Name: Changing The Marketing Metric: What Component Suppliers are Measuring In 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T18:32:04.653Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 55 s
Description: Changing The Marketing Metric: What Component Suppliers are Measuring In 2026

Transcript for "Changing The Marketing Metric: What Component Suppliers are Measuring In 2026": Good afternoon or good morning wherever you are today. Thank you so much for joining us for an ECIA Electrics seminar on the on optimizing your online search and all of the fun new challenges with AI. Again, I'm David Loftus. I'm the president and CEO of ECIA, And I wanna just do a a quick intro to be able to share with you about our service partner, Electrics is a really unique sales and marketing strategy consulting company for b to b electronics. And Lectrix has been a wonderful partner to ECIA and probably a little bit behind the scenes in creating the bulk of our PACE training courses. So, you know, Electrix has worked behind the scenes in interviewing our members and putting together a lot of original content to be able to put together a wonderful program that is available free to all of our members and especially our employees that are new to the industry. So today, we're gonna have a gentleman Jordan Woo from Lectrix, who is the director of SEO, share with us a little bit about AI and the changing landscape of online marketing. Jordan? Good morning. Afternoon, everyone. Again, like David said, depending where you are. David, thank you for the introduction and also the kind of words about Lectrix. We're very excited to be here this morning to talk to you guys about, you know, what's going on in search, what's going on with Google. A topic I think that most of us are very familiar with, especially as marketers, how could you not at this point? But we wanna talk about, you know, what we're seeing, what's happening from a trend standpoint, and really what that means is us as marketers inside this vertical and really how to take advantage of that. So we'll start with a little level setting on what's going on in the industry, what's going on in the search, the trends there. We'll talk a little bit about changing our mindset of whether this is good or a bad thing to have less traffic from search, which may be surprising to some. And then we'll talk about maximizing the traffic we are getting. So let's jump right in here. So on the agenda, because I kinda kinda alluded to, how has search changed over the last couple of years? Really, it's a building it's momentum building to a place where Google is wanting people to stay inside their ecosystem, and we're gonna talk about that. And what that means for our sites and our businesses is we receive less traffic. What is the opportunity? And really to sum this up, I would say we are now in a place where we're getting more quality over quantity. And in a way, if you look at it from a certain perspective, this is actually a very good thing for the businesses. The third piece is maximizing every visitor. So we are going to touch on a topic and service called CRO, which which means conversion rate optimization. So as we have performed this service for clients, and this is becoming more popular as we're receiving less traffic, there's some misconceptions about what CRO is. And, frankly, it's a little oversimplified, so we wanna walk through that. We also wanna end the presentation on a case study talking not only about some of the performance we've seen from less traffic coming from Google, higher conversion, but what CRO can do for a company in their website, not just in the organic channel, but across the board. So that's our agenda for today. So let's jump right in to see how search has changed throughout the years and and and more specifically, probably the last five years. Essentially, I would sum this up as saying we need to understand the shift from clicks to answers. Right? So jumping into the data here, I think we may all be familiar with the term zero click searches. So we live people say the gurus say we live in a zero click world. While that is true, while zero click searches is increasing, that's not 100% accurate. Oh, not sure what's going on here with the slides. There we go. So as of right now, based on current studies, there's 60% of all searches now and without a clip to any website. So on its face, if you were just to look at that, I think that would probably be very surprising to some outside of the marketing industry, outside of the marketing discipline. For us, if you look through historical data and where Google has gone with this over time, we know since about 2019 that they've been wanting to keep people inside of their system. And the real reason for that is that, frankly, it helps them better monetize their products. Right? So any decision Google is making on whether they send referral traffic out to a publication, an e commerce website, you know, any any nature of business, you know, the idea is usually, like, they make some of most of their money on paid search. Now they have a lot of ways to make money inside their ecosystem as well. So that essentially is why they're trying to keep them there. Right? They're trying to kinda control the user experience a lot more than they have in the past. So very quickly, if you look at zero clip search growth over time, we were already at about 50% in 2019. And as the years have gone by, 2022, '24, '25, things have just really accelerated. And I think this is probably getting it's probably getting more attention now because of the AI overview becoming such a prominent feature. So just to level set it real quick, the AI overview, and you're probably all familiar with this, is the summarized answer at the top of a search result from Google. Right? So, essentially, if Google feels like it can generate an answer to a query or a question inside of search, knowing what it knows using its index, understanding the topic, it will try to satisfy that query without actually sending one anyone out to, say, the source of that website. So, you know, the rate at which they include a link inside their overview, it varies depending on the nature of the search. But what we do know is, again, less people are clicking out from these AI overviews And, you know, the showing of the AI overview, that velocity is only increasing over time. So as of right now, all queries so that would be any search inside of Google as of 2025, 13% of those are triggering AI overview, which if you do the raw number of that, it's massive. According to Google, there are 2,000,000,000 plus people that act you know, interact with the AI overview versus going to traditional search results. So we say that because Google has slowly, you know, rolled this feature out, and now they have a new feature called AI mode into you know, in addition to the AI overview. So they're slowly testing this. And what they realized is is that the consumer, the Google searcher, Google