A few weeks ago I published what became one of our most-read posts in a while: a breakdown of the biggest shift I’ve been seeing in marketing since I started in this field. The change? The fact that your funnel no longer lives on your website.
In that piece I explained how your prospects are building trust (and making buying decisions) in places you don’t own, can’t control, and probably aren’t watching. Reddit threads. AI answers. YouTube reviews. LinkedIn feeds. Slack communities. They arrive on your website already having formed an opinion about you. Your job is no longer just to persuade them, it’s also to clearly connect to what they learned about you off of your website.
If you haven’t read that piece yet, start there: How to Optimize Everywhere Across the Entire Customer Journey.
The response I kept getting was one sentiment: We’re seeing this too.
So I decided to go even deeper and get more practical:
First, I sat down with Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro and the person who coined “zero-click marketing,” to go deeper into what the zero-click world actually means, what’s driving it at a platform level, and what she specifically recommends marketers do to show up where their audience is making decisions.
Then, I sat down with Dana DiTomaso, founder of Kick Point and Analytics Playbook and the person I call when anything analytics-related breaks my brain, to make sense of the tracking side. How do you get a handle on a buyer journey that’s increasingly invisible to your dashboards?
I took both conversations and layered them into the Emotional Targeting Framework™. Because here’s what hundreds of client experiments have proven: The Emotional Targeting Framework™ is how you grow, respond and scale in a zero-click world.
Zero-click marketing focuses on the fact that your audience is building trust and making decisions all over the web. Emotional targeting tells you what to say when you get there so that showing up actually leads to conversion.
Let’s get into it.
Table of Contents
What zero-click marketing is and what it means for conversions
“Zero-click marketing is a strategy where you optimize for impact that can happen without a website visit, for comprehension, trust, recall, preference, and downstream demand. Influence often happens before the click, without the click, or in ways analytics can’t fully see.”
Amanda Natividad
That last part is the one worth sitting with: In ways analytics can’t fully see.
Because here’s what zero-click marketing is actually describing: the end of the linear funnel as a useful organizing principle for your marketing. The idea that someone discovers you, visits your website, evaluates your offer, and converts (all in a traceable sequence) was always a simplification. Now it’s not even a useful one.The numbers make this hard to argue with. More than 60% of Google searches now end without a single click. Meta’s own Widely Viewed Content Report shows that 98.5% of views in Q4 2025 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. On LinkedIn, posts without links get up to 8x more reach than posts that send people away. The platforms aren’t neutral pipes moving people to your website. They’re actively keeping attention for themselves.
And it’s not just the social platforms keeping people in-app. AI is doing the same thing to search. When someone types a question into Google today, they’re increasingly getting a full answer before they see a single organic result. AI overviews summarize, explain, and recommend (without anyone clicking through to the sources that informed the answer). Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude are doing the same thing for people who search there instead. The answer lives in the interface. The click never happens.
This isn’t a trend. It’s a structural shift in how the internet works, and it has been building for years. Amanda wrote about it first in 2022 in Zero-Click Content: The Counterintuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World. Her most recent treatment, The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem, goes further, connecting the platform behavior to a broader collapse in digital trust that makes this even more urgent.
So what does this mean specifically for conversions?
In the original Optimize Everywhere post, I wrote about your website now having two jobs: persuade and confirm. Here’s what I mean by going one level deeper on that.
The persuade job is the one your website has always had. Help someone who is on your website (and any asset you own) understand the value you offer to them specifically, what you do, who you do it for, see themselves in it, resonate with them on an emotional level and help them take the next step with you. That job hasn’t changed and is arguably more important than ever (as more and more websites start to look and sound the same thanks to AI-generated content, emotional resonance is crucial for owning your industry).
The confirm job is newer, and almost nobody is designing for it. By the time a significant portion of your prospects land on your site, they’re not discovering you. They’ve already read a Reddit thread with your name in it. They’ve watched someone compare you to a competitor on YouTube. They’ve asked an LLM what people think of you. They arrive with beliefs, emotions and thoughts already formed, and they’re on your website to check whether they hold up.
The brands who aren’t paying attention to this are noticing a continuous decrease in conversions they can’t quite put their finger on.
Watch the full conversation I had with Amanda about Zero Click Marketing over here.
