Stu Eddins: The web is expanding underneath us, and what we have to be aware of is that expansion is away from very little literal interpretation of keyword relationships to contextual relationships.¹

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

Stu: Okay, so this is the next did I say that out loud? And this time we’re going to be talking about something that’s going to be really affecting us over the next probably 18 months to three years, and that is our understanding of context as we move forward into a AI empowered web. We’ve had a lot of controls that we’ve had keywords, for example; search terms are going to outgrow keywords any day. Now, the concept of keywords and how we would use them in SEO, to say that these are the words that people search for, we need to make sure they’re on our page the way we would use that in advertising, where we might target keywords in search ads. Now we still do those things. They’re still out there, but what’s happening is the web is expanding underneath us, and what we have to be aware of is that expansion is away from very little literal interpretation of keyword relationships to contextual relationships.

Now, honestly, Google hasn’t been a keyword-driven search engine for several years. It has been about context. It has been about intent, more than anything else, easily, for the past five to seven years. It’s just that now the shift has happened enough that it’s really brought it into focus that we need to change how we think about extending our influence onto the web. I think that may be a good way to put it. So, yeah, that could work. So context, context is everything. Here’s something I found. I went out looking for some quotes on context. And I found this one in common use. Almost every word has many shades of meaning and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context. That may be kind of a captain obvious thing. You know, we’ve always said that words can have two meanings. We even write songs about it.

Mariah: Anybody that’s married can tell you that.

Stu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That quote was from Alfred Marshall, and he published that quote in 1891 – 35 years ago. And it’s really relevant today when we think about search terms in the in the angle of keywords, if we think about it from that point of view, we’re limiting ourselves. Here’s something interesting that I learned over the last year or so. There’s an ad product out there called performance Max, P max, and it does a lot of different things in a campaign, but one of the things it does is search ads.² Now, for ages, I’ve been assigning keywords to search campaigns. So if I’m advertising accounting program, I’ll make sure it’s accounting. Degree accounting, AAS, I’ll have all sorts of words in my campaign that if the search person uses them, send them my ad. That’s the idea. Well, performance Max. They have this place for keywords, but they call them keyword hints. It’s not the real thing. It’s not we’re not targeting these specific words. Pardon me, what Google is saying is, give us a list of stuff that people might search around. Give us ideas. In other words, give us the context of the search you want to serve an ad to. And I think that’s kind of a powerful shift that’s going on right now.

Mariah: More than just like, tell us what you want, it’s let us help you find what you want.

Stu: Yeah, it is, and nothing in the world is as little in most people’s interpretation as a keyword. In fact, in my world of advertising, we had ways of qualifying that keyword. It could be a broad match. So lawn mower could lawn mowing service. Could be lawn cutting service, lawn care service. That’s kind of a broad interpretation, and really that’s kind of what we’re going toward, if you think about the context. Then there was phrase match, which was local long cutting service would match to it because, you know, it still had the same concept, but included other words. And then exact match was, if I put in lawn cutting service, that’s really. Really all it wouldn’t match to is when somebody put in long cutting service until three to five years ago, an exact match became exact-ish. Google is forcing us into context. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to be there. I venture to say we’re already there. We just need to have our practices catch up with reality.

Mariah: Yeah, I’m curious. What would be the hesitation for people? Why would they not want that? Like it’s a better way to find the information that you want and maybe don’t know that you want.

Stu: Control. Here’s the deal. When it’s in advertising, I pay for every click, whether it’s pennies or dollars, I’m paying for the click, and the risk is, if I don’t understand the context of what I’m trying to target, I’ll be paying for my clicks that are not relevant to what I want to accomplish. Now we can have faith in the ad platforms, because Google says, oh, we’ll learn that for you over time. During that time, Google’s spending my money to learn, and that’s where the friction comes in. We’ve used AI in a lot of ways inside of our campaigns to test to feel our way around.³ We’ve been very responsible with it. We’re not just saying, gee, that’s cool. Let’s try it. We make sure we have as many safeguards in place as possible. And my observation is that, yeah, it does learn. Google does lean into the context of what I’m trying to do. But context isn’t just the search term, the keyword we try to target. And I think the same thing applies to things like SEO. When we’re trying to write content, we write content around the concept of what somebody is looking for, or the information somebody needs, and that’s the more powerful thing, because we’re not trying to stuff certain words into paragraphs, we’re trying to answer a question fully and efficiently.

Mariah: Yeah. Like with blog, or with a webpage, or any type of writing or video, for that matter, we’re looking for that, who, what, when, where, why, like the what’s in it, for me, all of that. So like, I feel like most people who excuse me, most people who write understand that concept, and most people who read are looking to answer one of those questions. But like with ads or search ads, or any type of ads, how do you get to that, like, what’s in it? For me, how do you, how do you include the context in articulating what that ad should be, where it should be served?

Stu: And that’s going to be really something that changes as we go forward. I’m going to continue to use Performance Max as an example. Google, just this last month, in May of 25, they’ve released a new product. They’ve called it a couple of things over a couple of weeks, but basically, AI Max is a search campaign, and what they appear to have done is taken that performance Max campaign and broken off the chunk that was searched and now made it a standalone product. With this product it’s keywordless. We don’t give it keywords. We simply say, here’s our ad copy, and the ad copy talks to who we want to who we want to address out in the wild. And here’s our landing page that has all the information necessary for that person to make a decision and make the decision in our favor, quite frankly. So the context is the landing page. The filter for that context is the is the ad where we make that bridge between what somebody’s searching for? Here’s our ad. Is it talking about the right thing? Yes. Click here. Learn more on the landing page.

And Google is assessing all of this. It’s not just looking for keyword inclusion on the landing page, it’s looking for the context of the content. It does actually understand the context of what you’re saying and the content on a landing page. Now, if I’ve got a landing page that’s very general, it talks about, we have a Health Sciences College at our university, and we are one of the best we have some of the best staff. Our enrollment is easy. You know, money back, whatever you want to get in there. And then I list 53 different programs underneath that page. I got a very general page, but if my ad talks about a nursing program specifically and points someone to that page, the person who’s out here doing a search for nursing may get served my ad, but because it’s not terribly relevant to that landing page, the context is off.

My ads can be lower than somebody who does a better job of answering that nursing search query with an ad that leads to a page that talks more specifically. Think about what the person was searching for, context all the way through what they were looking for, what the ad says, what the landing page answers. That’s the kind of scope that we’re expanding into. And I used search advertising because it’s a very controlled environment, but it is not one bit different when it comes to just content in the organic part of your website, there’s not really a a styled and written search ad for a specific situation, but if you think about the description you write for your page, the HTML description tag serves that need. To some extent, the headline you choose serves that need. This is styling that blue link and that that that slug that goes beneath that, that is the description, and that is the SEO rough equivalent of what I write for an ad. It is the the it is the invitation to come read what I’ve got, because it answers the question you just asked.

Mariah: Yeah, and that’s what’s showing up right now, too. When you use the AI mode on Google or any of those other platforms, it shows your list of sources to the one side. It shows that blue link and it shows that same description. So it’s not like with AI changing the way we search. It’s not like that part has gone away yet.

Stu: Well, you know what, Mariah, I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon, because our websites are built that way. The resource that AI is turning to gather its information is built the way you’ve just described. Now, will there be different ways to structure that information? Might there be a, I heard one person suggest, you’ll have a parallel web presence. You’ll have a web presence designed and styled and marked for AI, and you’ll have a web presence design, designed and styled for the human who looks at it. And they may be interconnected, so editing one edits the other. But there’s gonna be different types of technology underlying both. The person doesn’t need to have such thing as schema markup to appreciate the page, but the AI tool does need it different topic for different day. I don’t know that that’s terribly efficient. If you remember, we used to have M mobile websites. We in the big deal about 12 years ago was responsive websites. Yay, one place to go.

Mariah: Well, we’re aging ourselves now.

Stu: Yeah, but, yeah, you’re right. By the way, a significant percentage of the people we’re trying to reach in higher education have never had to struggle with a difference between a desktop and a mobile view.⁴ It’s just been the same thing. 10 years from now, people will be it’ll be the same situation as my bet with an AI versus a view the website experience. It’s just how it’s managed. But back to the point, the citations in AI are based on that blue link and and description slug, just as organic is, because that’s what they have to work with. That’s that is the context of the website.

So where is this all leading to? Advertising is moving away from targeting specific search queries and moving on toward marketing, to contextual signals display, by the way, has been here forever. I don’t tend to target a display ad to a web page that has a specific phrase on it. I can, but it’s not really one of the the the ways that I tend to use it instead with the display campaign, we target the person’s context, and the context is the person who they are and what they’re reading. And if I have a higher education ad and I’m serving it on a platform like Twitch, which is a gaming platform, how is it going to look when I show up and say, Come apply in the middle of a gaming experience that’s going to either get ignored or marked as spam or something? It’s not; you’ve missed the context of the person in their moment.

So display behaves better and always has when the context is complete. The offer I’m seeing the artwork I’m seeing in my host website, the site I’m actually visiting is complementary to the experience I’m trying to have on the website. The message attracts me and sends me to your website, and it should have similar context to where I came from. We did this. We did this test where we had Tiktok ads that were out there, and the Tiktok ads were getting clicked a lot, and the Tiktok ads looked like they belonged on that platform. They’re colorful, they’re almost kaleidoscopic. They were punchy. They weren’t trying to look too corporate. And the message was valid. It was, hey, we’re the place to be. It’s a fun place. We it. People love coming to school here, click here and go to a web page that is just classic institutional web page. This is our university. We have classes, we have teachers. It is the complete wrong experience for where they came from, and they stayed away in droves. We had an average like from that three to five second time spent on the page. Well, we kind of inherited this situation.

So our first thought was, let’s create a separate page that looks like the experience they were having on Tiktok, at least the bridge is that that’s on the ad. They see the ad, they were clicking it all the time. We got hundreds and 1000s of clicks, except now those clicks were leading to a point where you’re getting 30/42, on average engagement on the web page, not on the landing page, because we answered context with context. So it’s not just words, it’s experience, it’s the person know who you’re talking to. The other part about this, I think that’s going to be scary, is the opportunities that opens up are vast, but then the combinations are as well.

