Welcome to Shift Happens the art, science, and chaos of modern marketing. Each episode unpacks the forces reshaping marketing from AI and data to privacy, creative and performance, and asks experts how they transform disruption into advantage. 

Nasser: 

In this episode, I’ll be joined by Jenna Watson, also SVP but this time of media, at DAC, one of my favorite people, and all round good egg. She has years of experience leading media strategy across industries. And they have been hands on with keyword research, including AI and SEO and AI Max, testing it across client campaigns and uncovering both the wins and the watch outs. 

She’s here to share lessons straight from the front lines. Welcome to the show, Jenna Watson.  

Jenna: 

Thank you Nasser. And may I just say, guess who’s back? Back again? Jenna is back. With her friend. Because we are the old school podcast. But sans Dan. How sad for him. But here we are. Back again at the microphone with each other. 

Nasser:  

So sad. Sad for him. Very, very sad for Dan. Yeah. Good for us. Yeah. So, Jenna, let’s get into this. So question I recently heard: if AI is supposed to make media more efficient, how do I know that it’s actually saving me money and getting me better customers and not just driving empty traffic? So a way to think about that is and this is how what we’re going to be exploring today as we dig into the keyword less future in search and SEO, but also within paid tools such as AI Max, which is, you know, as of today, Google’s new search feature. 

But let’s start with the people this really impacts, our clients and their customers. What challenges were advertisers and users facing that made a solution like for example, AI Max appealing? What gap in their experience does this type of automation aim to fill?  

Jenna:  

So it depends, I suppose, on the advertiser. As Google continues down its path of using AI enabled ad types and targeting types, this will be super helpful to the small kind of individual operator that wants to gain entry into a tool like Google Ads, because really, it can be. It is not at DAC. It can be a set it and forget it thing. But what it impacts for DAC and for our clients is AI Max in paid gives us a way to find incremental audiences. So it’s just a toggle on your search account, right? It’s not like it’s a whole net new thing per se, but it uses broad matching keyword, the signals to go find more people that you wouldn’t have found otherwise just using your regular search account. 

So it is an incremental scaling tactic that we like to use.  

Nasser: 

So from our testing, where have we actually seen it deliver real value.  

Jenna: 

So it does depending on the way your search campaigns are set up in AI for for AI Max, it does deliver that efficient scale. So it’ll get you possibly some lower CPC, some incremental reach. It really is designed for scaling efficiently, but that’s not necessarily going to be the case for every single client or every single account structure that’s out there.  

Nasser: 

So that’s interesting because you used the word like efficient scale. You’ve also talked about the fact that this is incremental, right. Which I find interesting and contrasting with kind of Google’s first shot across the bow when it comes to AI automation, which was P Max.  

And when that first came out, a lot of marketers hated it. They were like, it’s a black box, and all it’s doing is cannibalizing what we were already doing. But you’re saying this is different?  

Jenna: 

Yes and no. It is different. It’s doing different things. It’s got different ad types. It appears, in different places. It’s different. Both things are still very much going to advance into change. So advertisers hated P Max at the beginning because it was a black box, and to be perfectly honest, it didn’t perform that well at the very beginning. But of course, as more users test into it, as it gets more data, as it learns more, it gets better and better and better. And now we’re using P Max all over the place. 

 I think, in this case, some of the, some of the things and snafus that people are going to run into is if you are an already very sophisticated Google Ads marketer, and you’re already using a lot of broad match, and you’re already using a lot of P Max, and you’re already using RSAs responsive search ads, the scale you’re going to get out of this is going to be probably minimal. Because those things are already designed for scale, right? Broad match in and of itself is designed to get you more, with what you’re doing. So there’s the really sophisticated marketers where this is nice and it will, it will add some incrementality and might as well go get that. Absolutely. On the flip side of that is if clients have smaller budgets or if their campaigns set up is really, really granular and really, really tight, it doesn’t do a great job. 

 It’s just too small to be impactful. So there is a fine line that we’re finding there for sure. Okay.  

Nasser: 

What other limitations are you finding there?  