How to find where your buyers are actually making decisions
Here’s a question worth asking before you create another piece of content: What stage of the buying journey is most of your content actually built for?
Dana DiTomaso has a practical way to answer this. She recommends going into Google Search Console, pulling your top queries by impressions, and labeling each one by funnel stage: awareness, comparison, or ready to buy. Then calculating what percentage of your total impressions fall into each bucket.
What she finds consistently across clients: most brands are massively over-indexed on awareness content. One example from our conversation: 70% of impressions were top-of-funnel, 10% mid-funnel, 20% bottom-funnel. That content mix assumes people discover a brand and convert in one linear journey. It doesn’t reflect how people actually buy.
In a zero-click marketing world, top-of-funnel content is the exact content AI overviews are replacing. Google is now answering “what is X” and “how does X work” before anyone clicks through to read about it. If 70% of your content is built for awareness-stage questions, you’ve built most of your content strategy on ground that is actively disappearing.
The middle of the funnel is where the real opportunity is:
- “Is this right for me?”
- “how does this compare to [competitor]?”
- “does this work for [specific use case]?”
These are the questions people are researching right now in communities, in Reddit threads, in YouTube comment sections. Not on your website. Not through your blog. And increasingly, not through a Google search either.
This is where the zero-click world intersects directly with conversion. Because if your brand isn’t present in the places where mid-funnel research is happening, you’re not just missing reach. You’re missing the moments where buying decisions are actually being shaped.
The three main places those decisions are being made:
#1 Communities and Reddit
When prospects want unfiltered opinions, they go to Reddit. They search “[your brand] Reddit” or “[your category] best tool” because they trust strangers with nothing to sell them more than they trust any brand website. Whatever is being said about you there (positive, negative, or nothing at all) is shaping conversion decisions before anyone has visited a single page of your site.
Foundation Inc. recently analyzed 8,566 keywords across 14 SaaS domains to measure Reddit’s impact on B2B Search and found that 77% of Reddit’s winning search volume comes from generic category keywords, not “best,” “review,” or “alternative” queries.
We’ve seen this consistently with clients. Understanding what’s actually being said about them in relevant communities has been more valuable for improving conversions than another round of landing page tests. Because it tells you what beliefs prospects are arriving with, and what your website needs to address.
#2 LinkedIn and YouTube
Amanda made an important distinction in our conversation that’s easy to miss: it’s not just which platforms your audience uses. It’s which platforms they use when they’re in the mindset to consider you.
A prospect doesn’t always notice a B2B software ad on Facebook because that’s not the context in which they’re scrolling in on Facebook. But they could notice and click on it on LinkedIn. Same person, completely different intent depending on the platform and why you’re there. Some B2B ads work extremely well on Facebook, and tank on Linkedin. It’s all about the context your prospects are in and the goal of the ad.
YouTube works similarly. It’s not just a content platform. For many buyers it’s a decision-research platform. They watch product comparisons, real user reviews, “does this actually work for teams/friends like mine” walkthroughs. If you have no presence there in that context, you’re absent from a significant part of the consideration process.
Here’s what this looks like in practice. When we started working with Teamwork, a project management tool competing in one of the most crowded SaaS categories in the world, the data they had about their audience included demographic data, job titles, company size. The kind of information that tells you who is buying but not why, what they’re afraid of, or what’s actually shaping their decision.
At the same time, most of their competitors had generic headlines like:
- All your teams, all their workflows—connected in one workspace
- AI-powered project management
- The #1 project management tool
- Supercharge your teams with AI that gets work done
- Project tracking made simple
- Seamless project management for your team
- Discover Powerful Project Management From [brand]
Features. Technology. Generic outcomes. The kind of messaging that could belong to any tool in the category. Which meant Teamwork’s prospects were landing on five different websites that all said roughly the same thing and trying to make a decision without any real differentiation to guide them.
What changed everything was going to the places where decisions were actually being made and speaking to actual customers via surveys and interviews.
What we found in those places and the conversations we had was that the emotional reality of one of their ICPs was: “Agency owner who is tired of over-promising and under-delivering. Wants to know what the F@&# is going on, wants to know if she’s profitable or not, and if Patty the designer is actually working.”
Not “needs reporting, dashboards and chat.”