Now you write articles from time to time in healthcare where your job is to translate or reword what a highly educated person talks about, about a specific topic, synthesize that into words on a page that a a non healthcare person understands, because that’s the audience we need to reach. We need to talk to those people. We need to have them understand that, hey, we’re doing research here. It’s important research, and here’s how it affects your life. You’ve changed the context of what you heard into something that is the context of the person you want to address. And you know you and your team are great at that. That may describe the interview to Article process too, I don’t know. Is that close? Yeah, pretty darn close, yeah. So context is also a flexible thing. The interview with that doctor or that research person was in the context of that person in their world, and it was there. I mean, they were not being false. That’s who they are. You are the translator one context into another.

And as marketers, we’re gonna be that same thing, except in this case, the context is the institution, the organization we service and the population we want to reach, and we’ve got to they each have something. The institution has something the population needs. The population has a need the institution can solve. But in between is a gap of context. We’ve got to get those things aligned. That assumes need, that assumes a lot of other things. You know, I could go out and write a book report on a knee, on a knee replacement, and not have any need of the School of the hospital services, but the hospital had information I needed. So need plays into it as well. But really, context is going to be a is going to be a thorny subject for a lot of people I mentioned earlier, control. You have to, you have to either learn your way through it, which means giving up a little bit of control. But if your objective is to have control, you’re going to learn fast, aren’t you? You’re not going to be given any choice.

It’s not that Google says it’s not that Google is responding to their client and their client is the person doing a search, and that person, if they don’t like what they’ve got going on, is going to go to ChatGPT Perplexity, they’re going to go to some other place and have the experience they want. Or Google can do that and more, Google will probably be able to do what ChatGPT does or Perplexity, and add more meat to the bone, if you will. Only because Google’s been doing this for over 25 years and has a heck of a lot more data than the other people. It could answer questions more thoroughly. It’s pretty much scanned the entire internet. They’re catching up on that. But Google’s been in this context business for going on 30 years now, so they have a head start, if they choose to preserve it, there’s that, and we can have investors dumping money into chat GPT, but money doesn’t solve a knowledge problem in this in this case. So yeah, I think that when what we’re looking at is some very large shifts, some of it fueled by AI, but not the fault of AI. AI is a cause, not the only cause. Okay, look at this way. This is why it can’t be just AI. We were having the same conversation, the voice search started. Started, oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you remember when we were trying to figure out how we could get ranked for Voice Search? Oh

Mariah: Yeah. And like, thinking about the length of paragraphs, thinking about how often you put a call to action on a page, all, all of that stuff is like, not everybody’s on desktop, not everybody’s on a laptop, not everybody’s on, you know, tablet, mobile, whatever it is, and now it’s just second nature, because we know the behavior of people across devices is different. We didn’t know that 10 years ago. It was brand new. So it’s the same, same story, same song and dance.

Stu: Yeah, well, and 10 years ago, mobile devices hadn’t penetrated the market anywhere near to the extent they have now.⁵ So 2008, 2009, iPhones became the big deal, but it was still an $800, $700 big deal. So it was not the population, the masses, that have it. You know, there were others out there who were making flip phones that had a few more features and so on for a few years before competition really kicked in. But the point being that transition, though, there was a definite moment when it came along and Steve Jobs stood up there with his with his first iPhone on the stage that may have been the tee off. There have been other smartphones before that, by the way, the BlackBerry people be very upset we didn’t pay attention to them.

Mariah: But everybody wanted one of those when I was younger. The BlackBerry.

Stu: The Crackberry, yeah. It didn’t help that we had, we had a presidential candidate who couldn’t let go of his but still, that watershed moment of iPhone coming out and being the a tipping point of sorts. Still have long tail before it came about, before market penetration was there. That was the time when we were doing mobile sites versus regular sites. That was the time when we responsive was just coming in, that there was a development cycle, and it was longer than what we’re going to face with AI and the compounding voice search on top of it, I kind of look at AI and voice search as the meaning of what we thought was going to happen with voice search. Google says that right now, even without AI, search terms are now two to three times longer than what they were even just two to three years ago.

People, voice search this. This device over here from Amazon, I have, if I say its name, it’ll talk to me. These things have taught us to talk to our technology. We don’t even spend a beat thinking, how am I going to search for this? We just do it, yep. And as a result, our search terms are longer and longer and longer. In fact, the thing that I think it came from, again, from Google, from Gemini, they’re finding that a common search is five times longer than a regular search in Google Search, a search that goes through Gemini, their AI tool, is up to five times longer than an equivalent search that people have to manually type in to the Google interface. That’s so wild, and they’re still manually typing it into Gemini. They’re not, they’re not doing it through voice interesting, but the technology is encouraging a conversation.

And this is, this is something interesting. It was a little bit of a mind shift for me from how I think about it, when I when I go to Google, I’m trying to find something, and it’s very specific. It may be transactional. Rarely is it navigational. I’m not trying to have Google remember, for me, a website I can’t remember, or something like it’s transactional. Help me find this I need to. I need this product, this thing, this information, and off it goes. And it comes back. In that regard, Google search was a pre-search. You put something in and it gives you 10 choices in blue links, plus some ads, plus some other stuff.⁶ But it was pre search. Now you have to search through all this stuff to find what you really want. AI is an answer engine, which is a little different.⁷ It still goes out and finds all these sites and searches, searches them, but it amasses them into a single, vetted response and says, Here it is. Now you wonder where it came from. It’s over there on the right hand side. You can go click on it if you want. But this is what they say.

This is interesting, because what that does is the next thing is you say, thank you. That’s about 53 pages of information. How about you just do this and you give it a qualification that it gives you. It takes the information finds more refines it comes down. Okay, that’s cool. Yes, I was looking for golf golf clubs. And here’s all the golf clubs you can find. Okay, by the way, just left handed golf clubs. Oh, okay, that’s different. So here’s this great. Is there anything here that is more women’s style than men as far as far as weight and length? Yes. Here’s that, and people are having conversations with the tool. We did this, but it was briefer. Briefer? Is that a good word? Good enough. We did it. We did it with fewer words and fewer searches in just regular Google search. Show me, golf clubs, women’s clubs. No, no. You know it was, it was, it was brief things. But for some reason, we will type in full sentences, paragraphs into an AI interface.

Mariah: I wonder if that has something to do with the the context of the answer it provides. It’s not just like answer, it’s Yeah, I heard your question. Here’s this thing that we pulled together for you. Let me know if you need anything else, it feels more like humanoid-ish. That’s a word, you know.

Stu: Well, there is a different validation that comes from getting a specific answer, versus Well, here’s a bunch of stuff. You can find it yourself, yeah, if you are, if you ask a good question, and you’re rewarded within three or four seconds with a good long explanation says, Hey, good question. Here’s some answers. It even says it right up at the top, sometimes they are starting to try to program personality into these things which could come back to bite them in the end. ChatGPT, I think it was giving too many affirmations, even when the search was improperly formed.

Mariah: Can’t wait till they go the route of Garmin and like, Hey, you idiot. Why are you so slow?

Stu: Yeah, you know. And what we’re experiencing today is still nowhere near the final experience. So how does this relate to context? The context is what we’ve described, the human we’re trying to reach is in the context of using AI and having a discussion instead of a one off search, search query, they will still have those they know generally what they want. They just need to find the one that but somebody who’s in that exploration and evaluation stage, they’re going to thrive in this space, and that’s the place where we change hearts and minds. That’s where we intersect and say, here’s our brand to consider too. If we wait down to the bottom of that decision path, they probably have already come up with, okay, if they’re looking for something, 357, different brands they’re interested in, if we’re one of those brands, great. Otherwise, our job is interruption, and that’s tough, and that’s expensive, but up here, if we’re able to get ourselves injected into the context of their exploration and their evaluation, if we can be helpful in that space, whether it’s in regular search or AI enabled tools of some sort, whether it’s because they were Browse a web page about a popular one I was looking at is somebody was looking up for looking up information about the town that the college was in. Well, when they click on some websites, be a great place to have another ad for that college, because there’s five of them in that town.

Context always, mastering context is not going to be easy, and it may always feel like there’s just one more thing to do, and that would be appropriate, but every single one of these things, every single one of these instances, is in itself, context I recently heard, and I wish I could attribute it back to who said it. Your audience is everywhere. There the people you want to talk to right this moment. Are in 1000 different places, but they’re still the people you want to talk to. Yeah, you need to find the context that they are in if you want to lead them to the solutions you may have to offer them well.

Mariah: And I think we’ve talked about this before too. That’s why in the content side of things. That’s why blog often surfaces higher than, say, a program page or a service line page, because you’re answering a specific need. It’s both sets of content are important. You have that general overview for the Hey, acquainting myself with you, and then you have those deeper pieces, those deeper pages, those stories that provide the answer that you’re looking for in a specific context.

Stu: Yeah, I think that on the content side of the internet, we really have kind of a cool way of going about this, because if we have a blog out there that answers one question, it invariably leads to the next question. Now people don’t have an endless supply of questions. At some point, the last answer is given, and they make a decision. But when you go to work and you’re taking it, you surround a topic with blog articles from different perspectives, from different contexts, and they interconnect where appropriate, but they all tend to be pointing to that, that that look, that central point where the ask, where the action takes place. We know that people are going to take their time for some things. They don’t have a sense of urgency, perhaps.

And okay, here’s one you. My parents were getting older. We knew we were going to need some help because not the same. We knew that we were going to need help soon, but not tomorrow. So going out and researching that we had all sorts of blogs that we were reading about this, and yeah, some of the blogs put a particular spin, hard spin, on how the blog owner was the best solution for the problem, and you choose to read them or pass them whatever it is. But we amassed a whole bunch of information in that exploration and evaluation stage, and when we had to make a decision, we had already developed familiarity with the brands who we thought were the most helpful. Now we had about an eight month window in this that’s really kind of long for most decision paths that we try to solve online. You can go longer, but it doesn’t tend to be a it tends to be something where you need to be more face to face, or at least one to one engagement. But eight months is kind of long for digital so we had this information. So when we had to make the decision, because it had come down to the point where both parents were saying, Okay, we got I’m afraid that if your dad falls, I’m not gonna be able to help. Yeah, that type of thing.

