The Great Decoupling of Clicks and Impressions — Whiteboard Friday

3. Impressions are good data

Thirdly, impressions are just good data. There are a lot of things in SEO that we don’t have good data for. Impressions, we do have pretty good data for. It’s in Search Console. It’s free. It’s universal. It’s comparable with other channels. 

Okay, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of weirdness in how Google Search Console works. Okay, it’s only showing you SEO. But compared to a lot of things we deal with, this is actually pretty hard and fast data, and it’s free. So that makes this more tempting to work with as a metric. 

4. Top of funnel content does not have to be about clicks

And then, this is the controversial one, really. So I think maybe his words were taken out of context, perhaps, but I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media lately about a statement that Martin Splitt made at an event. 

I can’t remember exactly what the event was now, but we’ll put that in the description below. Martin Splitt is a Googler, and he’s a guy that I have a lot of time for. So I’m not trying to criticize him here. And like I said, I think maybe it was taken out of context as well. But the point that he was taken to say was that top of funnel doesn’t have to be about clicks, that maybe top of funnel can just be an impression, and then people will still make their way to a purchase in some other way. 

The trouble is, I think it doesn’t quite work like that for a lot of sites. Sure, there are sites where that model is fair. There are sites where your top of funnel doesn’t have to involve a click, and then people will make a purchase at the bottom of the funnel on your site, and that’s fine. Or maybe even they’ll make a purchase off your site, and that’s fine. But for a lot of sites, that’s not realistic. If you’re a publisher and you monetize by display adverts or affiliate links on your site, this model doesn’t work. 

You need that click at the top of funnel. And this is also a bit of a paradigm break, by which I mean we have this whole ecosystem called the web, where there is an incentive for people to /learn/seo/google-eat because it gets clicks and they can monetize those. If there’s no incentive to publish that content, then why will people keep doing it? 

Now, this is a critical aspect to how the web works as an ecosystem. If the only incentive is to write about people’s products on other people’s sites and then not get the click yourself, but the product benefits, how do publishers work as a business? So this is a big problem.