A Full-Funnel SEO, PPC & KPI Blueprint for Building Sustainable Revenue Growth

AI is fundamentally changing what doing SEO means. Not just in how results are presented, but in how brands are discovered, understood, and trusted inside the very systems people now rely on to learn, evaluate, and make decisions. This forces a reassessment of our role as SEOs, the tools and frameworks we use, and the way success is measured beyond legacy reporting models that were built for a very different search environment.

Continuing to rely on vanity metrics rooted in clicks and rankings no longer reflects reality, particularly as people increasingly encounter and learn about brands without ever visiting a website.

For most of its history, SEO focused on helping people find you within a static list of results. Keywords, content, and links existed primarily to earn a click from someone who already recognized a need and was actively searching for a solution.

AI disrupts that model by moving discovery into the answer itself, returning a single synthesized response that references only a small number of brands, which naturally reduces overall clicks while simultaneously increasing the number of brand touchpoints and moments of exposure that shape perception and preference. This is not a traffic loss problem, but a demand creation opportunity. Every time a brand appears inside an AI-generated answer, it is placed directly into the buyer’s mental shortlist, building mental availability even when the user has never encountered the brand before.

Why AI Visibility Creates Demand, Not Just Traffic

Traditional SEO excelled at capturing existing demand by supporting users as they moved through a sequence of searches that refined and clarified a problem before leading them towards a solution.

AI now operates much earlier in that journey, shaping how people understand categories, options, and tradeoffs before they ever begin comparing vendors, effectively pulling what we used to think of as middle and bottom-of-funnel activity further upstream. People increasingly use AI to explore unfamiliar spaces, weigh alternatives, and design solutions that fit their specific context, which means that when a brand is repeatedly named, explained, or referenced, it begins to influence how the market defines what good looks like.

This repeated exposure builds familiarity over time, so that when a decision moment eventually arrives, the brand feels known and credible rather than new and untested, which is demand generation playing out inside the systems people already trust and use daily.

Unlike above-the-line advertising, this familiarity is built natively within tools that have become deeply embedded in everyday life through smartphones, assistants, and other connected devices, making this shift not only technical but behavioral, rooted in how people now access and process information.

How This Changes The Role Of SEO

As AI systems increasingly summarize, filter, and recommend on behalf of users, SEO has to move beyond optimizing individual pages and instead focus on making a brand easy for machines to understand, trust, and reuse across different contexts and queries.

This shift is most clearly reflected in the long-running move from keywords to entities, where keywords still matter but are no longer the primary organizing principle, because AI systems care more about who a brand is, what it does, where it operates, and which problems it solves.

That pushes modern SEO towards clearly defined and consistently expressed brand boundaries, where category, use cases, and differentiation are explicit across the web, even when that creates tension with highly optimized commercial landing pages.

AI systems rely heavily on trust signals such as citations, consensus, reviews, and verifiable facts, which means traditional ranking factors still play a role, but increasingly as proof points that an AI system can safely rely on when constructing answers. When an AI cannot confidently answer basic questions about a brand, it hesitates to recommend it, whereas when it can, that brand becomes a dependable component it can repeatedly draw upon.

This changes the questions SEO teams need to ask, shifting focus away from rankings alone and toward whether content genuinely shapes category understanding, whether trusted publishers reference the brand, and whether information about the brand remains consistent wherever it appears.

Narrative control also changes, because where brands once shaped their story through pages in a list of results, AI now tells the story itself, requiring SEOs to work far more closely with brand and communication teams to reinforce simple, consistent language and a small number of clear value propositions that AI systems can easily compress into accurate summaries.

What Brands Need To Do Differently

Brands need to stop starting their strategies with keywords and instead begin by assessing their strength and clarity as an entity, looking at what search engines and other systems already understand about them and how consistent that understanding really is.

The most valuable AI moments occur long before a buyer is ready to compare vendors, at the point where they are still forming opinions about the problem space, which means appearing by name in those early exploratory questions allows a brand to influence how the problem itself is framed and to build mental availability before any shortlist exists.

Achieving that requires focus rather than breadth, because trying to appear in every possible conversation dilutes clarity, whereas deliberately choosing which problems and perspectives to own creates stronger and more coherent signals for AI systems to work with.

This represents a move away from chasing as many keywords as possible in favor of standardizing a simple brand story that uses clear language everywhere, so that what you do, who it is for, and why it matters can be expressed in one clean, repeatable sentence.

This shift also demands a fundamental change in how SEO success is measured and reported, because if performance continues to be judged primarily through rankings and clicks, AI visibility will always look underwhelming, even though its real impact happens upstream by shaping preference and intent over time.

Instead, teams need to look at patterns across branded search growth, direct traffic, lead quality, and customer outcomes, because when reporting reflects that broader reality, it becomes clear that as AI visibility grows, demand follows, repositioning SEO from a purely tactical channel into a strategic lever for long-term growth.