We already had three or four brands in mind from our research so that we could we had narrowed our decision path down to that and my sisters and I are in completely different states, which is why my parents were gonna need the help. But we had that common knowledge because we cheered back and forth, and that’s how that blog content helped the provider we settled on when that job? Yeah, it’s exactly how it happened. Because in our discussion on, oh no, wait a second, I read this over here and he talked about something that that mom’s really going to like, because not only will they help her at home, they’ll actually go out and shop with her at the grocery store, whatever it is, whatever it is, but surrounding the topic with helpful content in the blog, answers the context of the moment, and we were able to draw it in and put it to work, and we chose a provider.

Mariah: Eight months is a long time. I mean, it’s about the same like with higher ed I mean, you’ve got sophomores in high school thinking about where they want to go to college, or their parents, or, you know, whomever. So it’s two years.

Stu: It is, but at the same time, there’s a lot of space between the sophomore and the decision moment.⁸ Now a lot of people at that age, no, I don’t know you can say a lot. Many people at that age, in their heart know where they’re going to go. Several reasons. Mom and Dad said that’s where I’m going to go. So that’s one or two they’ve always wanted to go that that’s the place that for a sophomore to say, this is where I need to be, my path to career is best through this place. There’s a good number of them that know that, and know that they would probably have a very good chance of being accepted, and and that helps. But there’s also the people who really have no have not made up their mind, and very often they’re seniors. They’ve turned in their cap and gown after graduation, and they still haven’t made up their mind. That’s the pointy end of that, of that path. That’s the bottom end of that funnel. This is they’ve been exposed to all this stuff up here, through blogs and everything else, and through this brand and everything else, they’re down here. They know that they have some choices, but their context is now. I got four months before I got to be sitting in a school desk somewhere. I got to make a decision. Different context, different speed. You will have content for that sophomore, you will have content for that soon to graduate. Senior, you will have content for the 11th Hour. Oh, my God. Class starts in three weeks. What do I have to do? Mom and Dad are going to kill me if I’m not taken. Yeah.

Now, let’s also face it that if it comes down to that timeframe. You’re really looking at a local college of some sort. You’re not going to uproot and go, go five states away on a fight, on a three or four week decision path, unlikely. I’m sure as soon as I say that five people are going to say, Yeah, that’s what my kid I did that. Yeah, yeah. It was great. Had no idea. But at any rate, the point of all this rambling is that every person has context. Every person’s context is different. To be efficient, we find the ones that are the common paths that you might go through that I’m even though we’re different points and different points of view, we’re going to go through the same contextual point here. We need to find out where we’re going to live and how we’re going to do it. We’re going to need to find out how we afford it. We need to find out all these things that are common, no matter what are, the rest of our context is, and slowly build out from there, we may find that there’s a special context of people who are local to the college and still want to live in the dorms and to have a college experience. Okay? Is that something you want to tackle right off the bat? Probably not, but it’s a group about the you know, this big, about 150 people, as opposed to the 1000s of others that you might ignore to focus on that.

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

Stu Eddins:  Welcome to the did I say that out loud podcast, yet another installment and Stamats’ ongoing series of conversations between Mariah and myself.

Mariah Tang: This legacy of awesomeness.

Stu Eddins: Hey, you know, it’s a fun job, and somebody gets to do it. The today’s topic is going to be about, you’re doing digital advertising wrong. And, in fact, this is such a common topic. This is just part one. There will probably be a part two and three. I, for heaven’s sake, hope we don’t get up to Part 12. Quite possible with us. You just never know. What I’m going to bring up today are the three things, three most common things we see when we take over an existing ad account.

Yeah, there’s a lot of variability when you’re talking about a Bing or a Google Ads account, particularly when you’re dealing in those platforms. The language in the instructions, it’s not ambiguous, but it can use words that just don’t seem to go together. And it’s not that it’s unclear. You just have to be somewhat grounded in what it is that the platforms are talking about. But with that said, I’m going to start with the three most common things that go wrong or probably are set up incorrectly in the accounts we take over. Are these the things that I hear you going, what the Yeah? My gosh, yeah. These are the face palm moments sometimes, but sometimes they’re buried. They’re important settings that can be buried more than just a couple clicks into the interface. These are the things that are that face palm moment.

But again, on one hand, if somebody is new to setting up their account and their campaigns, you might understand the the oversight, but we’re seeing this in campaigns that we take over from other agencies, so you got to pay attention, maybe ask some questions to make sure that your campaigns are set up correctly. Now I’m not suggesting that you just dive into the next meeting and hold their feet to the fire. As fun as that might sound, it’s really not for a relationship going.

Mariah Tang: But as much as Google’s changed their interfaces, so much like just thinking about GA four, I you know, I used to know how to go in and find what I need, and now I have no idea. So it’s like this is not dumping on any of our clients and friends. It is helping you understand what questions to be asking.

Stu Eddins: Sure, but however, do rest assured that if we see you still doing this after we talk about it, we will point and laugh at you. Hand slaps. Yeah. Okay, so here is probably the number one thing we see going on, not controlling branded searches. This is really, really big. When we’re dealing with search campaigns, we’re very able to either target or avoid branded search now let’s think about this. In some cases, you do want to target your brand name in a search query, but you probably just don’t want to target your brand name only. You got to ride kind of a fine line. Here it is. A tightrope walking act between the notion of getting found for your brand name by organic links and not having to pay for it, or defense of your brand name because other advertisers are targeting it.

So there’s a fine line to walk here, and you do have to occasionally dip into the branded bucket to serve ads, but what we see time and time again are accounts where the conversion numbers are really high. They look great. The cost per conversion is low. We’ve got nothing but, but hallelujahs, tinsels and happy noises everywhere. It’s a wonderful thing, but when we look at the search query report, 90% of the conversions are coming from a search that included the brand name.

You’ve got to pay attention to this stuff is that a search for which you would have served the top five links organically anyway? If so, why are you paying for that? Can you give an example of that? And maybe this won’t make the cut, but sure, just for my understanding, sure. So what I’m talking about is, generally, with search, we’re looking for a a campaign that is going to do one of two things. It’s either going to seal the deal. It does tend to be a bottom of the funnel activity, the lower part of the middle sometimes, depending on what you’re going to try to attract somebody who just needs more information, or somebody ready to commit. Give me more information about this school program, about this procedure, about whatever it might be in healthcare. Or I want to become a student. I want to become a patient.

Say, I want to commit. I want to purchase. The very bottom of the funnel, we’re either trying to get ourselves inserted into the conversation by interruption. They’re searching for stuff that we offer, that maybe they’re already showing some commitment to somebody else, and our ad acts as an interruptive agent. We step into the conversation. We give them an offer that’s enticing. We give them the reason to look at us.

The other thing is we want to be in that mid funnel space, kind of the the Learn More space, the the assistive process of making a decision. We want to step in and and be part of the multiple touches people have before they make up their mind. Because really, when it comes down to it, very few decisions are off the cuff, spur of the moment. Heck, I saw that ad I want to buy that commit to that do that. It’s just not the way people behave, especially in higher ed and healthcare, right, right? But the other, the other side of this point is, if this is going on, you’ve got some pretty gaudy conversion numbers. Your cost per conversion is really low. Your cost per click really low. All the metrics that indicate cost low, all the metrics that indicate success high, your conversions, your click through, rate, your time on page all these things. It’s a positive feedback from beginning to end.

Mariah Tang: In healthcare, we’d call that a false positive.

Stu Eddins: False positive. Yeah, it is. You would, you would still get the same positive without the ad. Odds are you would still get the same positive without the ad. They’d click on your organic link. Here are a couple things you got to do. You got to decide what the purpose is of your campaign. Are you? Are you wanting to talk to people who are already considering you, who are already committed enough to type in your brand name into the search? Or do you have other methods that take care of that? Do you have really good content that’s going to come up in search and say, hey, here we are. Click on it. Click on our organic link. We’ve got the information you need right here.

Or are you concerned that that you don’t have good content? You need that constructive landing page to do the convincing, because your organic content, even though you’d rank for that particular search, it isn’t all that hot.

Or, you know, because Google ads will tell you that your competitors are bidding on your brand name. Now you’ve got to go in there. You’ve got to look at the actual user queries that are generating clicks and conversions. You need to do that. You need to stay on top of that. Whether you’re doing your own advertising or you have a vendor like us doing it for you. That needs to be part of the conversation, maybe not monthly, maybe quarterly, but it’s something that needs to be looked at for optimization purposes. We’re doing it daily, weekly level, but for the conversation and reporting monthly, maybe maybe quarterly. Just depends on how rough and down everything is. But you also have to have an understanding of what the objective is. Are you looking for prospects, new people who don’t know you? Are you looking to grow your engagement with people in the community? Are you looking to reinforce with people who already know you in the community?

I would suggest that if your method, if your intention, is to reinforce there are probably less costly ways to do it, you could use display advertising to keep that top of mind, to keep those prospects warm, because decisions take time, unless it’s an urgent care need, unless it’s something that you know, the deadline is next week, people will delay making a decision, even if by a few hours. And in that few hour period, that few days, maybe six weeks, that that period of delay, you need to remain top of mind so that the competitor doesn’t step in and win that bit of mind share, and in fact, you describe doing which is interrupting somebody’s decision path.

It is competitive in that regard. So this first point, not controlling your branded search, here’s what you do. Pay attention in Google ads for search campaigns, you can look at the user queries and get a handle on what they’re searching for. And if you see in there that your brand name, brand name, brand name keeps coming to the top, it is earning the greatest amount of conversions.

You need to do an experiment and maybe do an AB test, where the B side is, you add your brand name as a negative to that particular campaign or ad group and see what you get. I guarantee your conversions are going to go down, your cost per click, your cost per conversion, all of these things are going to go up. But what you need to be testing for is the ultimate outcome. Are you are you able to take that inside, non branded and have serious conversations that become students or. It is it really just your brand name is doing the job, in which case this gives you a little more ammunition for a branding campaign, for for something else that gets you out there, beyond your comfort zone, beyond your known zone, if you will.

