Zero-Click, AI Search and the Last-Click Attribution Trap: What B2B Marketers Need to Know with Amanda Natividad

Very exciting.

Well, congratulations.

And I know how much goes into writing a book and i know how much goes into just the whole process of getting it thank you as well with your book you've been sharing such great content for the past four years or so on zero click marketing what would readers expect to get that you haven't covered you know what what ground are you going to new territory things like that within the book that's coming out very soon yeah

so i think So I would say the first half of the book really covers why we got to where we are today.

Like, you know, my co-author, Rand Fishkin, and I have been talking about, you know, zero-click search, the way traffic flows around the internet, what people are doing online.

We've covered all those things in various research studies, but the book really crystallizes, well, how did this all come to be? Why did this happen? Who does this help? Did we train ourselves? Did this emerge because we users wanted it or were we trained to behave in a certain way is a little bit of both.

So the book covers a lot of that.

The book also covers the zero-click approach throughout all your marketing efforts.

And then we do also spend quite a bit of time on measurement versus attribution.

That was my next question, actually, because I've seen you talk about last click attribution.

There's something that marketers have become guilty of, like compliciting this last click attribution and that being so important.

And we want to break out of that, actually.

So who has to change their mind first in companies? to try and break out of this fixation on last click attribution? Is it the marketer or is it the purse strings, the CFO, the budget holder that is becoming a bit too sort of fixated on last click attribution as where the budget needs to go?

Well, certainly both, but I do think it's more important for executives to understand this shift.

Because, you know, these, these things kind of trickle down.

Right.

But, but I think it's, we can have these conversations, right.

And we can talk about this in a way that isn't, that makes sense for the CFO or the CEO.

And the book covers quite a bit of that, but in essence, I mean, it's that attribution is flawed.

Right.

Like conversion windows are relatively arbitrary, as in some platforms default to seven day conversion window.

Sometimes it's 30 days.

But we also know that a lot of customers and often the most loyal, most engaged customers will convert after 30 days.

I think it's something like closer to 40 days, the 40-day conversion window, which is outside of the attribution window, in which case you technically wouldn't even see it.

And so even just taking that and looking at that as, well, why are we making decisions based on only the metrics that we can see? That doesn't make sense, right? And so what we're also not saying is no to attribution, but yes to measurement.