More Resources:

• How AI Is Redefining Search And What Leaders Must Do Now
• How Enterprise Search And AI Intelligence Reveal Market Pulse
• 5 Key Enterprise SEO And AI Trends For 2026

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Integrating digital PR & SEO with a full-funnel strategy both influences audience behavior and top-three rankings in search engines.

In my recent webinar with Search Engine Journal about how to earn links with digital PR, I didn’t have time to dive into the importance of the audience journey and a full-funnel strategy. This article is to remedy that.

Have you found that ranking in search engines is more difficult lately? Or maybe your link building isn’t driving the top 3 ranking it used to.

Google representatives have been actively discussing the decrease in the importance of links in Google’s algorithm.

What does this mean?

This doesn’t seem to mean links don’t work, but that links and brand mentions in the context of the audience’s journey are factors that help to break into the top 3 positions of Google – and, I believe, eventually, how you’ll make it into SGE or other high-visibility areas of search.

A full-funnel PR and SEO strategy is a method for building links and brand mentions in the context of the audience’s journey online, creating an off-page user experience.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the key takeaways you’ll find throughout this article:

• Audience Journey Insight: Your audience interacts with diverse content across platforms long before they search, influencing their perception and decision-making.
• Case Study: Lectric eBikes showcased how aligning content with the customer journey and securing authoritative links and mentions can significantly boost SEO performance, brand trust, and, ultimately, sales.
• Strategy Blueprint: This guide offers a structured approach for businesses to navigate digital marketing complexities efficiently, guiding the audience from awareness to conversion.
• Integration of Digital PR and SEO: Combining digital PR and SEO creates a cohesive journey that guides the audience from awareness to decision-making, influencing audience behavior and search engine rankings.
• Digital PR for SEO: Digital PR links and brand mentions are in the context of the audience journey and are needed to rank in the top three positions in search.

Off-Page Audience Experience With The Brand Matters

Google recommends being helpful to the audience and demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) in a category to rank highly.

Your audiences are constantly looking for a solution that solves their problem or creates an opportunity, and for trusted sources to guide them through the decision-making process.

They may become aware of this problem or the solutions long before they even reach the search engines.

The chart below illustrates the sites that receive the most visits vs. those that send the most referral traffic.

This data indicates that search engines will drive the most traffic to sites, but any given audience spends a significant amount of time engaging on other platforms, digesting content about various topics.

Social and News sites get 20% and 12% of the shares of visits, respectively, while search engines drive over 70% of total traffic.

If the audience is using several touchpoints to learn about a given product or solution, wouldn’t Google use these to determine which company is a helpful source and what its E-E-A-T is for those topics?

I had my digital PR data team at PureLinq gather data for sites that ranked in Google for a seed set of cybersecurity keywords.

We then identified all of the keywords that those sites ranked in the top three positions. From that, we gathered data about the count of brand mentions and brand search volume for each domain.

The chart below shows the number of brand mentions (x-axis), U.S. search volume for brand keywords (y-axis), and the count of keywords in the top three (bubble size). Larger bubbles mean a higher count of keywords ranked in the top three.

This data set is only for cybersecurity brands.

As brand mentions increase, the bubbles grow in size, showing that a larger number of brand mentions correlates with a higher count in the top three rankings.

Brand mentions seem to influence ranking. I know there are a large number of confounding variables in this analysis. However, the idea that Google can use these measures to identify E-E-A-T is believable.

How does this play out in the real world? To understand more, I looked at Lectric eBike.

Case Study: Lectric eBike Full Funnel PR & SEO

This case study demonstrates the power of integrating digital PR with SEO to create a cohesive and effective full-funnel marketing strategy.

The key to success was the strategic alignment of content across all stages of the customer journey, ensuring that each piece contributed to building awareness, trust, and, finally, decision-making confidence.

By securing authoritative links and mentions, Lectric eBikes not only improved its SEO performance but also established itself as a trusted brand in the eyes of consumers and search engines alike.

The rise in organic visibility and brand searches directly contributed to the overall increase in website traffic and, ultimately, sales.

This case underscores the importance of a holistic approach to digital marketing, where PR and SEO work hand in hand to guide the customer journey from awareness to conversion.

Maximum Organic Visibility

At the time of this analysis, Lectric was ranked in position 1 for “ebike” and 3 for “ebikes.”

As a result of the non-brand and brand visibility, the website went from <40,000 estimated clicks per month to over 200,000 in just about 2 years – and it still seems to be growing.

How They Did It

Lectric integrated digital PR and SEO together with a full-funnel PR & SEO strategy.

Late in 2022, Lectric began to secure more media links & brand mentions.

At first glance, you might think that the growth in backlinks was the major factor in the organic traffic growth.

The famous Ahrefs chart shows a strong correlation between the number of referring domains and organic traffic growth.

However, this chart causes much confusion since it doesn’t tell the full story.