consumer, likes this interaction. And to be frank, it's gotten a lot better over time. I feel as if when they first really pushed out aggressively early last year, the quality of the answers are only getting better only getting better, which is not surprising. Another key stat here is 88% of all AIO queries, so that would be the, you know, the AIO review, are informational in nature. So being almost 90% informational in nature, that's a very important step for us as marketers, and it's very important step for us as we think about our content strategy, keyword topic strategy, you know, topic authority, all of those things. So while we're getting less clicks, it does thing it makes things a lot more clear about where we should focus. Right? So maybe the focus should be less on informational and more on transactional. Right? So our tools and our methodology is getting better at identifying these. So that's very important. For our industry in general and b to b tech broadly, it's actually even more challenging. Right now, we're seeing based on studies that 70% of the search result pages so we call this a SERP, the acronym you see there, the SERP. Search engine result page now contains the AI overviews. If you go to the next slide, we can see what this looks like compared to other industries. Right? So in the beginning, when AI overviews first launched, about 36 of all results showed AI overview in tech. We are now at 70%. And, you know, for just to compare this across industries, insurance started about 17%, and that's grown to 63%. You know, very good informational, you know, content available there. But ecommerce is a little different. Right? So right now, 29% of ecommerce related searches started showing the AI overview, and that's been reduced to 4%. And that's strictly because Google wants to be an ecommerce platform for companies. So point being is that our industry faces more of an uphill challenge than most. Right? Because what we're providing to clients and really, you know, customers and what Google sees is that we provide a lot of data sheets, technical parameters, very rich content about our products on our website that then trains AI to see this. So they're able to pull a lot of information that we've been giving our customers. So, again, the AI overview challenge is very real for our industry. Quickly looking at the trend of of of how this is accelerating and why this is not going away and a few data points here. We talked about how this has grown from 2019 to 2025. But really thinking through this, you know, we were at 50% at 2019. You know, as new features were introduced by Google, say, the featured snippets and the knowledge panels and, you know, the more enriched search results, you know, that began to grow over time. In 2024, we got to 59% with the AI overview launch. And towards the end of last year, we were roughly 60. But towards December, it grew to about 65%. So there's a lot going on here and a lot of factors that could be discussed. So projections are probably towards the 2026. We're gonna be closer to 70%, and there's a couple of reasons for that. So one, there's the adoption of AI search outside of Google. So we know, you know, Perplexity is growing market share. We know ChatGPT has their own search features. So people are taking a little bit of that Google market share that we've seen in the past, and I even have a note here that in 2023, it was about 93% from a search standpoint. As of last year, it dropped to 86%. So significant drop that we haven't seen in Google market share in a while, at least from search. At the same time, 86% of all search on the web is a huge number. So it's not something that we can really ignore and run from. It's still very important to think about optimizing for Google. Something else to note here is that Google has been very clear about their intentions and their plans for the future of search, at least within their ecosystem. They want their platform to be AI first. They would rather satisfy search intent as easily as possible and more you know, make things more convenient for the consumer. So for us, that is a pretty clear signal that, you know, this 60 to 65% in zero clicks is not going away. And in fact, it's going to probably increase rapidly over time. So at some point, you know, I mentioned earlier in the presentation, there is what is called AI mode. So AI mode is essentially a more native experience within Google that feels a lot like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or one of your other LLMs that you would be using. They have been very clear that they want that to be the default experience in the future for search. So all that to say, this doesn't necessarily the point of this is to paint a grim picture. It's just really to level set on what's coming and how we need to think about this now, not only from a content SEO standpoint, but what are the metrics that we would need to measure? And that really is the theme of the presentation today. So the opportunity. Before we jump into CRO, I do wanna talk about kind of the mindset shift we've actually had as an agency and with our clients on, you know, we're getting less traffic from this referral source. You know, on its face, this seems like a very negative outcome for us. And I think there was a lot of confusion, you know, as these stats were talking about really expedited over the past two years. But, you know, I would challenge the audience, and we challenge our clients to think about this in a lot different way than that. You know, the idea is, though, yes, we're getting less, but what we're seeing and even in the data is that the quality is better, and that is even before we begin to start a CRO program. So quality over quantity. So, essentially, the way we would describe this is that the AI overview acts as a qualification filter for us as manufacturers and suppliers. Pretty much full stop on that. So when AI answers simple questions on search, you know, with low intent kind of educational or maybe it could be a student or someone just looking for understanding how a certain, you know, component works, they are not a qualified visit is what I would say. So in the past, when we've been publishing kind of high level informational content, there's absolutely value inside of that for attracting the right engineer or buyer or consumer, but you get a lot of unqualified traffic that, frankly, was never gonna convert in the first place. So what we have realized over time is that this AI overview and AI in general, as we get cited as in brands, is just, frankly, sending better traffic for the for for conversion. So a good way to put that, look, there's two different stages. There's before AI and after AI. So before, it was very high volume. It was very low intent, probably pretty high bounce rate, and definitely low conversion. We do know that to be true. After AI, the first thing here is lower volume. Right? I think the lower volume piece is what can be alarming to us as partners. But