Jenna: 

Well, there have been some stickiness where there’s a little bit of kind of like, you know, almost call it keyword bleed in the old in the old way where like broaden or excuse me brand and non brand or having like keyword bleed. 

 So there’s a little bit of maybe lack of relevancy because it’s trading scale for the tight controls that we’re used to. And with that then maybe you might think that you’re wasting a little bit, a little bit of your spend getting a little bit lower quality. It’s not matching as well as regular search does. I think, though, you know, I’ve seen a lot of people like out on the interwebs saying, “oh, AI Max is terrible, the CPA is x percent higher than my search CPA.” Well, yeah, of course it is. It’s finding incrementality. It’s not a 1 to 1 competitor to your search campaign. Right? So as long as people go into this thing with kind of eyes wide open and understand that it’s getting you more than you would normally get, and to take that for what it’s worth should be fine. 

Nasser: 

I have to say, Jenna, when I woke up this morning, I didn’t think I’d be discussing bleeding keywords, but here we are. 

Jenna: 

Well, you’re welcome.  

Nasser: 

So what’s the bottom line for marketers today?  

Jenna: 

Bottom line with AI Max. So just speaking about that is it works best at scale. You should absolutely do it if you want to get some more efficient reach out of your campaigns, but it absolutely requires human oversight. Anybody that’s ready to turn this on and forget about it, you will see kind of the lower relevancy. You will see the lower performance. So focus on quality. Get that thing humming for you as well as you can with the limited controls available, it will drive, some efficient scale for you.  

Nasser: 

Okay, so let’s shift from paid to the famously transparent, practice of SEO. 

What do you think marketers should be thinking about? In a as far as a keyword list future? With regards to SEO. 

Jenna: 

Right. I have a lot of thoughts on this. So, or any of them stated keywords or what they could be. I’ll find a way to work that in here. 

 Anybody who still thinks that SEO represents a linear like user puts in a keyword, user clicks on a link, user comes to my website. I get all that traffic and there’s lots of it and it’s free. Those people are unfortunately in trouble. Right. So with AI overviews, AI mode and Google, not to mention things like ChatGPT, perplexity, the large language models, etc., we’re moving to a place where that all the onus used to be on the searcher, right? 

I am a searcher, I need something, I have a question. I’m going to type that in. I’m going to do my research. I’m going see if that satisfied. If not, I’m going to type another keyword in. And it was this very kind of back and forth user guided thing and keywords were the center of that. Now with large language models and AI that’s actually guiding the user. 

 So there’s a back and forth happening here. It’s refining the questioning as you go. So it’s not like you stop and enter another keyword the way that we used to. You’re just having a conversation with the AI. So you know, it’s really a sea change here. Thinking about search as more of an exploration way of thinking, to discover brands and products, because the AI is continually helping you refine and iterate. 

 So that first keyword that used to result in a click, eventually most of those aren’t even going to result in a click. And the idea even of thinking of keywords, even that alone is very bleedy. There you go. I did it! Because it’s queries. It’s conversations. Right? So the idea of keywords being a little entity that matters very deeply, it’s still a way that we can get some Intel. 

It’s still a way that we can start to look at topics and themes. But keywords as little individual entities are not the thing that we need to be focusing on.  

Nasser: 

So you use the word sea change, and that’s not a small word, right? But do you think that the industry is there yet in terms of their understanding of the impact and how? 

 You know, because a sea change implies that you’ve got to do things pretty radically differently or look at it differently or measure it differently. And do you think that they’re there yet? And if not, why not?  

Jenna: 

Well, I think understanding and acceptance are two very different things. Do I think marketers understand this? Yeah. Do I think they accept it? No. And that is because for years and years and years and years and years and years and years, you did the SEO things. And even though it was a little bit wizardry and you didn’t exactly know cause and effect, you knew well enough. And for all this time, your website was the central property that was receiving all of that benefit.  

Clicks to your site, clicks to your site, clicks to your site, clicks to your site. So all marketing orgs were based on that, right? “Free traffic” from SEO is a lifeblood of our marketing arm, and now as those clicks decline because 60% of all searches now result in zero click because they’re getting the answers straight there. 

