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"When you stop optimizing for the click and start optimizing for genuine value in the platform, you end up with better clicks — more intentional ones from people who actually want to be there."
Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
If you're still using clicks as your primary success metric, you are probably undercounting what's working and over rewarding what isn't. That's it. That's the thesis of this entire show, and today, in this first episode, I'm going to explain exactly why that's true, how we got here, and what it actually costs you when you optimize for the wrong thing.
I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
Let's start with a little nostalgia, and I promise I'm not gonna be one of those people who romanticizes the good old days of digital marketing, but I do think it's worth understanding why the old model made sense, because it actually did for a while. The click base funnel wasn't always a lie. It was actually a pretty elegant, legible system.
You'd publish a piece of content, a blog post, a landing page, a social post with a link, and then you'd watch what happened. Did people click good? Did they not click bad? Iterate? The whole thing was measurable in a way that felt clean. You had Google Analytics. You had UTM parameters, you had conversion tracking.
You could draw a straight line from, I published this to people, came here to. Some of them bought something. Your boss loved it, your board loved it. You could build a deck around it. And look, this model worked because the ecosystem supported it. Google was setting traffic. Social media platforms were setting traffic.
People clicked on links and emails. If you posted a blog post on Twitter, people actually went and read the blog post. Wild concept. I know. And yeah, that funnel was leaky. Sure, but every funnel is leaky, but the water was flowing. So what happened?
Well, that water eventually stopped flowing, or rather, the platforms decided they wanted to keep the water for themselves. Let me walk you through this channel by channel because I think when you see all of it together, it becomes impossible to ignore. Let's start with Google. In 2020, more than two thirds of Google searches ended without a click two thirds, and that was six years ago.
It's only gotten more extreme since then. Why? Because Google has systematically redesigned the search results page so that you don't even need to leave it to get your answer. You wanna convert ounces to cups. The calculator is right there. You wanna know Paul Rudd's age tells you right in the snippet, you search what is market research and Google just gives you a definition related firms books, no click required.
Now we have AI overviews, which takes all of that even further, pew research recently found that Google users who see an AI summary in their results are less likely to click on links than the users who don't see one. So the better Google gets at answering questions, the less traffic it sends to everyone else.
Now let's look at social media. Instagram still doesn't let you put links in those post captions. TikTok doesn't let you link out at all. Facebook buries the post with its external links, and according to Meta's own widely viewed content report, 97% of all US post views on Facebook go to updates that don't include a link to a source outside the app.
97%.
LinkedIn has never officially admitted to suppressing links, but, and I will just speak from personal experience here. I regularly see about eight to 10 times the reach on a post when I don't include a link. It's not a coincidence and. Back when Elon Musk took over Twitter and briefly open source the ranking algorithm, you could literally see in their code that there was a penalty for any post.
That included a link. It was there. So the social platforms, which used to be a massive traffic driver now actively punish you for trying to send people off platform. Then there's dark social. Now dark social is one of the most invisibly destructive forces in marketing measurement. It refers to traffic that comes from sources that don't pass referral data.
So links shared in Slack, discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, email. When someone clicks that link, your analytics sees it as direct traffic. No source, no context, just people appeared on your website. If you've ever looked at your direct traffic numbers and thought, huh, that's high. A big chunk of that is probably direct social.
People are talking about you sharing your content, clicking your links, and you have no idea. I mean, I'll say even for us at SparkToro, when I look at our direct traffic numbers, it's something like close to 80%, and I mean, I know that 80% of our website visitors are not remembering, oh, let me go to sparktoro.com.
Right. So with dark social, you're already flying partially blind. And now the latest challenge is AI tools chat, GPT, perplexity, Gemini. These are increasingly where people are going to go get answers, and these platforms send almost no traffic chat. GBT refers out roughly 0.2% of queries. Perplexity is under 2%.
The answer happens right inside the large language model. And if your brand influenced the answer at all, you're never gonna see that in your analytics. So take all of this together. Google is keeping clicks. Social platforms are keeping clicks, dark social is hiding clicks and AI tools are sending almost no clicks.
Every year, the research shows the long tail of the web, meaning anyone who isn't one of those top several 100 websites is losing ground to the biggest players. The water hasn't just slowed. The pipes have been rerouted, and yet this is the insidious part. Most marketing teams are still operating as if we're in 2016.