if you dig deeper and now that we have a little bit better year over year data, we can see the search traffic has higher intent. It goes deeper in engagement. It goes deeper in the website, and, ultimately, it converts better. Right? So something to note here, I have a few stats here from another agent who did a pretty interesting study, is that, you know, while being present in the AI overview may not send as much immediate traffic, it can still help affect other marketing efforts. So as of right now, if you show up in the AI review as a brand and even if it's not a link to your website, like, if your brand is mentioned as a solution or someone who provides information and a certain expertise, the rate at which they will scroll down and find you on your organic listing below that AI goes up 35%. So it's very important and very powerful from the brand to show up in that AI overview. The effects it has on paid search is even more. It's at plus 91%. So, essentially, if you show up as an authority for a product or a solution or an application, you know, someone is twice as likely to click on your paid search link. So it kinda shows you while, you know, we're not getting as much high volume, direct traffic from being in these listings or they have reviews, it's still very important for companies to think about this and to be there. We just need to rethink the value of what that is. So organic channel performance, I kind of alluded to some of our clients that experienced this this past year, and I wanted to throw in, like, a real life example for everyone to show you what this really looks like in practice. So one of our clients has a very well established organic footprint. They've been with us for several years now. We have a very robust content strategy, very buttoned up technical website, you know, good brand, good product, all the things that you kinda need for a good SEO performance. So, obviously, going from 2024 to '25, they experienced that drop in users. So you will see that for the year, they had about a 198,000 users. We had 7% less in 2025. I will say that the 7% drop in users is actually you know, you never wanna see your numbers down year over year, but I will say is only see a drop of 7%. We were quite proud of that, knowing what was going on inside of AI and reviews in the Google ecosystem. And the reason being is that we continue to kinda grow that organic footprint to the program. But, you know, the big thing that stood out to us is when you think about total conversions and the user c r CVR, which is the conversion rate. So year over year, conversions were up 40%. And, this is just from the organic channel, the same channel we saw the drop in users. We also saw that conversion rate go from about 4% to almost 6%. So you're talking a 50% increase there. And, frankly, this is not these stats did not come from a CRO program, conversion rate optimization program. This was strictly that I feel like we had the right contents in place for when the user clicks. We were answering the search intent. So it just goes to show you that just because we're losing volume to the website, that doesn't mean we have to lose the volume of the qualified visitor. So what does this really mean for manufacturers? If we could just sum this up very simply for everyone. Essentially, every visitor is more valuable. Right? So in a way, if we have the right content strategy and the right SEO strategy, Google is actually helping us a bit. Right? Because they're making our data cleaner, we're getting more qualified visitors. And frankly, you know, if it's not high level informational, they're just converting at a higher rate. So that's one thing. The other thing is that when we do get these qualified visitors to the website, you know, it is crucially important to make sure we are set up to convert them or to push them along to the next action that makes the most sense for our businesses, whether that's a phone call, a form fill, a sample request, whatever that is. Right? So we need to really think about we're getting less, but we need to maximize the value. So maximizing every visitor. Let's talk about conversion rate optimization. So it may be a good place to start talking about what conversion rate optimization is sometimes thought of and what it really is. So a lot of times we approach clients and we talk about and teach about CRO. You know, the first thing is is, like, oh, yeah. AB testing. Like, we do that. Like, we we optimize, like, the lead form with different colors and all these things. That is just one part of conversion rate optimization. It's a very important part. It's the analytical and testing part. But, really, conversion rate optimization is considering a lot of disciplines outside of that. Right? There's a lot of talent and a lot of brainpower that goes into a very good CRO system. So setting the table with that, essentially, CRO is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. You know, the simple math of CRO is, you know, instead of focusing on pushing more through the funnel, what if we could just convert more at the rate that what we have? Right? Wouldn't that be a bigger lever technically to pull from a business outcome standpoint than trying to go and just push people that may or may not be qualified to the website? So, essentially, the beauty of this is that we've talked a little bit about organic here, but this affects everything from a landing page standpoint. This affects every digital channel you could invest in, which why usually the ROI is so high on these programs pretty early. So let's talk about the system and who's involved and really the talent that's required for this. So we have to start with SEO. Right? Because I think attracting the right visitors with the right keywords and topics is crucially important. Right? Google is doing a good job of that with the AI overview of maybe following some of that out for us on the informational queries. But it is crucial that whatever solution we offer as a manufacturer or supplier that we know the way our target consumer is searching and speaking about this, especially from an intent standpoint. Right? We need to understand what's the buying intent and what's the informational intent. So really forming your SEO strategy and your topic strategy around that is crucially important. Obviously, the content and the messaging for the buyer when they get to the website is also very important. So you can see here while getting the SEO and topic research piece correct, that will inform that content piece as well. But we also need to understand when someone visits our websites, like, what part of the funnel are they in? Like, where are they in the buyer's journey when looking for a solution? And they may be very high level. Right? So we talk a lot about being more intentionally focused on transaction, but, you know, an engineer may have no idea what their solution is. They're just searching on attributes. So there is still a place for the informational