Tired of over-promising and under-delivering. Needs to know if the business is actually profitable. Needs visibility into whether her team is actually working.
Those are two completely different people. Same job title, same company size. Completely different emotional reality. And you only find the second one when you go to the places where she’s actually talking about her problem.
That research led to a homepage variation that increased ICP qualified lead conversions by 7X, a 172% increase in signups from their most valuable clients on key landing pages, and a 54% increase in sign-ups from a single comparison page. You can read the full case study here.
The point isn’t that Teamwork’s demographic data was wrong. It’s that demographic data alone can’t tell you what’s actually driving the decision. For that, you have to go where the decision is being made.
#3 Dark social and peer conversations
This is the part of the journey that never shows up in your analytics at all. And even if it does… it still doesn’t. Meaning, if you even get the referral traffic from a social platform, there’s a chance you might not even see it. A 2024 SparkToro study found that 100% of traffic from TikTok, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp is marked as direct in Google Analytics.
The last several people who reached out to work with us at Getuplift described seven or eight touchpoints before contacting us. A YouTube video, then a LinkedIn post, then an email, then a podcast episode. Weeks apart. No traceable thread. All of it shaped the decision.
This isn’t an edge case, it’s how trust is built.
The only way to start seeing it is to ask. Add this question to your next sales call, onboarding form, or post-purchase survey and leave it as an open text field:
“Before reaching out, what did you read, watch, or listen to that made you decide to contact us?”
Ask it consistently over the next ten to twenty conversations. A pattern will emerge that no analytics tool will ever show you, which platforms your audience was on before they found you, which content actually shaped the decision, which communities they were in when they first heard your name. That pattern is your trust ecosystem map in its most accurate form.
Why showing up isn’t enough (and what actually makes content convert)
Being in the right place (where your prospects are making decisions) isn’t enough.
You can show up on LinkedIn every day. You can be active in the Reddit communities your audience uses. You can have a YouTube presence. And still be completely invisible because the content doesn’t resonate with the people you’re trying to reach.
However, the vast majority of the people who encounter your content on any platform are not ready to buy right away. You’re building familiarity and trust with aprox. 95% of your prospects so that when they are ready, you’re the brand they think of first.
That only works if the content makes them feel something. Reach without resonance is just noise.
This is where the Emotional Targeting Framework™ becomes the connector between zero-click marketing and conversion. Zero-click marketing tells you where to show up. Emotional targeting tells you what to say when you get there.
Without the research that underpins the Emotional Targeting Framework, you’re creating content based on what you think your audience cares about. With it, you’re creating content based on what they’ve told you they actually feel; in surveys, in interviews, in review mining, in the communities where they’re talking about their problems when no one from your brand is watching.
The difference between those two approaches is the difference between content that gets scrolled past and content that makes someone stop and think “this brand gets me.”
What the research actually tells you
The Emotional Targeting Framework research step answers the questions that zero-click content creation can’t answer without it:
- What does your audience actually fear when they’re searching for recommendations in a Reddit thread about your category?
- What do they want to feel when they see a post from a brand like yours in their LinkedIn feed?
- What objection is sitting in their head when they watch a YouTube review of your product or service?
- What would make them feel seen rather than marketed to?
These aren’t questions you can answer by looking at your analytics. They’re not in your traffic data or your click-through rates. They come from talking to your customers directly and from going to the places where they talk about their problems honestly.
Fitbit’s example
The clearest example of this from my conversations with Amanda came from her time working in Fitbit’s B2B marketing team.
When they were selecting a PR agency, the agency they ultimately hired showed audience research slides in their final pitch. Their finding: Fitbit’s B2B audience (HR managers and benefits buyers) read Psychology Today and Entrepreneur. Not exactly the expected HR trade publications.
The insight Amanda understood from that: HR managers don’t see themselves as administrators. They see themselves as the CEOs of people. They’re in the business of human behavior. Entrepreneurial spirit. Once she understood that, everything about how she wrote for them changed.
The tangible result: she started calling them “overachievers” in email subject lines and salutations. Not a generic greeting. Not “hello, {first name}”. Overachiever. And people wrote back to say they loved it. Because it reflected how they actually saw themselves.
Understand specifically how your audience sees themselves, what they aspire to, and what they’re afraid of (through research) and then reflect that back in your content wherever they are. That’s what turns platform presence into trust. And trust is what eventually turns into conversions.