That’s really hard for people to accept. So the sea change isn’t necessarily that the industry is completely on its head, because a lot of the old tactics are still very valid. There’s just more you have to do now. The sea change is how you think about it and how you think about my brand is going to be discovered in this way, less than my brand is going to get clicks to my website in this way. So that makes sense.  

Nasser: 

Yeah. So I would some of your message correct me if I’m wrong, as opium is a powerful drug. Kids don’t do drugs. Do the good thing instead, right?  

Jenna: 

I love opium. Yep.  

Nasser: 

Oh yeah. That’s delicious. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite. But it’s just not going to work anymore. So. So given that from our testing, what should brands be doing first to adapt to this new reality?  

Jenna: 

First things first, make sure you really understand the difference between the way a search engine would crawl and index and source information, versus the way a large language model does. They are different things, even though the result is still appearing in like AI mode, for example, it’s still appearing on a search engine in Google’s AI mode, or AI overviews the way it is learning and the way it is deciding what results to pull is vastly different. It used to be the search engine spiders or the bots. They would go out, they would crawl, they would index it and they would say, okay, this is the answer. And here’s your blue links right. Now, there’s things like things that are way smarter than me, like Markov chains and slot schema and embeddings and all of these sorts of things that turn content into math. Basically, if I can dumb it down to the way I understand it, but it turns content into math and it uses the math to decide what the correct answer is. 

 So first things first. Go make sure you understand that the way that the information is getting sourced is not the same thing. That’ll change your mind right then and there. Now, the other thing that you really need to do is start thinking, okay, if my SEO traffic is going down, which I would assume it is for most listeners, what do I want to do about it within my marketing organization? 

 How do we want to start looking at this and get alignment within the org? How are you going to measure that visibility? How are you going to measure citations through LLMs? What does it mean to you when the click volume is gone and you do not have that kind of a last click measurement capability for you? I can’t answer that as a blanket statement because it’s going to be different for everybody. 

 But organizations need to be making those decisions right now.  

Nasser: 

So you talk about, you know, there’s just isn’t the same level of granular reporting and the mind shift that that needs to happen as a result of that. What’s the bottom line for marketers today?  

Jenna: 

So the bottom line, if we think about the keywordless future as a whole. 

 So for SEO, I would say SEO for a very long time shouldn’t have been a siloed, very technical tactic, but it still is in a lot of organizations. SEO is its own little thing. It has its own little swim lane. Maybe you talk to the IT and the dev teams, and maybe you talk to the content teams, but mostly it’s this little standalone thing. 

 Now SEO because of AI and LLMs, it is a jumping off point for a much broader, much more holistic strategy. So those silos that were there have to go away because you have to look at measurement differently. You have to have different types of content. You have to think about owning the entire topic because it’s a conversation now. 

So it really is, the bottom line is for SEO, it’s not a standalone thing. Bring it to the fore and bring everybody together. And you know, if you’re not thinking about this, including also in paid with things like AI Max and having, it’s for that lack of control that we grew so accustomed to you, right. That’s the thing that’s going away that keyword was a control mechanism and that’s going away. 

 So the bottom, bottom bottom line is if you’re not already thinking this way and planning how your org is going to change for this AI driven future, you’re already behind.  

Nasser: 

So here’s the shift. Google’s AI Max can deliver real efficiency, but only if you balance automation with human strategy. It shines at scale, but without oversight, you risk wasted spend and low quality traffic. 

 Smarter paid media means I gets to work for you, not replace you. And in SEO, the future is already here. The time to prepare for LLMs and AI driven search is yesterday. Now make it happen. Follow shift happens. Leave us a review and share this episode with your team. If you have any questions for the podcast, please email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you.  

Jenna, thank you for an enlightening and an engaging session. Way better than the one we had with Dan Temby before, obviously.  

Jenna: 

Thank you, Nasser.  

Nasser: 

And thank you for listening to Shift Happens. We look forward to seeing you next time.