We're still reporting on sessions and page views, still measuring social success by lit clinks, still building content strategies around what ranks on Google and drives traffic. And worse, now we're just tacking on AI rankings into these content strategies as if we have any control over what those random probability machines do.
And here's the thing, this isn't just a measurement problem. It's a decision problem because when you optimize for clicks as your primary KPI, you train yourself into a whole set of bad choices. You choose topics based on search volume instead of genuine audience relevance. You format content for clickability instead of actual usefulness, and then you write sub email subject lines that tease instead of deliver, you optimize for the metric instead of the outcome.
Here's the part that I find genuinely fascinating and a little bit uncomfortable today. Execution has never been cheaper. You can spin up a blog post with AI in 20 minutes. You can produce a passable video on your phone. You can run a social campaign on almost no budget. The cost to create and distribute content has collapsed.
The cost to create and distribute content is so, so cheap now. Choosing what to execute. Now, that has never been more expensive. More cognitively expensive, more strategically expensive because if the click was your compass, and now that click is unreliable, you have to develop a new compass. And that's a lot harder because you have to ask, is this content building familiarity with people who aren't ready to buy it?
Is this content earning trust at scale? Even if I can't trace each unit of trust back to a conversion, is my brand showing up in the places and conversations that actually influence my buyers?
There's this statistic from the Berg Base Institute for the LinkedIn B2B Institute that I keep coming back to. 95% of B2B buyers are not actively looking for a solution right now. Companies change their service providers roughly every five years, which means only about 20% are even in the market in a given year.
So if you content strategy is entirely optimized for conversion, for traffic, for clicks, you are at best talking to. 20% of your potential market, you are ignoring the 80% who will be in the market eventually, who are forming opinions and building preferences right now in the content, they're consuming the brands, they're noticing the names they keep seeing.
The mistake we make is thinking that because something is hard to measure, it isn't working. But think about what TV advertising out-of-home advertising and podcast sponsorships have known for decades. Influence is real. Brand recognition is real. The fact that you can't draw a straight attribution line doesn't make it not real.
there's this example I love from a B2B company called Dream Data. Their marketing and sales team all posts on LinkedIn about marketing revenue and just life at the company, and they all carry the same CTA in their profile header. No links in the posts, no direct attribution. Just consistent, valuable platform, native presence, and the result, a measurable lift in booked demos.
You couldn't trace a single demo back to a single post, but the lift was there. What they had to do was just look back a couple of months. Now that's the model. By the way, none of this means don't share links ever. None of this means abandon your website or stop caring about traffic entirely. Traffic is a real number.
It lives in the middle of the funnel and it means something. It's just not the top of the funnel metric. We treated it as the top of the funnel is now impressions, attention, presence in the places your audience actually spends Time.
Let me give you a before and after from my own experience because I think this makes it concrete. when I started getting serious about this work back in 2020, I was posting on Twitter, which is now X. And for a long time my instinct was the same as everyone else's. Write a thread, put a link at the end, try to get people to click over to the full thing, drive traffic.
That was the play. I had about a thousand followers. The posts were fine, the clicks were fine. Nothing that special really. But then I started doing stink. Completely different. I started writing posts that were complete posts where the insight was in the post, not, here's a teaser, go click to read more, but here is the actual framework.
Here are the receipts. Here's the point. You don't need to go anywhere else. I gave away the punchline. I made the click additive not required, and over the next 18
to 24 months, I went from a thousand to over 100,000 followers. No paid amplification. Just consistently giving people full value natively in the platform. And here's what I noticed. The people who eventually clicked, the ones who came to the website or who signed up for the newsletter, registered for the webinars, those people were warmer.
They already knew what I was about. They'd already gotten value from me. The click when it happened wasn't. Cold transaction. It wasn't a one and done thing. It was a continuation, an extension of that increasingly warming relationship. That's the counterintuitive part. When you stop optimizing for the click and start optimizing for genuine value in the platform, you end up with better clicks, more intentional ones from people who actually want to be there.
The clicks didn't disappear. They did get fewer, but they also got better.
The clicks lie. They lie by omission. Mostly they tell you about the fraction of your audience that took a trackable action, and they say nothing about everyone else who saw your content, remember your name, or formed an opinion about your brand. When you optimize for that fraction, you optimize away from everyone else.
That's the problem. Next episode, if clicks aren't at the point, what is we're getting into, what you actually measure and how you make the case for it internally.
This has been Zero Click Marketing. I'll see you next episode.