A case study: Increasing conversions by 14% for a moving company
We saw the same pattern play out with a client in a completely different industry: one of the largest moving companies in the US.
Their market had shifted. Most competitors were racing to the bottom on price, leading with deals and discounts and “cheapest pricing” messaging. On the surface, joining that race seemed like the obvious move.
Moving is expensive, the economy is hard right now, and people really do care about pricing.
But our research told a different story. Yes, people cared about price. What they really feared, though, was whether their belongings would arrive safely. Whether they could trust strangers with everything they owned. Whether they’d regret the decision.
So instead of competing on price, we doubled down on trust, safety, and confidence. We highlighted our clients:
- White-glove service.
- Full value protection.
- Decades of experience.
- Real human support.
By addressing the exact fears people carried when they landed on the page,we saw a 14% lift in conversions.
Bridging the gap
Zero-click marketing and emotional targeting aren’t two separate strategies. They’re two halves of the same one.
Knowing where your audience makes decisions without knowing what to say when you get there (or come to your website) means showing up in the right place with content that sounds like everyone else. And in a world where people are making split-second decisions about whether something is worth their attention, sounding like everyone else is the fastest way to become invisible.
But knowing what resonates emotionally without knowing where your audience actually is means creating content that never reaches the people it was built for, posted at the wrong stage, on the wrong platform, to an audience that isn’t in the right context to receive it. You need both. One without the other is half a strategy.
The brands winning right now are doing both. They know where their audience makes decisions, and they’re using those insights to show up in those spaces with the right message AND to optimize everything they own: their website, their landing pages, their emails, their ads. The research doesn’t just inform your Reddit presence or your LinkedIn content. It informs every asset you have.
The 6-step process to optimize your customer journey for a zero-click world
The Emotional Targeting Framework is a repeatable process for optimizing for conversions strategically. Here are 6 steps, each with a specific action you can take this week to optimize for a funnel that starts off your website.
Step 1: Audit your narrative outside your website
Before you optimize anything, you need to know what people believe about you without ever visiting your site.
Search for yourself the way your prospects do:
- Ask ChatGPT: “Is [your brand] worth it?”
- Search Google: “[your brand] Reddit”
- Search YouTube: “[your brand] review” or “[your brand] vs [competitor]”
- Search G2 or Trustpilot or whatever review platform your industry uses
What does AI mode say about your category when someone searches it? What does Perplexity say when someone asks for the best solution to the problem you solve? Are you in that answer or not? If you’re not, you’re invisible at the moment someone is forming their first opinion about your category.
What you’re looking for isn’t just whether the results are positive or negative. You’re looking for three specific things:
The dominant narrative, what do most people seem to believe about you? Is it accurate? Does it match what your website says?
The emotional tone, are people worried, excited, skeptical, or confused? That tone is what your prospects are carrying when they land on your site.
The specific objections, what reasons do people give for hesitating or choosing a competitor instead? These are the exact concerns your website and your off-site content need to address.
If what you find doesn’t match what your website says, you have a confirmation gap. Prospects are arriving with a belief your website isn’t acknowledging. That’s your first hypothesis to test.
Step 2: Map your trust ecosystem
Once you know what people believe about you, you need to know where those beliefs are being formed.
This is different from knowing where your audience spends time generally. The question is: where do they go specifically when they’re evaluating solutions like yours?
For some audiences it’s Reddit and G2. For others it’s YouTube and industry Slack groups. For others it’s analyst reports, whatsapp or peer conversations at conferences. The platforms are different for every business and every audience, which means you can’t borrow someone else’s map.
There are several ways to build this map:
- Audience research tools: SparkToro lets you search your audience and see the exact subreddits they use, the YouTube channels they watch, the podcasts they listen to, and the websites they read, all in one place. In fact, you can upload your entire email list to it and get specific insights on them. We use it all the time at Getuplift.
- LinkedIn Campaign Manager: Under Plan > Audiences > Insights, you can see the job titles, industries, seniority levels, and topics your audience has recently engaged with. If you’re running LinkedIn ads, this data is already available to you.
- Meta Business Suite: Under the Insights tab, you can analyze the demographics, interests, and behavioral patterns of your existing Facebook and Instagram audiences. If you’re running Meta ads, you’re sitting on audience data you may not be fully using.
