Where Did All Your Website Traffic Go? How To Thrive In The Zero-Click Era

Executives, business owners, CEOs, leadership teams: they love numbers, but they especially love numbers and metrics and KPIs and performance indicators that are going to scream success. But my question to you today is, what happens when those numbers aren’t going to add up like they used to? And today I want to introduce you to the world of zero-click content. This is where the new cold, hard truths that we need to start to understand, as both business owners but as also marketers, about how marketing is changing and developing.

My name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. As always, this podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing, help to challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing and instead start to plan intentional marketing strategies.

And today we are diving into a pretty crucial topic, especially as we round out 2024. So we start to come into 2025, as we continue to always see changes in our marketing is happening, technological changes, and the importance of building and how to measure our multi-channel marketing strategies. We are truly in a bit of an era where the digital landscape is consistently and constantly changing. And as marketers and as business owners, CEOs, we need to understand how to effectively reach and engage our audiences across multiple platforms. And that’s becoming more and more important as technology changes and evolves, as opposed to just going back to that age-old measurement of how content performs based on clicks, based on your website traffic.

Gone are those days. We need to start thinking more than just a website click. But we still see it so much when we’re chatting with leadership teams, when we’re meeting with clients, and they’re like, well, how’s the website traffic looking? Has this generated how many clicks? What’s the CPC here? Sure, it’s important. But we need to shift our focus, not just to looking at how much it’s cost us to get a website click or how much website traffic we’ve been able to get this month, but instead having a look at the whole multi-channel strategy. How does the entire strategy feed into building up this beast of a business that you want to build?

Now, I’ve spoken in the past about the importance of building these multi-channel strategies. And I say it often as well: when we think about multi-channel, we don’t want to build our entire ship on rented land. So this is relating to, obviously, not building all of our content on platforms and trending platforms that we don’t have the power to control. Hence why I’ll preface this by saying that anything I mention here around website clicks, I’m not saying that it’s not important to have your own brand and your own website and your own piece of the internet that you can control. I’m definitely not saying that, because I also don’t want you to build your entire ship on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube or anything like that.

Using a single-channel strategy like that is 100% going to put your brand at risk of any significant platform change that can then have a real massive impact on your business. For instance, Facebook, they suddenly decide that they want to remove all local business pages, just like that. You built your business on a Facebook page or anything like that. Obviously, that effect is pretty drastic. But if you think about it, the effect and the add-on to that would be pretty devastating for you as a business if you’d built literally your entire business just on a Facebook page, for example. So having to think about that multi-channel is really important.

There was also a study that was done, I think it was done last year. It was done from a publication called Advertiser Perceptions. It was in the UK. Reported that 50% of UK advertisers at the time, I would say it’s even more than that now, were using a multi-channel approach. And they experienced an extended reach, an extended brand awareness, and much more ad engagement across the board. And this report also went on to say that nearly half of those, about 47% of those marketers, also then experienced a much better ROI from their marketing efforts when they had a look at all these different channels, as opposed to just having a look at their website and just measuring how many clicks they can get onto that website.

So multi-channel campaigns are really an opportunity for us to capture users throughout an entire marketing funnel. And what this does is it allows us as advertisers to build awareness, consideration, and lead all the way down to a purchase and a sale. And obviously, this is really important when we talk about tighter marketing budgets. Thinking about multi-channel retargeting strategies, which will then enable marketing teams to deliver ads to a user based on their previous intent-based actions that they’ve performed on these different platforms or on your website, for example. So for budget-conscious marketing strategies, having a multi-channel approach is obviously very important. But I want to focus on the common mistakes that we do see with multi-channel marketing.

Firstly, I’ll just preface by saying spreading yourself too thin is obviously one of those key things that we do see. Attempting to create unique content on every platform, at all times of the day. And it’s obviously going to lead to burnout. It’s going to lead to diminish in the output of your quality. And it’s just not going to be good for business or your marketing strategy in general. Instead, what I suggest is that your multi-channel marketing strategy should instead be aiming not to be everywhere, but instead to focus on where your customers are. It’s about finding that right balance, that sweet spot, about where your business can thrive.

And this goes back, I’m going to say it because I say it on every podcast, it goes back to thinking about your key persona. Where is your key persona hanging out? Where are they consuming content? What time of the day are they consuming content? What type of content are they actually consuming? What type of content is actually then helping you to build your business and to reach your business goals, your business objectives, your business values and your business mission? All of those different things. How is all this multi-channel content that you’re producing actually helping to build this beast of a business that you’ve got? So multi-channel is great if you can do it right, obviously, and don’t burn out.

But it is going to put a bit of pressure on your metrics. And this is where I want to go in and start talking about this zero-click that I’ve been referring to so far. Gone are the days, I think, of expecting that all our marketing is going to lead to a click on your website. You may look at your Google Analytics now and you may see that your website traffic is going down. We don’t get as much traffic as we used to. Clearly, something’s wrong. But still, our sales are doing okay, and still we’re getting great engagement over here, and we’re doing really well over here.

But our website clicks are down. So we need to put all our channels back out of that. But honestly, this is where a lot of businesses are going wrong right now. They’re not taking a look. They’re not reading the room and seeing how marketing is actually changing, and adapting their strategies to suit. Especially if they are taking on a multi-channel strategy, as I’ve just gone through.

So there are some cold, hard truths that I believe that marketers, business owners, CEOs, boardrooms, executives, we need to understand as we enter 2025, and as technology continues to evolve and grow over time. The first one is that there is going to be less SEO, organic Google traffic, going to especially corporate websites. People finding solutions on search engines, and they’re finding those solutions without having to click through to your website. And there’s still executives that don’t understand that fact. They don’t understand that you can actually find the answer to your problem without going through to a website.