content, but understanding buyer journey is very important here. And these definitely the SEO content pieces work so closely together in our programs. The other piece here is designing UX. So, ideally, you're creating a very streamlined, frictionless path to give visitors essentially a step forward in finding a solution. Right? So, essentially, we're capturing them with SEO. We're speaking to them with content, and then the design UX piece is guiding them to that next step to be a customer or, you know, helping them along their journey. The last piece is analytics. And I think this is where most people, when we mention CRO, they think they think about analytics, and this is very important. So there's definitely the a b testing part of this. There's measurement on just general performance. And, frankly, you know, it's improving every touch point through event tracking, heat maps, all of the things that we've kinda known about AB testing throughout the last decade. But I think one of the issues and why CRO is a little bit more robust is that it doesn't really change the first stages of the buyer journey. AB testing kinda goes straight into what is the experience with the conversion element itself. So as you can see, it's a pretty vast program, and there's a lot of talent that goes into this, which, you know, for us, we think that's very positive. Right? There's a lot of different perspectives, a lot of knowledge that comes into play in these systems. So it's probably why we see such good results so early. So we're gonna quickly go through each aspect here. We won't spend too much time on SEO because we've talked about this a bit. But, you know, in general, SEO is probably gonna be one of the bigger visitor driving channels to a manufacturer or supplier's website. Right? So I kinda mentioned some of this in the previous slide. There's a couple key focus areas here as it pertains to conversion rate optimization. One, target transactional intent or the right intent that we think we need to capture for the consumer we want coming to the website. Two, part of that is gonna be optimizing for AI citations. From a usage standpoint and adoption and that market share, you know, 83% market share we talked about earlier, you know, AI citations are still a great way to have your brand show up. It helps brand perception. We know it helps through with click through rates and organic search and paid search, and it's still gonna be a a driver to our websites. So we have to think about that. Build topical authority. I feel like this is something that gets said over and over again. And, you know, it's not it's almost to the point where it's kind of a buzzword. But, really, what we're trying to do is how do we how do we appear to be the solution or knowledgeable source, not just in the eyes of Google, but also, let's say, like a ChatGPT for a certain product application, whatever that may be. So 92% of AI overuse citations come from top 10 ranking domains. What that means is that it's still crucially important for Google to see you as the topical authority from a general organic standpoint. So if we were to have our content ranking in normal organic search in the top 10, that is absolutely going to influence how AI treats us, not just even in Google, but also on the other platforms. So that's crucially important to remember. And then track new metrics. Right? So one thing to think about SEO is that, traditionally, it's all about keyword ranking and referring traffic, right, visits. We need to think a little bit more outside the box on this and think more of it from a brand standpoint. So how often are we mentioned? What are the responses? What's the sentiment? Again, not just about rankings. So the content piece here. And we could talk a lot more about content than just one slide, but, you know, we wanna think about this through the lens of the funnel again. Right? So we have four stages, which this is not true for every company, and they're probably more complicated this. But for simplification sake, you know, we have awareness, consideration, decision, retention. Right? So the content strategies for those four phases are very different even for the same user considering the same product. Right? So this is very important because, one, we wanna make sure that from a CRO standpoint, if someone is searching on a term that we would deem to be more in the consideration phase, we wanna make sure there are content immediately speaks to that and whether that is the headline or even just the type of content. Right? So if you think about this from the awareness standpoint, technical blogs are great, industry trend analysis, webinars, how to guides, those sorts of things. Their awareness kind of oriented content. As you go further down, you need to get more detail. Right? And there needs to be more data. So in consideration, we're thinking comparison guides, case studies, application notes, white papers. You go to decision. You know? Now you need to really think about, like, our product configurator, you know, talking about sample requests, getting into the the details of the spec sheet, maybe even ROI calculators. Right? So the point of this is that a lot of times, the landing page is that we will see are very high level informational. They're very awareness focused. Again, still has a place. But if we're gonna maximize a visit to the website that Google has probably already qualified for us, we need to think be thinking more consideration decision in our content strategies. Right? We still wanna attract informational with awareness, but we need to give the user what they're looking for as quickly as possible. And that has a lot to do with content strategy. Kind of interesting stuff here is content's role in CRO. You know, we have found that value focused headlines that speak directly to what we think the search intent is, actually improves conversions by about 27% per landing page. Adding customer testimonials that boost landing page conversions by 14%. Pages with video content where they can actually interact or, you know, absorb it in a different way, at times, that can boost conversion rate for those landing pages by 34%. So all in all, there's no one size fits all solution to this. You know, we have to understand per brand, per consumer, per content piece, you know, what makes the most sense to satisfy consideration and decision. Design in UX. So high level, 30% conversion uplift from UX improvements alone. So sometimes people will ask me, if you're gonna do CRO, you've got these four buckets, and I understand that they're all very important. But, like, what is something in the short term that we can do to see immediate impact? The answer is going to vary, but a lot of times that, you know, out of the gate, the UX for your website or a specific set of pages or a landing page, can be improved, and you see an immediate uplift there. So couple things that go into the 30%. 