So that that’s one thing you should probably be paying attention to, that’s deep, my dude, okay, it’s deep. It Well, it’s also expensive. Well, if it was, if it was in the budget, I’d be like, pissed, yeah. But, you know, you know, yeah, Chris rambling at this point, it will, but it’s,

I’ve had at least three or four conversations in the last six to seven weeks with people we work with, but we don’t do advertising for them. We’re seeing what’s going on, and I’m telling them that the 70% 80, 90% of the conversions are getting are coming from their own brand name, and they didn’t know it. But it sure looks good on paper. It looks good on paper. This also tends to be an activity where it looks really good, particularly if you have a low budget. That actually brings us to the next thing. Hey, that was a segue that was unintended.

All right, my mom, she’ll be proud to the budget is something we need to pay attention to. First off, if you’ve got a low budget very often, branding is what gets you your activity. But here’s the other side of budget. If you set up your campaigns and you’re using automated bidding, a best practice, a suggestion, a well, no, it’s a strong recommendation, not just a suggestion, make sure your budget can afford you to get one conversion per day. So if that means that your cost per conversion is $25 you’ve got to have a $25 a day budget times 30.4 for your monthly budget. Minimum. Automation and bidding requires data, and what it’s trying to do is earn you conversions, and it needs a steady and consistent flow, not constant. All your conversions may come on Thursday, but if it’s consistently Thursdays, it’ll figure it out. It’s not bad, but it needs a flow of conversions coming in to do its job, and if it’s starved for that information, the automation is just going to keep plugging away, testing things. It’s not going to know what to do, eventually you will probably earn enough conversions that it can start working for you.

But here’s the deal, make sure that your budget is sufficient to earn a conversion a day, feed the feast, feed the beast. But it’s not just that. It’s effectiveness. If you can’t afford one conversion a day, maybe you need to find a different tactic to use, maybe you need to be building a little more awareness. Maybe your your tactic isn’t a search campaign, but a display campaign paired with search, a performance Max campaign paired with search, something to get involved a little further, little further back from the decision point, so that people are primed for that moment of decision to choose you, to increase your conversions, you can’t really sell a product if people don’t know you Right, right? You know, how often have you gone on to something like Amazon or Etsy or something else and looked at something and said, I gotta have that. It’s probably happened, but it’s rare for most people. Yeah, you’re going to spend time looking at the different brands, the different prices like this might be coming from some tiny village that I’ve never heard of. It could be awesome. It could be a piece of crap. Yeah, yeah. There was a, there was an online offer, a really, really cool backyard ornament that was a wind ornament, and it was, was a hoop, and the outside part seemed to turn inside itself. People ordered it, and then they realized when they got it, it was only about 11 inches tall. Okay, impulse buys 11 inches tall. You spent maybe 20 bucks on it.

Darn, let’s talk about a hernia operation. Let’s talk about knee replacement. Let’s talk about a three year commitment, a four year commitment to a school for an education. Let’s talk about flushing five grand down the drain every month for an entire semester and getting yelled at by your boss. There’s that, yeah, but we’re going to cut out all that great thing. No. Back to the talking about the the lawn ornament, but the point being here too little budget for your bidding strategy. You need to be realistic. And if you don’t have the conversions, and you don’t have the bat budget, go back to a more manual approach, this can require more hands on, more time you’d still want to avoid, perhaps those branded keywords like a plague, but you don’t want to be using automation to just flail around and spend money trying to be successful if it can’t be.

The things you have control over are your budget, your geography and your target. It’s if your budget is fixed and your target is specific, then really, you know you’ve only got one thing left there that you can, that you can, that you can work with.

Be specific. Be more specific. Home in on the exact thing you want do something to narrow your targeting down to get the conversions you need get at least a conversion a day, 30 conversions a month. Whatever it is that cost per conversion times 30.4 becomes your monthly budget. Ask these questions up front, look for that up front, understand the first month. May not hit those targets, but it’s important cool little budget for your bidding strategy. Okay, that’s number two.

Here’s the here’s number three, sending ads, sending clicks from very specific ads to very generic landing pages. This the worst one. Again, this is something we see very often coupled to campaigns that are very rich in branded search activity. If I’ve searched for that business class at your school brand name, and I click on your ad, and I was intending to come to your school in the first place, and I go to your branding page that says, Hey, glad to meet you. Click here. Learn more. Okay, that’s not very tough. I’m probably going to do that.

But if the the objective is to get plus growth, if you’re if you’re looking to get that incremental lift that’s beyond the students you would normally get anyway, if you have an ad out there for that business degree, it needs to land on a page about business degrees. Let’s get a little more specific. If it is a business degree, slash accounting, then the page better start have a good chunk of content about accounting, because remember from a previous podcast, you got less than 10 seconds to hold my attention. Yep, gotta see those words that matter to you, right? So this is really a big deal, sending clicks from specific program or service searches generic pages. And we have, and I’ll use another school example, we have schools that might have a low tuition initiative, and it’s low tuition initiative, you know, for the next three months, or for those school year, whatever it is, this is it. And they build a landing page talking about that initiative, and it’ll have bullet lists of the of the programs that that cover it. That landing page is perfect for ads that say, we have a low tuition initiative. That landing page is not very good for somebody who says, hey, I want a business degree. I wouldn’t mind if the tuition were low.

Little bit of difference in intent, a little bit of difference in importance between the two. Yes, if I’ve searched for a business degree, low tuition, that content page answers only half of that question. You have business degrees. Here’s all this content about low tuition, but what’s the quality of that degree? What degree is it? How long does it take? What is the coursework look like, you know, on and on and on. Is it a two year, four year certificate? What? None of that is contained. You will get those searches who are already familiar with you. I live five miles away from your college. I know who you are. It’s probably where I’m going to go. I search for business degree. I was probably going to click on your link anyway. But here’s an ad saying, hey, click here. Brand name as business degree. We go to that. Okay, I got to fill out the application form. Here’s the button that is not a plus student, that’s not growth baseline, yeah. It may be a temporary fix for a bad conversion experience on the website. It may be necessary as content is updated in the we’ll call it organic part of the website that get that same task accomplished, but you’re spending money to do something you should be getting for free. And let’s understand, I keep using the word free because the click may be free.

The effort that go that went into earning that click with good, organic content has cost. The effort that goes into maintaining that content has cost. It’s just, it’s not equated to one click coming in cost me five bucks or three bucks. So the other part about it is, as you improve that organic content better serve the people who want to come to your website for these services, that content will become better at serving people who you pay to come to the website for those services. We’re going to get into this in another podcast about should you. Send paid clicks to an isolated, unique marketing landing page, or should you send it to your organic content of the same content type? We have two different opinions here in our organization, and we have had for 10 years, and it’s a fun, fun debate, because there’s not a right answer to that. Yeah, there can be the right answer is, send it towards can be most effective. Yeah, right. And if your website is not capable of conversion, your website is not capable of saying you asked for a business degree and with an emphasis on accounting, here’s that content, here’s the next step, take it and go on.

If your website can’t act at the same level of of engagement as a marketing landing page. Can use a marketing landing page? Yeah, I want to add one thing to this, yes, make sure on that landing page that you have an action step. This is something that we see more than you would believe, like you got them to this page. It’s the right information, and then it’s a dead end. Like, well, thanks for coming. We’ll contact you, and that’s, like, not helpful, no, what you’ve just experienced as a vanity exercise. Yeah, we brought you here so we could brag at you about how much stuff we got. Yeah, put your name in here and we’ll call you, and we’re not going to give you anything, and you’re at the mercy of our timeline. Nobody likes that, especially millennials and Gen Z. We can we are not a fan of that approach. It’s as though, come here, learn about all this and either find it yourself or leave Yeah, go away, yeah. So yeah. We’ve talked about landing pages. We’ll do that more coming up. But really, this particular one is if you’re going to put an ad campaign in Mark in market, make sure that the click that you’re paying for is going to content that is that is tightly correlated to what you’re advertising. You can have a business landing page that has a section on accounting, that has a section on leadership that has a section on MBA. And if you link those things, we have these things, link, link, link to lower on the page. That would work. But going to that page about how we have a low cost tuition program, and here’s the bullet list of programs that that are supported. In that case, I would probably say you’re better off not advertising specific, pointed items unless you really want to flesh them out on the page with more descriptive content. Yeah, focus on the question that’s being asked, give that answer, and then Intuit what the other questions might be and answer those in understanding that what your landing page is talking about is the offer and not the program or service, and keep your advertising there. So that’s our that was our three things about how you’re probably doing digital advertising wrong.

Mariah Tang: We’ve been schooled by Stu.

Stu Eddins: Well, no, the stuff I’ve just talked about here is available almost anywhere if you start searching for content about it, this isn’t buried information, but it does seem to be something that that is well, if you’re buying these services from a vendor, you’re assuming the vendor has gone through this is paying attention, and You don’t know what that vendor’s motivation may be, or their setup perfectly valid thing. You may have a ton of branded clicks coming in on your campaign from that first point, and the vendor is saying, this is just how it works with us. And if this is what they do, that’s fine, but understand that, understand what you’re getting, and if it doesn’t align with what you want, remember, just like you’re advertising to achieve new students, customers or whatever, you’re the person on the inside of the equation for that vendor. And you are quite capable of saying, you know, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Don’t target these brand names so intensely. In fact, let’s find out how to avoid most of them. You know, I don’t feel that the search campaign with this type of bidding structure is going to be terribly effective. If I’m getting 15 conversions a month. Tell me, please, Mr. Mrs. Vendor, how is this campaign learning how to bid for me? How is it being efficient with my money. And then finally, you know, it’s great. We have this landing page you’ve built for us. It talks about this wonderful tuition reduction offer we have, but I I’m seeing that the search terms we’re matching to that are converting. Are people asking about low tuition, not about business class I need to fill, not about the health sciences classes I need to fill. The tuition is a feature of those classes, or that tuition assistance is the subject.

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

Stu Eddins: This podcast is going to be on a recent article. It’s made headlines in things like Search Engine Land and places. A study said 60% of searches result in no clicks.