Google is now presenting that solution, and it’s getting even more like this, especially in the States, where they’re using generative search engines where, essentially, they are now producing the results right on the search results page without you even having to go to that website. Sure, they may credit you as being able to supply that information, but users can now get the answers to a lot of their questions without even clicking through to a website.

Right there’s one of your website’s stats, your clicks, that is going to start to diminish and start to go down, if that’s all that you’re focusing on. Also, we think about how people’s search behaviours are even changing these days as well. Back in the day, it was like, we’ll just Google it. It’s kind of became synonymous with how we found out and how we did research. Yeah, we’ll just go to Google, we’ll Google it. But I’m finding, even with conversations I’m having with people now, that the way that people are even approaching research or finding answers to their questions is changing. Instead of Googling, it is sometimes now going to, oh, I’m going to ask AI, see what AI thinks about it.

I’m going to go to ChatGPT or Claude. In future, we may even have AI assistants which are going to help us do all this research and help us move forward with finding the answers to the problems that we have. So people are finding solutions in different ways, and it is going to affect your website traffic moving forward. Just think about some of those other multi-channel things that you’ve got. You’ve got a multi-channel strategy that’s using YouTube. YouTube viewers, they’re very rarely going to click on a description link within a video. They’re going to prefer to consume more content, go to the next video and the video after that.

And YouTube, that’s what YouTube wants them to do. YouTube doesn’t want them to go off to your website and get distracted on your website and kind of leave the platform. They want people to either stay on that platform, and so they can send them more ads. So they’re going to obviously make sure that they can show more content to those viewers, as opposed to encouraging them to click on links that you have in your description. So again, you’re going to see those clicks kind of diminish.

LinkedIn. Let’s think about LinkedIn providing minimal to zero referral traffic, especially to corporate sites. You’ll do a test yourself, especially from a business page, even on your personal page. If you’ve got a link to your website or to another resource, very likely it’s not going to lead to much engagement. The algorithm is going to hold it back, because LinkedIn isn’t about providing referral traffic to your fancy website. No, no. LinkedIn is about networking. It’s about building a brand and a voice and authority. So that’s what you need to focus on there.

Just think about Instagram. Instagram is obviously great for brand building, especially for creative and products and services. But even then, Instagram is only going to allow links in the profile, in your bios. So you can’t even put a link in your caption. You can’t even put a link anywhere. They literally want people to stay on that platform. So it is not a website referral machine, and it hasn’t been for some time.

There’s podcasts. I’m on a podcast right now. I’m not building this podcast with the expectation that I’m going to be able to build clicks and get people to my website. It’s not around seeing, oh, I’ve seen certain people click from Spotify to go directly to my website. That’s not what this is about. Building a podcast is about how do you share your voice, your brand, your authority, and it’s not focusing on clicks. So those are just a few examples.

And given those challenges, I’m hoping that it’s actually really clear that a multi-channel marketing strategy is crucial. But what’s even more crucial is about how we actually measure, and how we actually get this across to boardrooms and to executives, to understand how we measure our marketing strategies and our marketing results from here on out. And that we need to move away from just having a look at Google Analytics to see how many clicks we got to our website. We need to start taking a look at our goals and our objectives and how people are consuming our content, and measuring our success based on some of those other channels and some of those other platforms.

So these are the key things that I want you to take away from this short podcast episode today. Firstly, I want you to truly go back, understand your customer persona. And I know I say this on every podcast, but I want you to go back and truly understand that customer persona that is truly fit for your brand, for your business. Meet them where they are, and not where you’d like them to be. So when I say that, I’m saying meet them on the platform where they are consuming content or where they’re spending their time, not on your website where you’d like them to be. Because chances are your target customer, your target client, is not just automatically thinking, I’m going to go check in on so-and-so’s website today.

So make sure you’re meeting where they are, not where you’d like them to be. Make sure you’re still evaluating your business type, your product, your service, to determine the right channels about where you should be focusing your time. Avoid spreading yourself too thin across multiple channels, and focus on quality, not just quantity. And then by balancing your multi-channel strategy, hopefully you’re going to find that sweet spot about where your business can actually thrive, and extend your reach, increase your engagement across these platforms, and ultimately help drive more conversions and more sales for your business.

But the big one here that I want to get across today is about how we can educate ourselves, how we can educate other business owners, other marketers, other executives, other CEOs, around the goal that it isn’t always to drive clicks to your website. The main thing here is we want to think about how our marketing strategy can help build our brand, build our leads and sales through solid relationships, through brand trust across multiple different channels. That’s the imperative KPI and the imperative measurement that I want you to focus on, not just website clicks.

Hopefully that’s given you a few thought starters about how you can start looking at reporting on your marketing strategies. And look, if you do need us to give you a hand with going through that, Done By Nine, that is what me and my business and my team, what we do best, what we enjoy. We enjoy sitting down, really breaking down a business and understanding about how we can actually measure where you should be marketing, and helping you actually measure the effectiveness of these marketing strategies and campaigns.

You can find all our details on donebynine.com. Go to the Contact Us page if you want to work with us, or you’re more than welcome to click the Podcasts tab at the top of the website. All of our content is listed there, and you can listen to us on all these different platforms as well. You can also listen or hear anything that I’d like to share on my LinkedIn page as well. You’re more than welcome to connect with me there. Just search Jordan McFadyen, Done By Nine, and I’m sure you’re going to find me on there as well. I’d really look forward to connecting.

And again, thank you so much. Thank you for your attention, and thanks so much for listening to another episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast, and we’ll see you on the next episode.