helpful for smaller businesses, right? People who don't have the scale of like, "Well, we, we put $10 million into PPC ads. Like, that's just what we do." So we could...

Let's talk about that next. Like, we should talk about how do larger organizations with massive budgets, how, how do they, how should they handle this? And this is where incrementality really comes in. So I don't know if you saw, but Dropbox published a study in IEEE Access, like, in, in March of this year, and I love this example because it really speaks to this, it t- it really speaks to how this works at scale.

And so Dropbox's data science team, they ran month-long blackout experiments on mobile advertising and on, um, search engine marketing, right? Search eng- yeah, search, on SEM. So mobile advertising showed attributed return on ad spend, or ROAS, of 1.53, right?

That looks pretty normal, right? It looks, that looks decent. And SEM looked even better. It was like 2X of attributed ROAS.

And now when they went back and measured the causal ROAS, for mobile ads it was 0.7, 0.7 ROAS. SEM was only a little bit better, but it was still underwater at 0.

92. So these ads were literally making Dropbox lose money. Phil: Hmm. Amanda: Now, here's where people can learn from this, right?

You can look at, you can look, you can measure, go back and measure causal r- causal ROAS, but the good thing is Dropbox then was able to reallocate the budget. So they took $25 million away from this low incrementality spend, and then their portfolio lifetime value to CAC improved by 53%. So this is a really good example of, to your point, Darrell, like when people are working with huge budgets, like these things that seem small are a huge deal. Like, if I personally was running mobile ads, right, and saw like 1.

5, mobile ads for my book, right, you know, like I'm an individual, I'd probably spend like a couple hundred dollars. If I'm seeing 1.53 ROAS I'd be like, "Oh, sweet," right? Or if I lost some money, I'd be like, "Well, I only lost like $100.

That's not too bad." To your point, if people are spending millions of dollars on this, then that percentage absolutely matters. So this is a good example of what bigger companies, bigger budgets can do with, like how they can make better decisions simply by measuring incrementality. ​ 5 - What Audience Listening Adds to the Marketing Ops Stack - Phil: So for the marketing ops professionals that are listening to this right now that, you know, maybe haven't really thought about this before, what is audience listening actually producing that's maybe already in their stack, and why does it matter on the technical side, like the pipelines, the scoring, segmentation, not just, like, it matters for the content team?

What, what, what does it matter for ops also? Amanda: Yeah. So I, I, I like audience listening, right? I mean, I think of it too as audience research, right?

You are listening to, you're looking at where your audience is actually spending time, the things they engage with, how they talk about their problems, the way they are searching for their problems in Google and in LLM tools. Now, I can say that you, you can literally search this in SparkToro. Like, we can... You can describe your audience just, like, in plain speak.

We will show you, if we can, if, if your website gets enough traffic, we can show you the increase in brand, in branded search, so you can see that. But you can also see, like, which social networks your audience actually uses, right? So, like, you know, ob- obvious example, whatever, B2B audiences, right? They tend to over-index on LinkedIn compared to the average web user.

Cool. But maybe you'll find that they also over-index on GitHub and WhatsApp and Slack, and sure, you can't just, like, do marketing in GitHub, but it's at, it, it at least tells you the kind of audience that they are, right? These, these, this is their tech stack. This is what they're using.

If you're thinking about, like, the Whats- uh, influencing the WhatsApp and the Slack channels, and you can think about, like, "Well, what can I make that is worth talking about in the company Slack, or what's worth amplifying here?" That's one piece. We can also show you, like, the search and AI tools your audience uses, and literally what they are prompting in ChatGPT. So that is one thing you can do.

That's not the only tool, right? Like, there are other tools, like BuzzSumo, which are really good for social listening, right? Where you can see... You can get a better sense of, like, the content your audience is consuming.

You can use Exploding Topics. Well, this is more of a macro trend, right? To see, like, the macro trends that are rising over time. But you can also look at, I like to say now Alertmouse, because I think we've all set, like, Google Alerts, but they're not very good.