Mariah Tang: We’ll put the link in the show notes.

Stu Eddins: Now they’re quoting another source, and it was a study that was done that said when a certain people search on Google in particular, but any search engine anymore, six out of 10 times there’s no click out to the wild web to find more information.

Mariah Tang: That blows my mind as a as a writer, as a journalist, as a content strategist, like you’re just going to take for face value what you see on the web?

Stu Eddins: Well, let’s also remember that a significant percentage they don’t really describe that, but a significant percentage isn’t that they read something and left is that they research, they do their search again because the results weren’t quite what they were expecting.

Mariah Tang: Oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. I used to refer to this is the magic eight ball. I ask a question, I don’t get the answer I want. I ask it a different way, until I get the answer I’m looking for. You know, how many times have you have you picked up a magic eight ball? Give it a shake, turn it over, and says the answer is not clear at this point. So he said, Yep, hell no, yes, you’re right. It’s going to happen. So, yeah, in some respects, search is treated just like that magic eight ball. That’s a simplification.

Mariah Tang: People have gotten much, much better at search, and search has gotten better at intention.

Stu Eddins: Yes, because search is more than just the words you type in search is also the accumulation of all the things you did leading up to that point. I had a recent experience and little off track here. I had a recent experience where I had been looking for ice cream recipes. I got an ice cream maker for Father’s Day, and I thought, Oh, that’s cool. So I started looking for ice cream recipes. And I did that for just a little while, and then I was asked to come up with a dessert for a fourth of July event. And so I typed in ideas for Fourth of July event, all of them were ice cream, because for days before that, that had been what I’ve been looking for. Eventually you scroll down far enough you start getting apple pie and all the other fun stuff.

But search is also based on your performance in your recent history. However, 60% of search does not result in a click. Yes, that’s true, but the click is, in this case, click, really non Google property, a click from search that goes to your YouTube channel is a property, and yet it’s content you posted. So you really care whether that click went to YouTube or to your website, as long as you were the feature there. That that’s not a huge percentage. It is a percentage, but it’s not like, you know, half of the of these non click searches. It’s not like that, or it’s a click on the map. Because what I was looking for was directions to and and fill in the blank. And what came up was a result in my click was onto the Google map to find the direction. Do you really care that people aren’t first clicking your link, going to your homepage, scrolling to the bottom of the page, and clicking your address with directions. Right? This inconvenient.

Why would you want to put your perspective client or customer through that? And that’s why you go through all those steps to make sure your Google or whatever search engine properties are set up. Yeah, the way they should be. It’s quite important that we acknowledge that this has been going on for some time. Clickless search is something that I actually report on in analytics now. It’s not the entirety of all search, click List search, rather, in this regard, what I’m talking about is when people click on the Knowledge Graph. That’s considered a clickless search too. So if I search for, you know, Mariah is dry cleaners, and it comes up with you on at the top of search, but there’s this Knowledge Graph thing on the right hand side of desktop, or at the top in mobile, and I scroll through that there’s all this information about it, and I wind up clicking on the map to find out how to get to you. That’s still considered click with a search, because I stayed within the Google domain.

Mariah Tang: Gotcha.

Stu Eddins: Bing has the same thing. Yahoo, who cares? I don’t think anybody really uses that much anymore, though they’re there. Yeah, so click the Search has been around for a very long time. It’s increasing. And if you think about it, when you add in the AI overviews we’re going to get, we could expect an even greater increase in click List behavior. Now hold that thought for just a moment. Talk about AI overviews of this in just a few moments. The thing is, don’t just pay attention to how many clicks you don’t get. Pay attention to the ones you do. And I did. I did a quick sample of 15 different websites that we have analytics asset access to, not all of them. Just randomly pick 15, and every one of them, over the last four years has shown a consistent increase in organic search traffic coming to their website. So the volume of click the search is increasing, but then so is the volume of clicked search. Now one thing I did not find in the article, and I have to reread it again and go through with a little finer tooth comb, Voice Search is in those statistics as well, I believe. And there’s no click after a voice search. If I say, Oh, I’m not going to say it, because I’ll turn my phone on Google. Give Me a tell me about this, that and the other thing, it’s part of the statistical database they have. And of course, there’s no click from that when Google reads it back to me. The same thing for big let’s remember that Bing is currently what’s being used by the Alexa devices that people have in their homes. So when you ask a question of Alexa, is that incrementing that number in Bing that they’re using to say 60% I think so, but I don’t see one way or another, regardless, the 60% number is the is the catchy headline to the limits of their test, it’s factual. We can just simply accept that.

But the other part about it is we also have to acknowledge that beyond the headline, there’s always been clickless activity. Ever since Google started putting a knowledge graph in referencing maps, started sending people to YouTube channels, there’s always been this, this clickless behavior that’s out there.

Ai overviews, hold that thought. So let’s return to that for a moment. I guess. Yeah, AI overviews, they were released into the general US market about a month and a half ago or so. They’re showing up for 7% or less of searches right now, far less than anybody anticipated. No idea what Google anticipated with this. Now, they’re not very forthcoming, but yes, AI overviews could contribute more to clickless search, but at the same time, it’s not been a significant percentage of searches that get it, I do find it interesting that that now they’re testing the this kind of scroll across the bottom where it’s like, here’s three, here’s three sets that you might find more information on. Yeah, kind of thing, instead of just here’s the answer. I’m not going to tell you where we got it right, right? And that was one of the criticisms of Google’s AI original Bard, as it was called. It gave you all sorts of information, but no citations. Chatgpt gave you citations, but it was just hyperlinks within, either within the content or as hyperlinks of URLs. And if the citation site didn’t have plain language URLs. It was just alphabet soup.

Mariah Tang: Straight plagiarized soup. Yeah, yeah, not jaded at all.

Stu Eddins: No, no, no, as the content person says. Yeah, I guess it is your content being sucked up by AI overview. So you may have a little more skin in the game than I do but AI overviews are not having a significant impact yet. Google is becoming, well, not just Google, all search, you can say it’s about Facebook or searching, searching on Tiktok, search has stopped being a link provider started being an answer provider. Google’s client is the person doing the search, not you and your website, not me and your ads, not Google’s client is the person doing the search. The more they can satisfy that person, the more the further they’re going to lean into that behavior that did the satisfaction, that generated the satisfaction. People are saying, I want to live in the world of Star Trek. I asked the computer a question. I get one answer and I’m done. That’s the direction. Even Sergey Brin said the same quote of the same thing. Early on in Google’s life, but that was the ultimate goal. He even cited the Star Trek computer as one question, one answer, we’re good to go as being kind of the goal of Google at some point.

Unfortunately, search is transactional. At this point, there’s a reason for search to exist in its current paradigm, because I want my site to be found before yours is Mariah. I want more clicks than you get. I want my ads to be clicked before yours are. There’s this transactional competitiveness going on in search right now, and it generates, I don’t know, I think the technical term is buttload of money when you look at Google’s, I believe was two $19 billion revenue last year, and 80% of that came from ad clicks. Yeah, I’ll fact check my 80% but I believe that’s what I read. In other words, still, most of that money came from ad clicks. They have a vested interest in making sure that search remains competitive and viable for advertising. It may take somebody challenging that paradigm and saying, You know what? Search is a utility. We are going to give you one answer to your to your question, and it’s going to be the best answer possible. And we’ll get our money from some other way. That other way will probably be, in my opinion, for subscription.

Instead of a free tool, you’re going to pay all dollars a month to use it or something. Anyway, people do for YouTube, people do for Spotify, yeah, you know, free, ad free, and in fact, chat GPT, their 4.0 version. If you want that, I think it’s the pro version is fee per month, and that gives you not just better results. It gives you richer responses, as far as making the citations more readily available, as far as tailoring the response length, what they’re expecting and so on.

The model of a for-fee search engine, or answer engine, if you will, is already there. I believe they’re testing it. We’re getting pretty far away from 60% of searches don’t result in a click. However, that’s what we’re leading to it. Consumers are are giving indications that they just want answers to some things they don’t need to be led to someplace to get the same answer. They want to ask a question and get an answer right here and now.

And this is pushing them toward being answer engines instead of search engines. Yeah. So what is what do you think Stu that this means for marketers, the thing that we have to do is you have to look elsewhere in Google search if you want to optimize your experience, excuse me, not always your experience, but optimize the traffic to your website. First off, you should never have been counting totally on Google search. You need to be considering that your job in organic traffic is organic, social, organic search. You need to make sure that you have such things as guest blogging, anything you can think of that contributes traffic to your website without a fee necessarily is going to become organic traffic.

Maybe labeled referral may be labeled anything else, but it’s non paid traffic. Another article, I think, that came out after this 60% search results, and I think it’s even mentioned in the article, there are several other places you need to be active in to make sure that your website is getting, is developing traffic that isn’t that you don’t pay for. And that’s true. You don’t just, you know, place your bet all in one horse. Make sure that you have yourself covered across the spectrum of discoverability, if you will.

So did you say there were seven? I think that’s what the article said. Was that there were seven here. I just opened up. Let’s take a look here real quick. Google launched AI, or we use it may and well, yeah, here it is, search everywhere optimization, seven platforms SEOs need to optimize for, beyond Google.

And  the thing that they’re talking about is, what is search everywhere optimization? And they talk about a number of different places you need to make sure optimizing social, for example, Tiktok, optimizing for things such as Snapchat, because you’ve discussed this before, if you’re under the age of me, The lower 30s, you probably turn to Tiktok for answers more than you do Google.

Mariah Tang: Yep, I know all of my teenagers do.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, my own daughter does, and she’s not a teenager. She about has one of her own. She goes to Snapchat and Tiktok to find out information more than she turns to Google. This has to do with preference, more than anything else, answer quality, who knows, the people who do this would prefer to get information from somebody who’s used it rather than an answer provided from the source that they’re going to get the solution from. So, yeah, 60% of clicks no longer, uh, excuse me, 60% of searches no longer result in a click. You got it, they don’t to me that that speaks a lot to discussing the experience around your service or your project or your product, not just here’s the thing we have that’s just not going to fly anymore, whether it’s on social or Google or whatever platform. Yeah, and we could consider this to be the warning shot across the bow.