53% of users will leave a page that takes greater than three seconds to load. That's information directly from Google. And in showing the note, for years, there were speculation whether it was actually a way which Google deemed your site valuable. Right? The user experience side of this. And and no one was really sure if that was true, but we have found out that is very true. That if you have a bad UX and someone comes to your website and it's taking a long time to load and they leave and go back out to search, that is a negative ranking factor. Like, we know that now for sure. 32% better conversion with a single CTA versus multiple CTAs. So something very easy to fix that we see is that there's too much going on, and sometimes we ask too much of a site visitor from a conversion standpoint. So even simplifying this can really, you know, boost conversion in the short term. Key UX principles for manufacturing websites. So this is something that we see pretty much across the board. One is speed. So every one second improvement in load time increase in conversion about four to 7%. Clear form fills. And this can be difficult depending on your product, your industry, what you need to know about potential leads and customers. Is it being very clear on the ask in the form field, but also simplifying that. So going from even a field that requires seven inputs down to three can increase conversion by 35%. We know that always isn't the case. Three is very low. But the general thought here and the idea is that the more simplified the process can be for a consumer, the better. Mobile first. Mobile optimized sites convert 30 to 40% higher. And right now, roughly 60% of web traffic is mobile. Now big caveat on this point. Again, directionally, I think this is very important. I think in our industry, based on what we see and what we know, you know, our target consumer or audience is still heavily using desktop, and we understand that. But what we have noticed the past thirty years is that trend is changing over time. I think as, you know, different generations and different age groups move into that role of being a buyer, we're still gonna see behavior change. So mobile first, I think, is a little less than others in importance right now, but it's something that we need to be aware of. And then the trust signal piece. So adding certifications, reviews, trust badges, we see that increased conversion pretty much seven to 12% immediately on our landing pages. Analytics and testing. So, again, as we talk about CRO and AV split testing, you know, these are the things that I think crowds are more familiar with. Right? So the CRO testing cycle, there's analyze, hypothesize, test, implement, and repeat. So, essentially, it's what data do we have that we can analyze, whether that's through a heat map program, Google Analytics, Adobe, whatever that is, and what can we see, And then what can we hypothesize? So if we know we have a landing page that's converting at a a dismal rate, yet we feel like we have other parts of our marketing strategy pretty tight, whether that's our content, our SEO, our UX, whatever that is, there's probably something going on from a from a form fill or form design standpoint. So we can hypothesize what that is, of course, off of the the data, which is you analyze. The next piece is you do run that AB test. You change your CTAs. You change your layout, your forms, your page structure, you know, the number of fields required in a lead form. Whatever that may be, you test it. And then you, you know, statistically see who the winner is, and then you implement that. And then you repeat that over time. So, the a b testing analytics part is crucially important for CRO. I will also say, which I don't think I've mentioned yet, is that analytics play a very big part on the front end of the CRO strategy. So I have a case study, and I'll walk through a little bit about, you know, what that means. So high level, the ROI of CRO, you know, not just our our data, but just industry data, there's an average return on investment of about 223%, which is huge from a marketing discipline, frankly. Interesting stat here, $92 on average are spent on acquiring a customer, but $1 just to convert them. And to paint you a picture of what that stat really means is that if you're a company and you're running paid search, you are willing to spend $92 on that click, right, the cost per click of that, which in our, you know, our vertical can be very expensive depending on what you're manufacturing or what you're selling. So a lot of times we find that people will spend that $92 on the clip, but they won't spend any money or any marketing investment to better convert them once they get to the website. So a lot of times we'll see is that we think a lot about input, we think a lot about traffic, But, really, we should be thinking about how do we maximize the value of that traffic, especially because in this illustration, the $92, it's only going to go up over time. Acquiring a visit to your website, especially through a paid search platform or even in the investments you make in SEO, that's only gonna get more expensive over time. 7% each one second step improvement on the website raises conversion rate from four to 7%. And then really just the global market for CRO tools is always kinda interesting to see growth in SaaS products as they relate to marketing disciplines. Are disciplines. It has grown to about $5,000,000,000 market. So there has been more focus on CRO this past year, and rightfully so, based on what we're seeing with Google, than there ever has been. So a quick case study that I I kind of alluded to there. We had a connector manufacturer that, you know, again, had a very well established organic search footprint. You know, they saw a little drawback from AI overviews and AI mode and ChatGPT and those sorts of things, but overall, not a big decrease compared to what we saw in other places. We did see eventually over last year that there was a 30% decline. Again, I feel like for a mature program, that could have been a lot worse, but that was the reality of what we're seeing coming from Google. One thing, I mean, that we we knew we need to look at was, look, if if we're getting less, we've gotta make more out of what we're getting. Again, that's kind of the theme of this whole presentation. So the first first thing with this is, like, we need a CRO program. I mentioned the role analytics plays in the front end of a CRO strategy. And, really, that comes down to is where do you put your efforts on your website. Right? I mean, you have product pages. You have product listing pages. You have PDPs. You have the home page, blogs, you know, all kind of varying content types and page types. For us, you know, our thought is always as the agency is, like, where can we make the biggest impact for our partners in the shortest period of time? And that usually comes down to volume. So volume being, you know, what are what is our best organic landing page from a volume standpoint, a keyword and topic traction