Alertmouse is basically Google Alerts that actually work, and they're actually a lot better Phil: Yeah, I signed up for it recently actually when, when Rand posted about Amanda: Oh, you did? It's, it's really, it's really good, right? Phil: yeah, I have been loving it Amanda: yeah, you get like a daily email digest, or I think it's whatever you want, and it shows you, like, all the, all your brand mentions. But it, it shows it in a relevant way.

Like, it'll, it'll show them by weight, right? So, like, if you get mentioned in, like, uh, The Wall Street Journal, like, that's gonna count a lot more than some, like, random blog, you know? So, like, you'll see that first. Um, you can, you can look at those things, and when you look at these things, though, like, what I would do in Alertmouse is I would set an alert for the topic or category that I play in, right?

The, like, the, the topic or category that I serve, and then seeing in Alertmouse what comes up, because then you're gonna see where the mentions are. You'll... It gives you a proxy for where your audience is probably paying attention to, Phil: Hmm. Amanda: and then you can use, um, you can use the data in SparkToro to just inform how you're, how you're going about these things, right?

Like, you can start thinking about, like, "Okay, I know my audience. They tend to be on, like, LinkedIn and on Instagram, and they're, they tend, they're, they've been prompting in AI tools, like, how to do, um, like, how to do a better, like, RevOps strategy." Like, great. Like, that, that tells you a lot, and this is...

The reason this is important, like, now more than ever is, sure, you can do the SEO keywords thing, and, like, you probably should, right? You should look at, you probably should look at what people are searching for en masse. You should probably look at what people are searching for on YouTube. Cool.

But it's audience research and audience listening that shows you how to do these things. Like, somebody tells you, "Hey, write a blog post on, like, how to RevOps," right? Like, you'd be like, "Well, like, what do I say?" Like, "How do I say it?

Who is this for?" And the audience research can tell you that. Darrell: I love that. Yeah, and so I think the next question are, are talking about signals, and I wanna kind of spin it a little bit because, you know, 6 - What Content Leaders Need From Marketing Ops - Darrell: a lot of our audience is like marketing technology professionals, people behind the scenes pulling data, pulling reports.

And if you, Amanda, like you're so great at content marketing, if you're leading content for a brand or a company, what do you wanna see from the ops teams that would actually change, like, the, the strategy that you're doing? Like, what, like, what examples would you see and reports you would see and you would say like, "Oh, you know what? We need to make some major changes"? Um, and feel free to think about that a little bit, 'cause I changed the question a little.

Amanda: Yeah. No, I, I love that question, 'cause that is like, that's very much like how teams actually work together, you know? And I often say I'm not really a data person, and I say that because like I'm not the marketing ops person. You know, like I'm not the one pulling the reports.

I'm not business intel. But also I would think about this as like what are the things I want, and then how can we work together to, to uncover that together? You know? Like, so I would be thinking about- How we can segment our audience or our core customer a little bit better.

Like, I would be asking you, like, "Hey, is there a way we can figure out who our most engaged customers are?" Now, maybe we can stick with an example of like software or SaaS, right? 'Cause that's, yeah, that's kind of just my world. I would be asking like, "Well, who are the people who are, you know, like reading our blog or listening to our podcast, or they generally attend our webinars pretty often," right?

And these people who are logging into the tool and like actually using our tool, like who are those people? Let's, let's learn about them. I would assume it's a pretty small subset, you know, but then I would be l- looking at like, well what company size are they? What industries do they s- do they serve?

Um, what role are they in? Like, are these usually content marketers or are these actually performance marketers or PR people, right? I would wanna know stuff like that. I would also want to know stuff like, well, who are the people who consume all our free content, you know, the people who do come to like all the webinars, they read all the blog posts, they open all our emails, but they aren't customers yet.