And how slow this evolution happens, I don’t know. I expect it to be much more accelerated with some of the other features that have been added into Google. I think that the pace of adoption of AI into Google, answer machine, versus answer Engine versus search engine, I think it’s gonna be much more fast paced than we’re probably anticipating at the moment, because Google’s client is the search user. That’s who they want to satisfy. People are saying this at the top of their lungs.

Yeah. So I I’m not surprised by the number. I think there’s a lot of explanation around the number, but I don’t think it’s going to change. I think we’re going to see more and more clickless behavior going on. And yeah, our organic traffic is generally increasing across websites. What about the ones that don’t come to the website? Are they getting the information that we want them to get? Are they getting it from us?

The way to assure those two things is by having a multipronged attack, or optimization attack, that multi prong optimization plan that has your presence on Tiktok, that has your presence at Google and other organic search, that has your presence across multiple sources, so that you’re driving not just general traffic, but meaningful traffic to the website. Yeah, into very into Google.

Google doesn’t see how many searches are conducted every day. There’s maybe eight and a half billion searches every day. About Google is saying is, we have access to eight, eight and a half million searches every day. Advertiser, we’ll rent you access to that, but you’ll have to compete against others to bid, then whoever’s willing to pay the most for that access gets it.

Mariah Tang: How many billions of those do you think are from us, Stu?

Stu Eddins: I’m thinking about half.

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.

Stu Eddins: They’re trying everything they can to maintain the story that their customer is the search user, not the college that wants to advertise, not the doctor that wants to advertise.

Did I say that out loud? Welcome to did I say that out loud a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO?

Stu Eddins: This week on Did I Say That Out Loud?

Mariah Tang: We’re telling the future!

Stu Eddins: Yes, yes, Google made some announcements that are directly impacting how we will use search in the future. One of those things is the Google’s search experience the the search generative experience that you can opt into at this time. It’s being tested in the wild to people who don’t opt in, of course, but I have opted into it. And when you do that, at the top of your search column, you will see what’s called a AI generated result. So if you type in, where’s the best pizza for lunch in my town, you’re probably not going to see much. But if you ask a question that might be more toward research beyond just the immediate need for a really great slice of pizza, you might get a good response at the top. And there’s two qualifiers there might and good. Right now it’s in beta. So the question of good is what they’re trying to answer. Might means that they’re deciding what questions they can and should answer along the way to the change that Google announced. Its AI overviews. That’s what that chunk of stuff is at the top of search. So when I search for something, and it comes up at the top, and I’ve been asking you about, let’s say, information on the best type of lighting for my office, with a north facing window, it’s going to give you a search generative experience at the top. And in the near future, soon as they enable it, it’s rolling out, I’ll be able to change the overview. I want detailed information. But I just want something simple. And that’s actually one of the options is simplify. I want a simplified result, we’re given more control over the response we get from Google because this this response is giving is coming from it’s knowledge. It’s gathered by indexing every page on the internet that it’s indexed. So it’s going out and finding answers based on that searching that index that it has and returning the top results. The extensive, detailed response you get, I’ve opened up some of these things there as long as your arm. There’s just a ton of information in it. And if all I’m really asking the question is to find out because I didn’t ask it to my question 20 halogen lighting or incandescent lighting, you know, or LED? What do I need? Maybe I just want a simplified answer. I don’t want to dig. In a way it’s kind of like the equivalent of using Google as a little more of a magic eight ball. It’s really simple. What is it? You got a possible responses on one of those, but you get the point, I believe this will be interesting. Chat GPT is also hinting at having a search replacement coming one day. That poses some interesting, some interesting questions. Also, Google has a vast, vastly larger array of information to pull from the chat GPT currently does. And Google has spent a lot more time segmenting and parsing out the information it has into what it considers to be its logical hierarchy of how to find stuff. Not more, I wouldn’t go out and argue for using those sort of Google search experience. At this point.

Mariah Tang: I am looking through the lens of being in a somewhat jaded millennial. I don’t just trust what was up there even though I just from Google. So I’ll scan it and say Okay, that looks like something accurate. I’ll look and see if there are any of the linked sources to say okay, this is where they got this information. But mostly I’m skimming down through the page and looking at the people also ask questions and things like that. Okay. I think that is not how young people use the internet. And I know this. However, I think to me, it’s really reminiscent of a lot of the other changes that they’ve made throughout my career, which is, you know, Featured Snippets, the local pack be highlighting in the meta descriptions for app pages where it’s pulling up this information. We think this is what you’re trying to find. So we were chatting offline before this and you mentioned it’s it’s really bringing In full circle, what we’ve been talking about for a few years, it’s search intent, not the keywords, not the specific. Do I spell it this way? Do I spell it that way? How exactly do I phrase this? It’s what are you trying to achieve? And we’re going to help you achieve that, even if you say it in 35 words.

Stu Eddins: Right, more complex, you know, in some way, and and I’ll close this again, for the end of this, of this episode. It says the rule is grooming us to use search differently. And I think that’s going to be a large part of their intent with how they release features. Now, the other question comes up has been going to do the same thing. Because being in chat GPT are joined at the hip portal, you Yahoo out there. I don’t know what they’re doing yet. Frankly, I haven’t kept tabs on them the last few months? How this all shakes out? And who comes out on top? I don’t know. I can tell you that when it comes to technology. The new entry tends to take a little time to gain traction, but then it will overtake the existing the existing hero, if you will. It may be chat GPT may be something we’ve not seen yet. I don’t know. But really, when it comes to this, this simplification or high detail feature, I think it’s going to be helpful. But I think it also is a way that brings us back more toward the concept of Voice Search, which has always been an ask a question, get one result. And I think that the the whole search experience that we’re seeing the search generative experience has GE is it’s called for Google, these barred and now it’s Gemini that thinks Okay, they’re naming their platforms as they go along. Think what it is, is we’re seeing that fusion of app based search, meaning going to the Google app on your phone or going to the Google website on the internet, then we’re seeing the fusion of that and voice search a little more each day. This kind of lends itself to it. At home, I am based more on Alexa enabled echo devices. If I ask a question as far as getting too long, they tell the darn thing to shut up. Okay? Is this a more polite way of saying Shut up, you know, just give me the simplified version, please, I don’t need all this. So I think it can be helpful in that regard. If you’re trusting or more trusting at least of the response you’re getting. And you still get the 10 blue links, and you still get the ads below and you still get all the other things you always have. This is just that gradually expanding feature at the very top of the page. Because it is a feature that is getting more and more research and development improvement in it. I think it’s more it’s more than just competition against the chat. GPT is of the world.

Google does an interesting thing, I think comparatively to some of these newer groups. And maybe they’ll do this down the line. But Google is extremely invested in user testing user groups, beta rollouts, and they’ve already scaled back some of their display on Ste because people were complaining that it was overtaking everything else. Advertisers were not happy users are not happy. So they said, Okay, you know, we’ll rein it back in, before it was even widely released. And so I feel like there’s a, Google always has a pulse on what’s the next thing for the rest of us do. And when you mentioned, you know, it’s teaching us how to use this differently. It’s teaching you it’s teaching me, but it’s already adapted to how younger people use it. And so I think all of us old fogies that are out here in the world are going to have to just suck it up and start using search differently if we’re going to want to reach these younger markets. It is in and as we’ve discussed, also, we have a cohort of people right now, higher education kind of focus on 18 to 24. Now, we’d like to go lower than 18. But you know, advertising and promotion practices don’t allow us to go below 18 readily. But that 18 to 24 demographic is more likely to use tick tock to find information than it is Google Search already. Our numbers are going up when it comes to organic search from Google on the websites that we associated with. So if the younger people are you are using other platforms, I have to say they’re still using Google, at least for the clients that we’re dealing with.

Mariah Tang: Isn’t Google indexing some of that kind of content anyway? Because we’re you know, when you Google something, sometimes you’ll get TikTok  results, you’ll get Facebook results, you know, yeah, so it all kind of works together.

Stu Eddins: Sometimes there’s still tension between those entities because it’s walled garden and Facebook, you know, you have to sign in to get there. Same with tick tock and Google was trying to answer by by bringing Reddit in at Google is trying to bring answers in by bringing YouTube shorts in instead, it’s trying to fill the gaps there. But that search generative experience is going to start taking over. And sometimes, as we get more used to the tool, getting a simplified answer is going to be important. Now, that actually brings us into the second thing Google announced what they’re talking about, there is multi step multi step reasoning. And that’s, that’s a, a fancy term for you don’t have to ask three questions to wind up where you want to be.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, it is. All at once that ultimate instant gratification, I went this, this, this and this.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. An example I use the other day was, what is the closest college with a business program that offers partially free tuition? Not too long ago, that was three separate searches. Finding colleges near me didn’t say, Okay, shall we the ones that have business degrees, we’re able to do that part right now readily when you add in the partially free tuition. And that’s a concept that that is actually probably the finest point of this. There’s a lot of colleges near me, most of them offer business, but the real qualifier is partially free. Now, what is partially free mean? That it has readily available scholarships, that there’s grant money available, that you know what, they are just, they just, you know, you sign up for this, you get the rest of it free, because they got to they gotta three months special going? That the point is that the concept of free tuition is varied. The thing is, what they’re saying is with the with the multi step reasoning, Google is going to be able to understand that has to be able to put it in context. And this goes back to what you said several minutes ago. Well, Google is about content, it understands the language understands how people speak, and can respond to it. No, it’s getting better at doing that. It’s still learning. That’s why this is all in beta. That’s why the, you know, you’re not forced into it. But let’s keep in mind two things. First off, Google has said Google executives have said that their vision for Google is one day to be like the computer on Star Trek. You simply say what you want me to give you the right answer. And that’s it, you’re done. The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that Google doesn’t get paid because it gives one answer. Google gets paid right now, because it provides 10 answers, and a handful of ads.

Mariah Tang: I wonder if one day, there will be a model where College, ABC college is paying Google to play like I would like you to use us as the subject matter expert for XYZ, and we’ll give you a million dollars or whatever that looks like. And maybe that replaces ad spent someday. And that’s probably like, way down the line.