standpoint? So let's start there. That has the most potential for us to make an impact on the bottom line. So, essentially, we went through the entire program like we just outlined for you guys. And within sixty days, on our best page, we moved the conversion rate from point 56% to almost 2%, which is a huge jump in just sixty sixty days. I mean, that's a 250% increase literally on just one page. So in place, that's there for sixty days. We ended the year for that page up 200 from a conversion rate standpoint year over year for the last three months. And it just kinda shows you the only change in investment related to the program was thinking about CRO and thinking about how to leverage the visitors we are getting organically, and converting more of them into customers. I think it's also important to mention that in CRO, we talk a lot about content. And one thing that's also important that I didn't really mention earlier is site search and, you know, a chat feature. Right? And that's something especially the chat feature, that's not always prominent or as part of a website, at least from a manufacturer standpoint, but that is part of the user experience. And those can be two very powerful tools if done correctly for conversion rate. So when you think about that, you know, as AI grows and its ability our ability to train it increases, it's a huge opportunity for, especially, manufacturers to use it to create a better experience. So, Lectrix, we've actually developed two different AI solutions for sites and customers, one being called Lassie. So Lassie, what that really is is an AI powered product search on your site. So if you think about having good user experience if we're driving visitors that are more difficult to come by or they're more more expensive, if you will, and they wanna use a site search feature and it's clunky and it doesn't work and it doesn't really mirror what search is becoming on the consumer side or outside of our websites, people are gonna be frustrated. And what Lectrix does is essentially create more of a long form search experience, and it's an AI trained on your product data, whether it be data sheets, PIM systems, product pages, whatever that is, to help have somewhat of a conversational search or conversation about what they're looking for, hopefully finding a solution a lot better than traditional site search has in the past. Lectrix is interesting because it kinda serves as your virtual engineer, right, to engage with site visitors as they come. So I like to think about this, and this might be a little crude, is that it's almost like having an engineer, a highly educated engineer on your information. Again, have that conversation and help work through solutions with consumers in real time on the website. So, again, I I think there are other elements outside of, you know, general content that we're used to talking about that can really help with the CRO, you know, and and and help with that UX piece. So key takeaways here. So there's about five. AR views are reducing website traffic. We know that. You know? And b to b, it really is affecting, especially in the tech industry, in our industry specifically. It really is affecting how it's sending users to the website. So at the same time, I'll reiterate that we need to change the way we think about it. Instead of being worried about not having visitors, we need to be comfortable with the fact that the people that are coming to our websites, they're just more qualified. And those are the people we should have really been targeting in the first place, frankly. The second is the shift is permanent. And not only is it permanent, like I kind of alluded to earlier, it's going to accelerate. Like, I think adoption inside of the other platforms, ChetGPT, Perplexity, I think that's not going to stall out. I think it may slow down, but that is going to continue to grow. The big thing about this point is that Google has made it clear to reiterate that is that this is where they wanna go. They are testing paid search inside of AI mode. They are looking to monetize it. That is going to be our reality. So we need to start rethinking our marketing strategies now. The visitors still reaching your site are more qualified. I can't repeat that enough. So conversion rates for remaining traffic, at least from what we're seeing, are just better. Right? So it's a chance for us to refocus on how to actually turn visits into customers. And also, you know, again, Google is somewhat doing us a favor from a business standpoint. CRO CRO is no longer optional. I think we all know that at this point based on volumes, but every visitor is coming in there more qualified, and we need to do our best to convert them. So the opportunity in front of us is huge when you think about what CRO is. And, five, a coordinated strategy across SEO, content design, analytics, it's gonna deliver compounding returns. Right? So we talked about that 223%. But, really, when you think about CRO, it's a whole system with different tactics and strategies inside of it. So we've known for a long time that content and SEO need to be married because there's so much influence there between the two. But now when we think about the whole journey, you have to layer in design and analytics as well. So that's the end of our presentation. I believe we're gonna open this this up to a little q and a. I am going to invite graham to come join me on stage to help facilitate some questions and maybe chime in as well. Yeah. Thanks, Stuart. Excellent stuff. And, you know, I'll add just one more piece. I think the summary there said it all. But I see no surprise the majority of our attendees today are are from the marketing side of the business. But I think this is something a subject that marketers could and should begin to engage with the salespeople side of the business. Because at the end of the day, the question is, what are we spending on marketing, and and what's it doing to impact the business? This shift in thinking from just getting more people to the website and focusing more on converting more of the people who are on your site right now, this second. There's probably hundreds of people there this very minute. How can we convert more of those into sales opportunities? And I think this is where sales and marketing have a real opportunity to connect. So I'd encourage you to, have this conversation with your sales teams as well. Okay. We're gonna dive into some q and a in just a second or two, but, wanna do a quick poll first. Ian, our tech engineer, you probably see a flash on your screen. Go to the polls tab, and you should see a question just to ask. Does your company consistently measure conversion of site traffic into sales opportunities? And I'm not seeing it on my screen. Yes. I am. Okay. So I'll be interested in no amongst our attendees today. Yes or no? Or do you have some other, answer? Are you consistently measuring the conversion of that site traffic? And we'll leave that open for a minute