Like, who are those people, right? So these, so I say this as a, as solid examples, right? I'm not saying like, "Show me 100% of people who do this thing," 'cause like I don't know, and the difference between the audience who 100% of the time joins your webinar, they're probably not that different from somebody who joins nine out of 10 times, right? So like those are examples.

So I would want to be looking at things like that because then I would be thinking about, okay, so for the audience who is, who's a- actually our paying customer who uses our tool and likes our stuff, I would wanna know like what else do they need from us? Like how can I better enable them? How can I make them happier? Maybe that's the group I would tap into and be like, "Hey, do you want..."

I would, maybe I might form like a product advisory board or customer advisory board and be like, "Are you interested in joining this? We would include you in alpha tests of our product. We can do like quarterly meetings where it's like just us on a Zoom call talking through marketing problems together. Like, let's figure out how we can solve these things."

Because chances are this really, really small loyal, engaged customer base, it's not gonna be like 10,000 people, you know? It's probably gonna be a lot smaller than that. Phil: Yeah Amanda: And then, you know, for the people who are consuming all the content but not converting yet, then I would wanna know from them like, well, what are the opportunities here? Like that's, that is an audience where I would experiment with more of like- Bottom of the funnel content, like the things that are better tied to conversion, and then seeing, like, okay, are they converting now?

You know? And that, and that's stuff, like, you can create ongoing. You might not know right away if it's working, but here's where I will also say, like, but isn't, isn't it worth creating those bottom of funnel assets anyway? Like, you probably want those anyway.

Like, they could probably be reused as, like, sales talking points. They can probably be repurposed into a sales deck. So that's a kind of asset that, like, sure, it's a... call it a blog post because it goes on the blog, but that's not the only form factor in which it needs to be.

It could be in a customer success deck. It can be in employee onboarding materials, you know? Like, it c- it can serve a lot of purposes, but for the purposes of your audience, that's where you would test, like, okay, are they actually consuming it? Are they converting?

Do they have other questions before they convert after consuming this? Yeah. Phil: Yeah. S- so, so cool to hear you, uh, just get like a, a download of your brain on this.

Like, you gave us a bunch of different examples, and I feel like they're all really practical. And, um, y- you kinda like answered this one already. Like, we were gonna ask you about, like, the how do you operationalize this in- inside of a company? So, and, and maybe your answer is a little bit different, but 7 - How to Turn Audience Research Into an Operational System - Phil: let's say hypothetically, um, like you join a huge organization like Canva, and you run Canva's zero-click marketing strategy.

How do you turn all of those ideas and some of that data from, like, this research project that you do here and there a couple of times, like, and it outputs into a slide deck, and then you send it off to the, the content team, versus, like, you're in charge of operationalizing this thing, working with ops or with whoever in the company, and turn this from, like, this, um, like batch and blast approach of research into this ongoing operational system? Like, what, what would that look like for you?

Amanda: Oh, that's a, that's a really fun question. No one's ever asked me that before. Plus, I actually use Canva, so I'm like, "Oh, what would I do there?" Phil: Perfect example Amanda: Yeah.

That's really fun. Oh, my gosh. I don't know where I would start because I'd be too excited. I would, I would want to know, like, what are the highest performing pages.

And I'm saying pages 'cause that could be anything for Canva, 'cause it could be a blog post, it could be a free tool. I mean, it's probably a free tool, but I'd wanna know all of that. Like, what are the best performing ones? I would also wanna know what do you, what, how would you define best performing?

Like, I have an idea what that is. I would think it, it's some kind of mix of, like, a lot of traffic, high conversions, people actually use the thing, and people who keep coming back. Like, that's what I would, that's how I would think of it. But then, like, I would also think about, like, well, what are the most popular pages where people keep going or people go to it, but it's not converting people?

Like, I'd be super curious about what those look like. And those might be blog posts, right, that are kind of just outside of what their software does. You know, where it's like there isn't really an action to take here, so people are just kind of, like, enjoying the content of itself, and that's fine, too. And then I would, I would wanna know, like, what are...