- Customer interviews: Five conversations asking “where do you go when you’re researching solutions like ours?” will tell you more than any tool. Direct, fast, and free.
- Reddit: Go to the subreddits where your audience spends time and post a genuine question asking where they go to research solutions like yours, what they read, who they follow, and what influences their decisions. Reddit communities are remarkably generous with honest answers when the question is genuine and not promotional.
- Post-purchase or onboarding surveys: Ask new customers how they found you and what they read, watched, or listened to before they bought. The patterns that emerge over 20 to 30 responses will surprise you.
Step 3: Do emotional targeting research
This is the step most teams skip because it feels slow compared to running another test or publishing another post. It’s also the step that makes every other step work.
The research methods are surveys, customer interviews, review mining, and social listening. The goal isn’t more data about who your customers are. It’s understanding how they feel, what they fear, what they want, what they need to believe before they’ll act, and what language they use to describe their own problem.
The output of this research is your Customer Compass, a strategic document that captures your ICP’s pains, desired outcomes, hesitations, and the exact language they use to describe their situation. This becomes the brief for every piece of content you create, on any platform. Not “write a LinkedIn post about our product.” “Write a LinkedIn post that speaks to the fear of making the wrong choice and having to defend it to your team.”
And critically, it becomes the brief for your website too. The objections people are raising in Reddit threads about your category are the same objections your pricing page needs to address. The fears showing up in your review mining are the same fears your homepage needs to acknowledge. The research doesn’t have separate outputs for off-site and on-site. It’s one set of insights that informs everything. Here’s one research method you can start with this week:
Analyzing your social listening with AI
Here’s a process you can run on any Reddit thread, review page, or community discussion relevant to your audience.
- Gather the data. Use a free scraping tool to pull Reddit threads, G2 or Trustpilot reviews, Quora discussions, or Facebook group comments into a single document or CSV. Focus on threads where your audience is discussing problems in your category, not threads about your brand specifically. The more raw and unfiltered the source, the better.
- Run the segmentation prompt. Open your AI tool of choice and paste the following: “Use the following set of raw comments from [platform] about [topic/category]. Group them into two lists: Problems/Pains/Challenges and Solutions/Outcomes/Results. For each item, keep the original wording whenever possible. Support every theme you identify with at least three direct quotes from the data. Do not invent quotes, do not summarize into percentages — only use language that appears verbatim in the source material.”
- Find the recurring themes. Once it’s done, follow up with: “Highlight the top three recurring themes in each list. For each theme, include three direct quotes from the original data that best represent it. If you cannot find direct quotes to support a theme, do not include it.”
This is the step where the real insight lives, not in the themes themselves, but in the exact language people use to describe them. Those words belong in your content, your headlines, your social posts, and your website copy verbatim. When someone reads copy that sounds like something they’d say themselves, the reaction isn’t “this is good marketing.” It’s “this brand understands me.” - Identify your content gaps. Following Dana’s advice on gap analysis, once you have your themes and quotes, ask: “Based on the problems and themes identified in this data, what topics and questions is this audience actively seeking answers to that are not being addressed in the conversations themselves? List these as content opportunities. For each gap, include at least one direct quote from the data that shows the unmet need. Do not suggest topics that are already well covered in the threads. What you’re building here isn’t a content calendar. It’s a map of where your audience has unanswered questions, the exact mid-funnel topics that belong in your LinkedIn content, your YouTube presence, your community participation, and your website. Not because a keyword tool told you they have volume, but because real people in your audience are asking them and no one is answering.
What this looks like in practice
When we ran this process for a client in the home services industry, three themes emerged consistently from hundreds of reviews: urgency and relief, long-term peace of mind, and confidence in their options. None of those emotional drivers appeared anywhere on the brand’s website. Their homepage talked about licensing, experience, and service areas. Their customers were talking about fear, relief, and trust.
The content gap was equally clear. Customers were repeatedly asking variations of “how do I know I’m not being overcharged?” and “how do I know if I actually need this repair?”questions that had no answer anywhere in the brand’s content or on their website. Those became the brief for the next round of content and the next round of website optimization.
Step 4: Optimize and align your on-site experience
This is where the confirmation job becomes concrete.