Stu Eddins: But it is in the concept right now. It kind of flies in the face of a Google wants to be viewed as today. They want their results to be the organic results. They want that to be viewed as impartial, because they’re trying everything they can to maintain the story that their customer is the search user, not the college that wants to advertise, not the doctor that wants to advertise. They have two different business models. And the biggest one is we provide the best answers around for people’s questions. And that means that they’re beholden first to the people asking the questions. Along the way, they figured out how to monetize that through search ads and through everything else. And they allow that in now they allow that $219 billion worth of allowed last year. That’s their revenue from ads. I wouldn’t say they have incentive to preserve that. Because Google Search by itself getting links without ads, plus some money is the ads that pay their way. There’s no doubt. I don’t see too many Google self driving cars out there right now taking up the slack. They are getting into other things. But there has to be some way to monetize this because it costs money to have the servers running that answers. We’ve all seen the pictures of the Google data center datacenters. They take up acres of space they consume gigawatts of power, they have people there to serve them. There’s hardware that breaks down every you know, it has an expense structure they have to pay for that. They have stocked stakeholders that need to get money back further investment. There’s all sorts of reasons to have monetary reward for what they provide. That’s true. But I wonder if taking a direct payment to become the answer would be the undoing of their of their current ethos, which is the user’s art.

Mariah Tang: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing everybody knows already.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. And he and I also have to say that skepticism about not just Google, but we keep talking about them, but they aren’t. They are the 800 pound gorilla. The skepticism with search engines right now is running higher than it ever has. And with generative search results being the bright, shiny object, there’s a lot of people saying, Hey, this is the way to go. This is the next thing. But quite frankly, I’m more suspicious of that than I am about Google results. Yeah. Google’s motivation, I think I can figure out pretty clearly, then, yeah, if they game the system is their system. It’s not a public utility, right? Neither is Bing, or Yahoo, or Yandex or Facebook. Yeah. And, you know, if you’re not paying for something, then you’re the commodity you’re, you know, selling stuff to us what they make money off of. So anyway, that’s all that but AI is not cheap. It takes more power than non AI types of search. It takes more energy, more people, more research more everything else, they got to figure out a way to pay for it. Okay. All of this started out as a conversation about how they’re allowing you to have simplified results at the top and detailed results. And right now, they don’t know how to monetize that. But here’s the thing. We’ve talked about multi step reasoning. Right now, most of what they do for support revenue is based on keywords, search terms. But I argue it’s not anymore. And this is the next logical step after that. What I just said about what is the closest college or the business program offering partially free tuition, easily has three search terms in there that are not, that are not tightly coordinated to each other until they’re strung together in that sentence. That’s my keyword. What Google has been training us on for the last couple of years, at least, if not longer is we don’t pay attention to keywords anymore. We pay attention to we pay attention to intention. What is the context? And what is the intent of what somebody is searching for? That is what Google is uncovering with all this? That is what is driving Google search results right now? Yes, in a search campaign, I still put in keywords. But in that campaign, my keywords might be colleges near me. Business Programs, and low cost or free tuition.

Mariah Tang: Price, proximity, preference.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, it’s the emotion, it’s the feeling, it’s the thing you want that specific item that you that you’re looking for, and maybe the closest college to nice 500 miles away that has free tuition or near partially free tuition. So it needs to make those judgments to the point being that we need to make sure that even today to be ready for these things AI overviews for okay, how do you get involved with an AI overview? That we’ll talk about that in a minute? Let’s solve the keyword problem right now. We need to stop thinking about keywords as things that we must build upon. And start looking at them as the shorthand the Cliff’s Notes of content. The keywords that we choose to target need to be able to together represent the intention that we’re trying to market to the intention we’re trying to attract. So if we have colleges near me business programs and free tuition, and we get a sense that that is what a lot of people are searching for. We need to make sure our content supports that concept. Not necessarily those words, because free tuition, I bet that would raise the hairs on the back of the neck of every executive and most in most higher ed institutions. But low cost affordable.

Mariah Tang: They would we’d like to have that on their pages that was relevant, smart enough to know that those are all similar techniques.

Stu Eddins: Right? So context. People are going to be people they’re going to search for what they want. They want free, semantic search, semantic search. Yes. And semantic search was introduced many years ago in Google Search, and we keep riding the crest of that wave forward.

Mariah Tang: This is the adults. The adults. What is the word? I’m looking for evolution of content.

Stu Eddins: It’s a maturing. Yeah, it’s the maturing of it. In there’s still more to go. Because it’s, I don’t know. I have raised kids, you’ve raised kids, and when they tell me my dog has the intelligence of a three year old I really question them, or it makes me question to humans. Raisa three years old, I don’t know which maybe you guys were Google searches too. It has a limited vocabulary, it understands the intention, I may use great big words when I scold a three year old, but what they see is the intention of I’m angry, and they did something. Yep. So it may be that we’re at that stage with Google Search to or Bing search or whoever. But it’s going to get better. And I think part of this this discussion is, we think we understand from reading the tea leaves the direction things are going. And we know where we bet, we’ve been to a point where we’ve come from the exact match keyword targeting, we’ve come from a point of make sure we had these words showing up in content. So we can get found organically. We’ve come from a point of view, where if we’re talking about a business, business program, business class, business degree business, we got to use all the near match stuff. That was lexical search, that was matching word for word to make things happen, instead of contextual search, which we have now. And I think that this is just the next step in that we get the, we get the AI generated result at the top, and we have the control to say give it to us all or you know what, just give me the highlights, we have the ability to say, Okay, I, as a human, I’m going to search for everything I need in one statement. And it may be multiple sentences long. Now, by the way, that echo device with Alexa on it, I’ve already been doing that, I will ask it a question. And and it’s multi part. And I don’t stop talking until I’m done asking all the parts of it. And I would say about a third of the time, it gives me a useful answer. Two thirds of the time, you just want it to stop talking at you because it’s so stupid. You know, it’s just the level we’re at with these things. But I’m also trying to stress it out. I’m trying to push the edge with it.

Mariah Tang: We can’t record doing that to someone.

Stu Eddins: Says the lady sits next to me. The fact is that these things will get better. And they’re going to drag us kicking and screaming to get better at using them too.

Mariah Tang: I was, you know, at first when I was like no links, what are they even thinking but the six excites me as the contractors and the content strategists. Because while there is a camp of people hollering, like, why did why would we even make content now if Google’s not going to take people to our site? In my mind, it’s there is a there’s going to be increased and steeper need for new relevant fresh content all the time. Great, because those questions are going to change, we see that now. The questions that people ask are going to change, they’re going to become more complex, they’re going to bring in other emotions as these needs changes the audience ages as you know all the things. And the cool thing about blog, web pages, whatever media you’re using, you can get the content of those pages and refresh it with new with new questions for you answers. Keep your URL the same. I don’t see that changing in the future. But, you know, maybe it’s these three questions for the first quarter of the year, maybe those evolve to, we’re going to keep two of those questions and add a new one, we’re going to swap some of it out, you know, this is an ongoing optimization, and the need for that is only going to grow.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, and consider this pool search has been around for 20 some years. And even today, 20 some years later, one out of every five 20% of the searches they see they’ve never seen before, every single day. Can you imagine what it’d be like, you know, put pushing the tight out with a broom to stay ahead of that is constant work. If they were on lexical search, I have to match what you asked for in order to be successful. And 20% of the time every day I fail. The way they have to get around that is to go to context. They have to start understanding the meaning that the words convey. And that’s what they sold for some years ago and started progressing toward today. And it’s going to get better. And right now. It’s not being asked to learn me how I want my answers to come back. So I’m given control and said okay, you want simple answers, ask for that instead. The other part about this is a no, it’s not training me on how to ask a question or a complex question is training me on the fact that I now can do that with Google. It’s that connection. The third thing they announced last this last week, may have even deeper implication for certain verticals. And that’s search results categorization. Now, it’s not coming to higher education or probably to healthcare anytime soon. But recipes, it’s going to come to that travel is going to come to that. And what this is, is you ask a question shinned about I need recipes for healthy eating for overweight people who are middle aged. All right, right there. It’s a complex question being asked. But what it’s going to give you is a series of results that it’s going to say, I hear healthy recipes for anybody. Next category is healthy recipes for overweight, older people here. And then the third one is going to be eating out if you are a overweight, older person, so where do you rank? Number one? All categories? Probably not. What does what happens to the number one ranking in that type of a display?

Mariah Tang: Yeah, maybe you have the opportunity now to say, We rank. We rank high in this category. And this matters, because that’s what you take to your stakeholder. My question is, is there going to be a category to take out all the stupid backstory about the recipe foggers that nobody cares about?

Stu Eddins: Well, that could be that could be Yeah, that could be the simplify button for that. Yeah, yeah. References get rid of stupid. The the other part about this that that’s interesting is that keywords are no longer a thing. Okay, they are still to some extent, but our concept of keywords needs to change. themes. Themes are in fact, with in Google search, or to the Google advertising performance Max, we were asked to put in search themes, not keywords, 25 word descriptions that we have things we want searches we want to match to. It’s already here for those of us doing marketing in certain ways. But when it comes to the people that the vast majority of people who use surgeons that have paid beyond search, this is going to be a little more liberating, and at the same time, you have to give the public permission to do more, but not do so much more that you can’t keep up.

Thanks for listening to Did I Say That Out Loud? with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.

Stu Eddins: If you step off that soapbox, that everybody says, oh my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard of. I can’t believe you thought of this and I didn’t. That doesn’t mean you have something successful, right? It just means that you have more assurance that you’re maybe on the right path.

Stu Eddins: Something occurred to us the other day, we were sitting around and just kind of tossing ideas back and forth. And I recalled something from earlier conference, it was a less formal setting than what I what I attend today. Yeah, there were keynotes. There was everything else going on. But they provided a soapbox space. It was kind of interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen such a thing like that. Mariah said I don’t think so. But what was kind of cool about it was in this space, they would set up multiple platforms were moved enough one from another so that you wouldn’t get a lot of crosstalk. And people were allowed to just stand up there and pontificate here’s an idea I have, let’s talk about this, they are able to broadcast to a small group of people in front of them a concept they’re working on an idea something so that they could pitch their idea, think of Shark Tank. And then the other people that were out there would listen to the entire presentation not interjecting in the middle of it. But then at the end of it, the person would either usually just step down and walk into the 1015 people around them and start the conversation about what was just presented. Interesting. The thing I thought was cool about it was it gave immediate feedback from peers. You know, we we spent all of our time in an agency among the people we know. And it’s not that we eventually start sharing a brain or anything. But we tend to have the same perspective, because we’re all serving the same type of client. We have the same experiences with expectations that we’re currently working under. And the thing that kind of resonated with me, was this type of a process allow me to connect or whoever was given the presentation with like minded people who did not share the same background of experiences. That sounds like something you’d want to do.

Mariah Tang: 100%.

Stu Eddins: Really? I love that. Okay. Okay. You know, it takes a very brave heart or a large degree of hubris to decide to do it because you’re putting yourself out there.

Mariah Tang: Well, it’s like being on social media, especially in a not to get political. But in an election year, if you’re only listening to the opinions of people who sound like you, if you’re only getting information from sources that sound like you, then you’re in an echo chamber, like, what are you learning?

Stu Eddins: Yeah, I could see that. The other part about this is it was the people who present it may have had some tentative feedback on their process or their idea. They may have tested it once or twice. One objection I’ve heard in the past is, you know, I’ve got these great ideas. I don’t know that I want to release them to everybody in the world. Yeah. Secret Sauce. Yeah, that could be my competitive advantage or something. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that reservation. But I think you have to balance that against the potential of what you can learn from the feedback. Yeah.

Mariah Tang: And a lot of the times, I mean, we come across this all the time, like, your organic search query dashboard. As an example, you came up with this cool idea, not many people are doing it? Or if they do, they’re not talking about it. And you were very forthright with it. Like, we’ve got to share this with everyone. Just because you tell somebody about an idea doesn’t mean they have the skill, the know how the time to do it themselves?

Stu Eddins: Well, right, it actually that’s a good idea. Or excuse me a good example. I did give a couple of presentations on this, this tool, this this search query tool. And then within about a week, I had three comments back with yet additional ways to use the tool, the expansion benefit of everybody, because now the people who shared individual insights on what how they used it, I was able to take that and multiply it across all the clients that I talked to on the topic. And I think that that, in some ways, is some synergy, some, some, some back and forth that we may be lacking, particularly in a more diffused workspace that we have today. I don’t want to tap into the the entire conversation about remote working. But I do think that that some, some venue where I can where I could present my ideas. A podcast is one example where there’s no feedback. Yeah, I gotta wait for it to get published and then for somebody to type in a response or call me or email me. Tell me my gosh, I listened to That entire podcast and I have never heard such a stupid idea, whatever it might be, but getting that immediate feedback in, I wonder if having a little bit of fear of putting it up there putting your idea out there is what you want. Because if you don’t have that, maybe you’ve got too much certainty in your process. And all you’re doing is bragging. Oh, yeah,

Mariah Tang: I had an experience like that. Last week, two weeks ago, I have spoken at Content Marketing World seven times, okay, I’m not a I’m not a newbie to the speaking circuit. But I just published my first article with them on their blog two weeks ago, I have never felt more tiny and more afraid in my whole life than when I hit that send button. And the feedback was awesome. Like, if you don’t have that healthy, oh, my gosh, what am I doing? Feeling? Maybe you’re too comfortable in your role? Maybe you need to reach out and start learning more outside of your little bubble.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, I can see that being beneficial. And I think that they the risks that you take, sometimes it’s gonna blow up in your face, otherwise, it wouldn’t be called risk. You know? I think Google’s the one who keeps putting forward the concept that 90 Some percent of experimentation fails, otherwise, it wouldn’t be called an experiment. Yeah. I think a similar thing applies here. A significant percentage of the of the ideas and concepts you have probably won’t survive first contact with your peers. They’re going to have better ways they’re gonna see holes that you did not see. And honestly, I think that may be a better outcome than using our clients as guinea pigs.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s, I think it is gorgeous. I have clients too. It’s one thing to present to your peer group, you know, to, I’m going to bring this idea just do what just do think, okay, Stu validated this, I’m gonna take it to Sandra, okay, Sandra, had this idea, this idea, we’re going to take it to somebody else. And you know, walk through that process. When you bring it to a client, you’re talking about their experience, their goals, everything, and they bring you like, Well, what about this? Did you think about this? How does this work here? Love that. I mean, when you get that, that challenge that question that? How are you really going to use this with my work? It makes you stop and think either my idea has been validated, or there’s room to grow here.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. The other thing I think about presenting it at a setting like a conference in a from a soapbox, instead of from the from the main stage and podium. I have had that feedback at roundtable discussions. And we can have that there. In this case, the roundtable was not set up to be something about concepting and talking about the direction you want to go, we’ve got a completely different purpose. And like you, humans of our type did, we completely strayed from that topic is talking about things we wanted to try. But my goodness, we were so energized afterward, I frankly forgot what the purpose of the roundtable was, I had to look at my at my agenda to remember what why I was sitting there. Because what I took away was much more valuable in the moment than what I sat down to take away in the first place. I’m sure that the roundtable sponsor was was completely beside themselves, mad as hell at us all. But, you know, we weren’t having a round table that others were observing. It was a everybody had their own table that they were discussing things on. But I guess I guess my point is, I think, maybe conferences, we we tend to go to the looking for, I want to gain ideas from the people who I sign up for to go to their presentations. I want to see people at different booths or different installations, and see what they want me to, to learn and understand from their offerings. We have Hallway Conversations with that person. We met three conferences ago, hey, how you doing? What’s going on in your life, we eventually get down to that. But I think that that, a another facet of that could be putting your idea out there, offering it up and saying, I have an idea. I’d like for you to present it to everybody. Or not everybody but to a select group that wants to hear it. And then I’m asking for your feedback. This is not to be a passive exercise. It’s something where I’m expecting you to come back and challenge me on it. Constructive criticism is is often how things go from idea to actuality. Oh, yes, the step in the middle.

Mariah Tang: Yeah. And then you have that built in accountability of those people who are sitting there who are going to pester you later how that thing turned out. Did you use my idea? I want to you know, yeah,

Stu Eddins: in, you know, there’s an entire avenue of after the fact Hey, you know, folks, thank you so much for your feedback. Give me your names and email addresses and I’ll let you know where this goes. I, you may go that far, you may not. But if you’re not furiously taking notes during the feedback session, perhaps you haven’t given it your all here. The other part about this that occurs to me is, we really do want to talk to our peers. And I’ve said that like 93 times so far, but we shouldn’t consider this to be something as formal as a peer review. It’s not that type of a thing. If everybody if you step off that soapbox, that everybody says, oh, my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard of, I can’t believe you thought of this. And I didn’t. That doesn’t mean you have something successful. Right? It just means that you have more assurance that you’re maybe on the right path. It is some sort of a validation to keep going. If you step off the podium and eat and you take the critique that comes towards you and saying, you know, that’s a great idea. But I think you have a narrow application in front of you, it’s not going to have the scope of application, you think it will, then here’s why. That may be the most valuable part of the interaction. Because if you leave it at the at their statement, and you don’t ask the return question, okay. Why don’t you think it’s my Why do you think my scope is limited? Yep. You’re not going to get the most from your from your presence there. Oh, yeah. Anyway, it just something that you and I were talking about, it occurred to me that I had experienced something similar at that roundtable, I mentioned that at a less formal convention, in different industries, we’re not talking about marketing at the time, they had provided space for this type of soapbox communication. I don’t think they actually envisioned what it was going to turn out to, they just said, Hey, you want to talk about you want to have a conversation about an important topic to you? Let us know, we’ll tell you at 1015 Your time is is at zone B. Something as simple as that. You’re also leaving your stuff out there little exposed to be somebody standing at a podium with nobody to talk to ya. What if you gave a party and nobody came? But again, it’s risk? Yeah. And in our world agency world, our particular focus with this agency is in marketing. And if I were to, to present scheduled to present my idea, nobody showed up, man, what a bad job of marketing I did, right. Maybe the punishment is twice over the I don’t know, the the feedback I got from you on how you feel when you present, particularly in larger groups. Others around you like Sandra and so on, when she presents, they get warm reception. They get a lot of positive feedback. They get some questions afterward. But it kind of occurred to me to take that information and reach back to the experience I had before and say, Okay, let’s make it intentional. Yeah. So a smaller group, you do have a greater tendency for somebody to poke at you. Yeah, yeah. And you’re inviting it.

Mariah Tang: Like you said, those pokes are the growth opportunities. You’re not going to grow in your comfort zone if people telling you what a what a great job you did pat, pat, pat, right.

Stu Eddins:  Right. I will take all of those though, that I love it. But now

Mariah Tang: I gotta think of a topic for use do to have your soapbox conference?

Stu Eddins: Oh, geez. i Yes. i, i Yeah, I have so many. You know, let’s realize that the name of this podcast is did I say that out loud? Honestly, that may be my test for whether I have such a topic.

Mariah Tang: I love this idea. And I think I think people in an agency setting or people that are really hungry to make change in their organization would be interested in this, this small group idea is less intimidating in a lot of ways than being passed the mic in a great big auditorium full of people. And it gives the people that are quiet with good ideas and opportunity to raise their hand and beard. Yeah.

Stu Eddins: You know, I I’ve been living with this idea for a couple of weeks. And in my mind, inventing the worst case scenario, I envision myself standing on the soapbox and and issuing my ideas and my concepts on the best way to handle something for search marketing. And Frederick Falaise is standing right in front of me in the group. Kind of like the the person who was the original Evangelist for Google search and pointed out virtually every hole in my idea, but I tell you what, I almost paid for that to happen.

Mariah Tang: This is like the modern-day equivalent of showing up at school without your clothes on.

Stu Eddins: I think I would prefer to remain dressed at that podium, but yes, you’re right.

Thanks for listening to Did I Say That Out Loud? with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.