I would wanna know, like, where, where, where and how is retention showing up. Uh, not retention, sorry. What's the opposite of churn? What's the opposite of this thing?

No, I would wanna know, like, where and how does churn show up? Like, does it show up because... Like, like, what are the common occurrences? You know, is it people who should be close to converting or, like, should be close to becoming, converting from a free customer to paid customer and they just don't do it?

Or is it people who have paid, but they're dissatisfied for some reason so they cancel right away? Like, I would just, I would wanna understand that really, really well. That would probably take a long time to understand because they have, because of their massive scale. But I'd wanna know all those things so that I could think about, I could, I would wanna be thinking about general enablement content.

And I'm saying this specifically for Canva, because it's a tool that, like, once you're in it, you either get it or you don't, you know? Like, or it's a tool that you open up 'cause you're like, "I just need to remove this background." Like, I don't, I don't know. I just gotta remove the background.

Like, I would wanna know, like, are people actually able to do that, right? Where are they stumbling with it? Or what are the, what are the queries that people type in? 'Cause they have, like, an AI assistant now, right?

Like, what are the queries people tend to type in where they don't, they aren't satisfied with the result, where they just keep prompting the tool with like, "No, I..." This is what I mean. "No, I said remove the background, but you removed part of my arm. Like, stop it.

Put my arm back." You know? You know, like, like, things like... I would, I would really wanna know those well and then figure out, like, what's the content opportunity here?

Like, is there a tutorial, you know, written, text, video, whatever. Is there a tutorial we can write that addresses this pain point? Like, here's how to not erase your arm by accident. Darrell: Yeah.

I love it. I love it. 8 - How AI Visibility Changes Zero Click Marketing - Darrell: So let's talk about AI because we have to. Um, so with zero-click marketing, you're, you're basically saying one of the big parts is, hey, these platforms keep audiences inside these walled gardens and reward native content.

Now with AI, there's like a new walled garden. They surface answers without links, attribute information without clicks, et cetera, et cetera. So where does the zero-click marketing infrastructure go from here? Like what are you seeing already is changing?

Where do you predict it's going to go as more and more of us are just really relying on AI to, you know, do like basic search and to like live, to get work done? Amanda: Yeah. This is such a fast-changing thing. Because I don't even know if it's like industry, tool set, whatever, system.

It's very fast-changing. So I will say there is an aspect to AI that makes me feel vindicated in the way I've been doing marketing for the past, like, 10, 12 years, and it's, it's that the way that I've done marketing has always been zero-click marketing before that was a thing. You know? Like, it's been like, "No, let's go where our audience already is and influence them where they are, and we'll do that by posting really, really good stuff that they actually want and keep coming back for."

And of course, leaders will push... Have, have pushed back and been like, "Well, you can't measure that. Well, we measure, like, follower growth. Like, what do you mean?"

So what I say now is, like, but AI visibility kind of speaks to that because that's where you're like, well, the more that you create things that are crawlable by the bots, that are extractable, like the bot can understand it because it's well-written and it's structured properly and it's focused and easy to understand, right? That's AKA good writing, right? Good content. When your content is crawlable, extractable, when it's credible, like when you're...

Like, if you're posting original research and you publish the methodology and the limitations, right? Like, you should be doing that. But then that also signals to the AIs, to the LLMs that it's credible. And then when you're doing all this really good content, really good work, really good marketing over time, you have more and more people in the public, m- pu- publicly talking about you.

Like, "Hey, did you see that report by, by HubSpot? Did you see that report that Phil Gamache did?" Like, like those things that people talk about online or that get linked to, that get mentioned, um, those are the things that influence your visibility in AI or LLM tools, and it's harder to measure that for sure. I mean, that's why everyone's freaking the heck out, right?

But that's what influences that, and I'm s- I'm... I feel even more strongly about this because I've recently did a little bit of a deep dive and joined a bunch of like GEO and AI- AIO webinars to be like, "All right. Let's go. Let's learn all this technical stuff."