Most websites are optimized to introduce the brand and make a case for it. They’re built for the first-time visitor who knows nothing. What they’re not built for is the visitor who already has a belief about you and arrived to check whether it holds up.
Closing that gap means three specific things:
- Use social proof that addresses the real objections, not generic praise.
The testimonials and case studies on your site should directly mirror the concerns people are raising in communities about your category. If the most common Reddit objection is “I’m not sure it works for small teams,” your social proof should include a customer who had exactly that concern and resolved it. Generic “we love this tool” testimonials don’t do the confirmation job. Specific “I was worried about X and here’s what I found” testimonials do. - Make your mid-funnel pages as strong as your homepage.
Comparison pages, use case pages, “is this right for me” pages, these are the pages prospects visit when they’re actively evaluating. They’re often the weakest pages on any website because the homepage gets all the attention. As we saw with Teamwork’s comparison page, the specific fears and desires we found in our research, helped increase sign-ups by 54%. The homepage is where you introduce yourself or act as a jumping board to other content. The comparison page is where you win or lose the decision. - Write copy in your customers’ language, not yours.
The phrases they use to describe their own problem (the ones that came out of your interviews and review mining) should appear verbatim in your headlines, subheads, and CTAs.
Step 5: Show up where decisions are happening
Now that you know where your trust ecosystem lives and what your audience actually cares about, you can create content that earns presence in those spaces.
Amanda’s concept from our conversation is the right mental model here: every piece of native-to-platform content that delivers standalone value is a deposit in your algorithmic bank account. You’re building capital over time. The more you deposit, the more reach your content gets, and the more receptive the algorithm is when you do eventually post something with a link or a CTA.
Dana framed it differently but arrived at the same place. When she looks at what’s driving traffic and influence for her clients, she’s not just looking at their own URLs anymore. She’s looking at Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, and community discussions that mention the brand. As she put it: “It’s not me as the destination. It’s me as the conversation.”
“It’s not me as the destination.
Dana DiTomaso
It’s me as the conversation.”
That reframe matters. Your goal in these spaces isn’t to drive people to your website. It’s to be part of the conversation that’s already happening. The website visit (and the conversion) comes later, when the trust is already there.
The emotional targeting layer is what determines whether those deposits resonate or not. The content that builds the most trust isn’t tips and listicles. It’s content that names the thing your audience is quietly thinking and says: I see you, I’ve been there, here’s what I know.
Take one insight from your customer research. One fear, one desire, one frustration that came up repeatedly in your interviews or your review mining. Write a post, a comment, a short video that names that insight directly (with no link, no CTA, no ask). Just: here’s something true about your situation that most people in this space aren’t saying.
That’s the content that gets saved. That’s the content that gets shared in Slack channels with a “have you seen this?” message. That’s the content that makes someone remember your brand six months later when they’re finally ready to buy.
Step 6: Own your narrative
Showing up is not a one-time project. The conversation about your brand online is ongoing, and if you’re not monitoring it, you’re not in it.
Assign someone to run a monthly narrative audit:
- Run the ChatGPT and Perplexity searches on your brand again. Has the output changed?
- Check your branded search queries in Google Search Console. Are new objection-based queries appearing: “[brand] complaints,” “[brand] vs [competitor],” “[brand] problems”?
- Read the last 30 days of new reviews on G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, or wherever your audience leaves feedback. What’s the dominant emotional tone? What new concerns are surfacing?
- Search “[your brand] Reddit” again. What’s being said this month that wasn’t being said last month?
What you find feeds directly back into Step 3. The research is never done. Your audience’s fears and desires evolve. The conversation about your category shifts. New competitors enter and change the narrative. The brands that own their space over time are the ones who treat this as a permanent part of their optimization program, not a one-time audit.
How to measure what you can’t fully track (and get leadership on board)
#1. The Google Search Console funnel audit
Dana’s approach: label your top Search Console queries by funnel stage and calculate what percentage of impressions fall into each bucket. Here’s exactly how to run it:
- Open Google Search Console and go to the Performance report
- Export your top queries by impressions
- Label each query by funnel stage: awareness (“what is X,” “how does X work”), comparison (“X vs Y,” “best X for Y,” “X for [specific use case]”), or ready to buy (branded searches, high-intent queries)
- Calculate the percentage of total impressions in each bucket
If the majority of your impressions are coming from awareness queries, you have a content gap, and now you have the data to show leadership exactly where it is. The fix isn’t to abandon top-of-funnel content. It’s to close the mid-funnel gap. The comparison and consideration queries your audience is using are the same topics they’re researching in Reddit threads and YouTube videos. This tool shows you where the gaps are. The social listening work from Step 3 shows you what to say when you fill them.