or two, and you can think about it and put your answer in. So in the meantime, while you're thinking about that, and we'll come back to the poll, Ian, just let me know when I think everybody's made their mind up. We'll we'll start to go into some of the questions. So first question, Jordan, is from Shunari. With your clients, have you noticed organic drop off at a different rate depending on area? Shunari, do you mean geographic area? Let's assume that that's the question. Well, I believe she means, if you click it, like, it's the area of website or content type. Oh, there's a there's a read more. Is see. A different a. depending on area of the website, blog. versus biometric search versus product pages. Sorry, Shunari. I should have clicked the read more button. Yes. And I would say that we absolutely have seen a difference. So I would say even in your example that in general, blog traffic has been down. That's not always true across the board because, again, it depends on what the topic is and what intent we're satisfying. But, historically, blogs have been a place where we've been more high funnel. Right? If we think about what the content purpose is, it's been a little bit more informational. It's not necessarily, like, very deep into applications at times. It's not very product heavy. It really is a little bit more generic content. So I think we definitely see we have seen that traffic drop. Now at the same time, we're still getting very good impressions. So remember, an impression in Google would be like your website or your brand showing, but the clicks don't always follow. Right? Because we are a part of the answer that Google is building in the AI overview. So absolutely. We've also seen traffic grow, you know, in PDPs or product detail pages, just because the intent there is transactional. So I do believe Google is still sending people out based on what they think they're looking for versus, like, just answering a question. So it's definitely affecting, different pages and different content types. And, John, if I can just ask a follow-up to that. So. if blogs are returning less traffic to the manufacturer's site, do you think they are still providing information to AI overviews and and winning citations? They are. There's still value there. So, you know, I alluded to this a little bit at the presentation, graham, is that even if you don't you don't receive that click from an AI overview, and frankly, any mention you get in the AI search platform, there's still tremendous value for the brand from a brand building standpoint. So if you think about it, it's kind of a force multiplier. So if I'm doing early research, maybe at a more high level query, and I encounter your brand for the first time, there's a great chance that you will receive a visit from me somewhere, and it may just not be search. Right? It's definitely a good thing to be there. Okay. Great. I'm just gonna go back to the questions now. And, we did actually get the poll result. So six people answered, yes. We are tracking conversions consistently. 11 said no and and one other. And might get a whole bunch of other people were too shy to answer. But that's that's a very interesting result. Twice as many basically saying no versus yes. Let's go back to the q and a. It's a question from Ben. The the AI tool we mentioned trained on data sheets and data from the manufacturer. Do we have successful implementation that didn't frustrate the engineers? Well, I can answer that one then. Yes. Absolutely. And and I think that's the whole point of the the AI tool is to prevent the frustration of, digging down through layers of data sheets and product families and, you know, what what we call the rabbit hole or, you know, search fatigue, we also call it. So those AI tools we built are designed to to combat that. Next question. I'm guessing it's somebody in the South because he starts with y'all, David. Y'all mentioned chat GPT. Is Grok not a popular player in your opinion? Jordan, what do you think? Well, first of all, you all have a very efficient word that I use. So I appreciate that, David. You know, from just a pure what we know about, AI usage and the data is not perfect and what we see from a referral pattern with our own clients. Again, when we think about Gronk, it's like we're thinking about this, AI tools in general, as a referral to the site or someone that would mission the brand, not so much like a model like Gronk being able to solve complex problems. But, no, they're pretty low. I mean, when you look at just if you take Google out of it and you think about or the AI overview and you think about Gemini, you think about ChachiBT and Acquad, I don't know the exact numbers, but ChachiBT has most of the market share there. Now when you compare that to Google, it's it's tiny. But as far as AI tools go, Chevy g GBT is the leader, which makes a lot of sense. And I would just add to what Jordan said is in our own work and experience in developing AI tools, we're currently sort of seeing that the Claude Sonnet, tool is actually performs better for scientific technical queries over the others. So, you know, there's there's there's consumer level popularity. And then the question is, well well, which tool really works well in a technical industry like ours? And this changes, and we're agnostic about the tools that we use, David. You know, we're looking for the one that is gonna work best for a technical audience. And and right now, from from our testing and usage, Claude Sonnet is is the leader currently. But we're ready to change the minute somebody else brings out something better for engineers than Claude. So hopefully that answers your question. Okay. Let's move on. Watching the clock. What, how long does it typically take, Jordan, to see a measurable result from a CRO program? And what's the first step or change you'd recommend for a manufacturer that hasn't done any conversion optimization so far? It's a good question. And I'll touch on the timing one first. Right? Because I know, you know, we talked about uptime from implementation to benefit for a website or a conversion action. I would say it really depends on volume. So in the case study, I kinda mentioned that we picked a page that already had high traffic based on the other parts of the website. So, frankly, we could see improvement faster. Right? Because remember, we're putting more people through a CRO program. There's gonna be more conversion faster. So speed is really based on how much you can put in in the beginning. But, honestly, if you CRO is done correctly, the benefits should begin on day one. Right? And you may need to refine that and improve that over time. But, you know, you should start seeing results within the first month, frankly, if if it's the right strategy. Like, it should be immediate. As far as what to focus on, I think that varies from from website to website and brand to brand. So, you know, you may find someone who has great search presence. Like, they have a