And I'm hearing so many people talk about, like, ask questions like, "Okay, so you're saying we need to have H2 headers in our content to separate the key ideas. All right. What is the optimal length of an H2 header?" And it's like, what?

Like, the... It's not like it's, it's not like the answer is 18 characters. You know, the answer is it's however long it needs to be while being concise. Like- I don't know how many words that is.

Like, there's no standard of words for that is. It needs to be e- concise, easy to understand, and it needs to be crawlable. Like, enable your robots.txt.

I don't know, like, but you can do these things. And, and by the way, um, um, Lily Ray, you know, a known SEO, GEO expert, she has, um, an LLM tool. It's on algorythmic.co, I think that's her website, where it's an LLM, like, it's a tool where you just put in your domain and it'll show you, like, can the bots see your domain?

Here are some opportunities for you. So I would say, like, that's a really good tool to start with because this piece, right, of, like, retrievability, this is a very solvable problem, you know? Like, I think we're at the point now where you don't need, like, a 20-person team to make sure that, like, your website is enabled properly, right? You can probably fix a lot of these issues in, like, 30 to, 30 to 60 minutes.

So I kind of feel like I went off the rails there, but I'm gonna say that. Phil: I love it. Yeah, no, it's funny, we've been like seeing more and partnering more with, uh, like AEO companies. Like we j- we just had a, a cool episode with the, uh, founder and CEO of AirOps.

They started with just like AEO visibility stuff. Now they're into like the whole system, the content engineering behind it to like systemize that for big enterprise companies, and how to connect Claude Code to like your CMS and have Claude update this product term on all of your pages in the CMS because it's like the, the, the bane of the existence of every product marketer. But like we, we have like Ahrefs Brand Radar that does a lot of really cool stuff around visibility. Uh, Scrunch AI does something very similar.

Um, like we, we had a partnership with them where like you can type in your domain, they tell you compared to your competitors where you're ranking right now, like citation wise. It's a, it's a complicated space, but exciting and I love that you said it like vindicated your whole thesis around zero-click marketing, AI did and LLMs did. And it's very similar to marketing ops because I feel the same, that marketing ops feel vindicated because of AI on the data quality side. Because everyone that wants to do AI is like, "Oh, garbage in, garbage out.

AI is only as good as the data you feed it." Now everyone cares about data quality, just like everyone cares about zero-click marketing content. So Amanda, I feel like that's a, a really cool way to, to kind of end this here. We have some fun questions to, to, to close us off.

Uh, we have this fun conversation, uh, this fun question we ask everyone on the show. Uh, 9 - Setting Boundaries to Protect Your Energy and Focus - Phil: you're obviously a marketing legend, an author, podcaster, a frequent speaker. You're also a busy mom, a home chef, and a professional sourdough baker recently added to the resume. One question we ask everyone is like, how do you decide what deserves your energy at any given moment, and what's your personal system for staying aligned with what actually makes you happy?

Amanda: This is, I appreciate this question so much because I've had to take a really long and hard look at this recently. So a couple weeks ago, I had a bunch of travel. I came home from the airport at, like, 2:00 in the morning, super late, and then I had already booked a webinar where I was presenting the morning after. Like, first thing in the morning, and I overslept.

We had, like, I think we had, like, 400 people sign up for this webinar. I straight up slept through it. Like, now my husband... Normally I do drop-off with my husband, but he felt sorry for me that I came home so late.

It was busy, so he, he didn't even wake me up. He was just like, "Oh, she's sleeping." So there was that. I have an Eight Sleep mattress, and the alarm is, it heats up, so, like, I'm c- I'm, my body is cooking and I'm still sleeping.

My alarm on my phone and my backup alarm goes off, still sleeping. I woke up 30 minutes into the we- into the webinar time with, of course, like, 10 messages from the event organizers who were like, "Are you okay?" Like, "What's going on?" I'm mortified.