#2. Channel weight vs. conversion contribution
This is the report that changes how leadership thinks about attribution. Most teams report on raw traffic numbers by channel. Dana’s recommendation: stop reporting on traffic volume and start reporting on conversion contribution relative to traffic share. Here’s how it works:
- Look at each channel’s percentage of total traffic,
- then compare it to that channel’s percentage of total conversions or key events.
If organic search drives 40% of your traffic but 60% of your conversions, it’s punching above its weight. If paid social drives 30% of your traffic but only 10% of conversions, something is wrong, either with the audience targeting, the message, or both.
This framing moves the conversation from “our traffic is declining” (which sounds like failure) to “organic search is converting at 3x its traffic share” (which sounds like ROI). Same data. Completely different story.
#3 The tracking flowchart
This is my favorite recommendation from Dana (and the one most teams are missing). Stop presenting attribution data as a table. Tables imply a precision you don’t have. When leadership sees a table that adds up to 100%, they assume it accounts for everything. When reality doesn’t match, trust breaks down.Instead, draw a flowchart. Dana’s version uses three categories:
- Green: touchpoints you can track with confidence — direct traffic, branded search, form fills, email clicks
- Yellow: touchpoints that are partially trackable but lossy — organic social, some paid channels, referral traffic where dark social is folding into direct
- Grey: touchpoints you know exist but cannot track — Reddit threads, word of mouth, podcast listens, community conversations, dark social
The grey boxes matter more than most teams realize. When Dana’s moving company client started asking customers how they actually found them, 75% of bookings attributed to PPC turned out to be word-of-mouth referrals who ran a branded search at the very end of their journey. In the table, it looked like PPC. In reality, it was grey box activity the whole way through, and that finding changed how they wrote their branded search ads entirely.
Walk leadership through the flowchart. “Here’s what we can see clearly. Here’s what we can partially see. Here’s what we know is happening but can’t attribute.” That honesty builds more confidence than a table that pretends to have all the answers. It also reframes the conversation: the grey boxes aren’t a failure of your measurement. They’re proof that trust is being built in places that matter.
A note on presenting all of this to leadership
Dana’s framing from our conversation is worth keeping close: the goal isn’t to prove that every channel is working. It’s to show leadership which channels are earning their investment and which aren’t honestly, with the caveats included.
The brands that build the most internal trust around marketing measurement are the ones that stop pretending they can see everything. They show what they can see, name what they can’t, and make the case for continued investment based on the patterns that keep showing up regardless of whether they’re fully trackable.
That’s not a weakness in your measurement strategy. That’s what honest measurement looks like in a zero-click world.
Watch the full discussion Dana and I had about tracking and attribution in a click-free world here.
Over to you
The reality of zero-click marketing is that the customer journey has expanded outward and off your website, into communities and feeds and conversations that don’t show up in any dashboard. Your prospects are out there right now, building a belief about you on Reddit and YouTube and LinkedIn and in group chats you’ll never see. When they arrive on your website, they’re not starting from zero. They’re arriving to confirm.
That confirmation job is new. Most websites aren’t built for it yet. And most content strategies are still optimized for a journey that no longer exists.
This shift does NOT mean you need more content, more channels, or better attribution software. You need a cleaner understanding of your customer: what they fear, what they want, what they need to believe before they’ll act, and where they go to form those beliefs in the first place. That understanding is what the Emotional Targeting Framework™ gives you. And it’s what makes showing up in the right places actually lead to conversion rather than just reach.
Follow Amanda’s work at SparkToro, and Zero Click Marketing — her podcast, consultancy, newsletter, and book!
For anyone who wants to go deeper on analytics and measurement, Dana’s Analytics Playbook is here.
And if you want the complete emotional targeting research process (the one that tells you exactly what to say wherever your audience is) it’s all in my book here, or our course: Emotion Sells, here.
Facebook Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments