As SEO specialists with years of experience under our belts, we’ve seen the digital marketing industry change many times. For most of that time, traffic to your site has been one of the metrics we’ve used most to measure the success of digital marketing efforts.
At an agency like First Digital Media, we’ve always given you context to that traffic; if you’re getting visitors who aren’t ever going to buy from you, those visitors might as well not be there. But there’s no metric which tells the whole story, and traffic has been one of the most common ways to tell part of it.
What Metrics Matter in Digital Marketing?
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The Changing Role of Your Website
There was a time when the only thing that mattered was the number of backlinks to your site. Then backlinks needed to be of a certain quality. Then they needed to be relevant. (We went into a lot more detail on backlinks recently, if you want to know more.)
In recent years what’s mattered a lot more is the value your website adds. Put another way, you want your ideal customer to find the information they need on your site, feel comfortable that they can trust you, and reach out to do business with you.
For some industries, especially for eCommerce websites, a single visit might take them from discovering you to buying from you. But the more expensive your products and services, especially if you sell to other businesses, the longer it might take between them discovering you and becoming a lead.
But things are in the middle of changing again.
AI’s Impact on Search
Whether (like most people) you still search on Google or you’re now using Bing, Perplexity, Claude, or even some other AI-driven search engine which hadn’t entered the market at the time of writing, you will have noticed AI has a much bigger presence than it used to.
Summaries drawn from the content on different websites seek to answer simple questions within the search engine itself, without anyone clicking through to your website. Recent studies show that Google’s AI Overviews section reduces clicks by anywhere between 15 and 35%.
And really, that’s common sense; if my question is answered in the search screen, I’m probably not going to visit the website that the answer was originally taken from. (Of course, sometimes these answers include AI hallucinations, making their information flawed or even outright wrong – but if you’re asking basic questions because you don’t understand the topic yet, you’re less likely to spot that.)
What Good SEO Can Do for You
The good news is that very little of that lost traffic was going to become a customer. The type of searches that AI summaries are best at answering aren’t commercial in nature. And despite the growing market share of Bing (backed by ChatGPT) and the emergence of many other AI-powered competitors, Google still processed more than 5 trillion searches in 2024.
All of this means your website still has a huge role to play. But as more questions end before clicking through to a webpage, and as more users refuse cookie-based tracking in favour of privacy, traffic becomes less and less useful as a metric.
As we mentioned in that earlier blog, the only real measure of a digital marketing agency’s success is the extra revenue coming in from sales they helped make or their lead generation services.
Attributing those to specific channels is tricky when it’s Google or Meta Ads, very difficult when it’s organic search optimisation, and even email marketing can be surprisingly difficult to track with modern tools (what we wouldn’t give for the previous version of Google Analytics back) so we’ll always be looking at visitor count – but it’s even more important now to consider conversion rate, also known as the percentage of your visitors who convert. (Of course, the longer it takes a potential customer to decide to reach out, the lower conversion rate will be – but these tend to correlate to higher-value conversions)
We’ve given this example before (and we surely will again), but would you really rather have 5,000 visitors to your site every month but sell to only 50 of them, or would you prefer 1,000 visitors but you’re selling to 100?
Make the Most of Your Business Online
The fundamentals of online marketing don’t change much; if you build a website that solves your ideal customer’s problems, you’ll get traffic and you’ll make money. The specifics change steadily over time.
To future-proof your business’ marketing, get in touch with us today – we’ll be more than happy to help.