Like, I'm just like, what is happening with you? I didn't even know what to say at first, and I was like, do I lie? Phil: Yeah, car accident. So sorry.

Amanda: Like, I am in the hospital. Like, like, what do I say? So I was like, "I overslept. I'm, I'm sorry.

Like, I'm just sorry. That was, it was irresponsible of me to plan this, to agree to this at this ti-" Like, that's on me, you know? It just is. And then, like, that was where I had to be like, be real with yourself.

Like, this is not sustainable. And now this is not so much of, like, this didn't deserve my energy. It was just you need to n- I told myself, like, you need to know your limits in advance. You cannot do this just one more thing, just push through, because f- like, like, even if you have, even if your brain and heart are in the right place, your body's gonna take over and be like, "Nope, we're sleeping."

So I've had to, like, really intentionally set some new boundaries for myself where now I'm like, okay, you're doing, like, two webinars or, like, podcast interviews, like, per week max. Beyond that, you're just gonna, like, not have time to do your actual job. It's gonna be too much. So there's that.

The other thing really that I'm very much realizing is the import- This is gonna sound so cheesy. Truly the importance of being present in everything that you're doing. You know? Like, I think it's it's easy to say, like...

So my husband and I, we drop off our kids together, 'cause we both work from home. So, like, we e- we get the kids into the car, and we do the drop-offs together. Do we both need to do it? No.

We don't. And, like, I'm sure anyone listening could be like, "What a weird use of time," or whatever. Like, or they're just like, "We don't do that," and that's fine. You know, you do you.

But I do me, and I actually like this. Like- It's fun being in the car together, all four of us, and like it's, it, it, it's fun to me to be able to see my kids off. My husband will kind of like, he's the one driving, he kind of drops us off and I walk to a certain point. You know, so like we have a little, little strategy that we do, but it makes me happy to be able to do this every day.

Obviously if I'm traveling or something comes up, then we plan in advance and I don't do it. But this is important to me personally, you know? And I think it's really important for anybody to figure out, like, well, what are the things that actually matter to you? Like, there are gonna be people who are like, "I can't do the drop-off every day," and that's fine.

That's totally fine. But like what's the choice you're making instead, and do you like that choice? Are you happy with that? If you're not happy with that, I know it's like not, maybe every, maybe a lot of people listening are like, "I would love to do drop-off every day, but I can't 'cause I have a freaking office to go to."

Okay, and you should not feel guilty about that. But I would say like that's okay, but like what are, what are the other things in your day that you can do to bring more of that joy? Like, then is it maybe you can, maybe you do pickup. Is, is it stressful to do pickup?

Oh, probably, but it's like, well, what are, what, what's the thing you can do to make that a little bit better or more enjoyable for yourself? Maybe it's, maybe it's blocking out your calendar and leaving your office 15 minutes earlier so that you're not rushed to pick up. You know, maybe you can do that just by like putting something in your calendar and then mentally committing of like, "Okay, but I don't need to worry about this because I know after dinner I'm gonna go back and check my email, have a little glass of wine," or you know, glass of water, whatever, and, and like go through my inbox and triage then.

And unless there's some crazy launch, right? Or a big really, really, really big important project, nobody needs me to reply to them within a span of like 90 minutes. It's gonna be fine. Phil: it's a launch week, it's not a launch day.

Amanda: Exactly. We don't believe in launch days anymore. Phil: I love it. Great answer, Amanda.

We, we've kept you long enough. Really appreciate you coming on and, and sharing all those, those insights. We'll obviously share a link to, uh, the, the pre-order for the book. It, it's still gonna be up for pre-order by the time this drops.

Uh, but yeah, excited to get my hands on it also. Maybe we'll, we'll get you back on to dissect a s- a chapter or two. But thanks so much for joining us today, Amanda. Really appreciate your time.

Amanda: Thank you so much for letting me ramble and be weird and yeah, thank you.