lot of impressions, maybe not as many clicks and organic, but the intent could just be way off. So if if the visitors that are gonna be your site, the intent's not aligned with what they're actually looking for versus what you're offering, a CRO program can't fix that. Like, that's just the wrong visitor. So sometimes it's rethinking the SEO strategy. Sometimes it's the content. Right? Sometimes we have the right visitor from a keyword standpoint, but our content doesn't really speak to, like, what they're looking for. Usually, if someone's actually invested in SEO for a few years in the content, which a lot of companies have, the easiest lever, and I mentioned this, is the UX piece. It's just doing the redesign of the landing page, rethinking the lead forms, the CTAs, simplifying things, being a little bit more direct in your headlines. I find usually with clients, like, that's one of the first places to start if they have done the other pieces first. But it really depends on where where you find your site. Yeah. And I would just add up. I think before you make any changes, I think it's obvious, but I'll say it anyway. I think the first thing to do is start is start capturing the data. Get a benchmark on what is your conversion rate look right now, and you can measure those sales intentions in simple forms like inquiries, sample requests, RFQs, anything that's got a sales intent to it, and just understand what what is your current rate versus the number of visitors. Start there. Start measuring, and and then start analyzing where to begin. Okay. We got three more questions, and I think we'll be done. This is an interesting one. We're seeing our organic traffic drop. Do we know if that's AI overviews filtering low intent users, Jordan, or if we're actually losing valuable traffic? Well, I think it goes back to what you just said, graham. I think that, you know, one, we do encounter, you know, our clients and potential clients that haven't really set up that conversion tracking, so they don't really know what the value of the visitor is. So sometimes just by not having analytics set up properly and looking at things with that lens, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell, like, what the value of the traffic is. But in this question, I'll assume that, let's say, you are looking at conversion rates, you are tracking that ash action, whatever it may be, is that, you know, just just year over year or time period over time period, if you've lost traffic, how is the traffic that's still coming converting? Like, how is it performing, and what is the value of that? So to me, that really tells the story of, you know, whether you you're losing all traffic or just traffic that was never gonna convert. I will say, and this gets a little bit more complicated, is that, you know, sometimes when you lose traffic in organic, it makes up somewhere else given the nature of what's going on in search. So your direct traffic may actually perform a little bit better year over year, if you look into that. So I would just say the answer to that is what is the conversion quality of the visitors that are coming to the site? And that should answer your question. Okay. Final question, and then David and I are gonna wrap up. Do we have any data, Jordan, on or is is there a place to get data on conversion from AI queries? In other words, traffic coming from LLMs. Yes. Yeah. So if I'm understanding the the question is that what at what rate does traffic actually come from, say, the ChatGPT? At what rate is that converting? Mhmm. We definitely have that. We definitely have that data. So most companies are gonna be using, a Google Analytics for an Adobe of that nature. You can create special views to see the traffic coming from AI search or AI models. Right? So you can say, we wanna measure everything coming from Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. Like and then you can start looking at that as its own channel, the way we look at referral, the way we look at email, organic paid search, those sorts of things. So you absolutely can see what is the conversion value coming from chat p GBT and Gemini. I will say that we talked with our clients a bit bit about this is that if you're going to try to invest in a pure more AI search or some of these AI conversations and models is that remember that a lot of the value isn't necessarily in the referral to the website. It's more about you getting cited as a brand that could be a solution. So remember, there is a branding element to this. But a long way of answering the question is that, yes, we can absolutely see the value of the clicks coming from them. Okay. Great. I think we got through all the questions. I just wanted to ask David Loftus since we've got him here today at a very, very busy time, I know. David, in your conversations with manufacturers and distributors, you know, we're obviously talking today about a shift in focus towards this discipline of CRO. Are are you hearing anything as in your daily conversations with manufacturers and distributors about where their focus is this year, and and has that changed at all? Definitely a lot more for conversion. I think there are a lot of great insights in this webinar shared by Jordan that, you know, it's hopefully, improved quality means that we're getting more qualified people to the websites in the first place and people are really trying to work on just closing design wins. It's great time in the industry right now. We're climbing our way out of a little bit of the doldrums over the last eighteen months. And so I think the optimism is really positive and people think that getting those design wins closed is the most important action right now. Yeah. I think there's a whole other webinar in the offing about the topic of engagement overall becoming the new metric, not just one way broadcast of impressions and clicks and views and traffic, but actual one on one engagement between a salesperson and a customer. That's absolutely becoming the the new bigger metric. This is just one piece of it. David, any any quick updates on what ECIA's got coming up down the road? Hello. I know we're running short on time. I guess I'll just take the opportunity to thank Jordan, Graham and the Lectrix team for just some great insights and suggestions. Thanks to all of our attendees. You know, it is ECIA's ongoing objective to bring the latest best practices to our membership and across many areas of our business. I hope everyone follows us on LinkedIn so that you can stay up to date on things that we're doing. Please ensure you have profiles on our website at ecianow.org to receive info and updates. And if you're not currently an ECIA member, please contact me or our team to learn more about the benefits of membership. And from me, I wish everybody a happy weekend. Thanks, David. Thanks, Jordan. Thanks, everybody, For you. tuning in today. And, certainly reach out if you've got any follow-up questions. Bye for now. Have a great Friday.