Note: Semrush and Ahrefs have very different traffic estimates lately. However, any traffic estimate will be inherently inaccurate. They estimate these based on position, average monthly search volume, and estimated clickthrough rate (CTR) using Google’s keyword planner data. They all calculate CTR differently.

A little more digging with Ahref’s content explorer and BuzzSumo shows that the site saw growth in brand mentions starting in mid-2022, around the same time the organic traffic began to grow.

Lectric gained much of the organic traffic improvement by focusing on creating content for each stage of the audience journey.

The brand generated links and brand mentions based on the audience’s needs and wants, driving brand search volume.

Awareness

Lectric eBikes secured media coverage on environmental and technology news platforms and podcasts. This effort placed the brand in front of a broad audience, emphasizing its commitment to eco-friendliness and innovation.

Placements gained during this stage aimed to educate the audience on the environmental benefits of e-bikes, leveraging unique data and expert commentary to secure media coverage.

• Consumers are drawn to sustainable transportation, seeing e-bikes as a way to align with environmental values. (Rv Lifestyle)
• The unique, self-funded growth story of Lectric eBikes appeals to those seeking reliable and ethically operated companies. (The Verge)
• Insights from the CEO of Lectric eBikes highlight the enjoyment and utility of e-bikes, broadening the appeal to a wider audience. (Autonocast)

These placements generated topically relevant and authoritative links and brand mentions related to the company and individual expertise.

Expert commentary and unique data appeal to journalists. Lectric could have used PR outreach to pitch Lectric’s sales data and CEO commentary to obtain media coverage.

I almost exclusively use unique data and expert commentary to secure media coverage in digital PR. This is a very effective technique.

Consideration

The company obtained mentions in articles that discussed market success, customer satisfaction, and endorsements from reputable sources. This helped build trust and positioned Lectric eBikes as a reliable choice.

Coverage included comparative discussions on pricing and quality, showing how Lectric stands out from competitors. This was crucial for audiences evaluating their options.

• Lectric eBikes’ market success and customer satisfaction offer social proof, encouraging new customers to consider an e-bike. (Electrek article)
• Gaining trust from the audience by applying for awards from trusted sources (Arizona Tech Council).
• Media coverage and expert commentary discussing how they focus on a lower price over incentive programs (Axios)
• Securing links and mentions in articles that evaluate options for e-bikes (Earth911)

Digital PR Insight

The Axios article is a great example of a technique I use in data campaigns. Find data about specific states or cities that relate to your niche. Then, use that data to pitch media about a given topic.

Decision

The website’s content was tailored to answer final questions and overcome objections. This included detailed product comparisons, reviews, and clear, transparent pricing information.

By this stage, Lectric eBikes focused on ranking for both non-brand and brand-specific keywords, facilitating easy access for users ready to make a purchase decision.

The audience is actively searching Lectric by name as a result of the digital PR.

Lectic’s site has comparison, reviews, and showroom information easily accessible in the main navigation.

It also has clear pricing and product options.

Pro tip: Brand search for a company or product seems to have an impact on a site’s ability to rank in the top three for non-brand keywords.

If you’re unfamiliar with the audience journey, here’s an overview.

What Is Full-Funnel PR & SEO?

It’s The Stages Of The Audience Journey

A full-funnel strategy means that you create content for each stage in the audience’s journey and at the touchpoints where they are going for that type of information.

The audience journey has several stages:

• Awareness Stage: The customer becomes aware of a need, opportunity, or problem and starts looking for solutions.
• Consideration Stage: The customer evaluates different options and solutions to address their need or problem.
• Decision Stage: The customer decides on the best solution and buys or takes action.

A full-funnel strategy creates content for each stage of the audience journey.

Using e-bikes as an example:

• Situation: Consumers want to have less of a carbon footprint, and e-bikes are an option.
• Awareness: Provide graphics showing the amount of carbon an e-bike produces compared to a car.
• Considerations: Show how your e-bike compares to others in terms of carbon footprint.
• Decision: Provide information about pricing and maybe carbon savings during the checkout process.

It’s Wherever The Audience Is

The audience journey has touchpoints they use to learn or gather insights at different stages.

For example:

• Awareness Stage: The audience reads news sites, so you use digital PR to pitch unique data to journalists who cover environmental issues.
• Consideration Stage: The audience searches Google for [e-bikes with lowest carbon footprint], so you rank articles with data showing how your e-bike has the lowest carbon footprint.
• Decision Stage: The audience will search your e-bike’s brand name and purchase intent keywords, so you should focus on ranking your e-commerce pages for brand and non-brand keywords.

Targeting each stage of the audience’s journey can create topically relevant links at key touchpoints.

Designing A Full-Funnel Strategy

Designing a strategy means laying out a structured roadmap for businesses to effectively guide their target audience from awareness to decision-making.

I’m a big fan of templates that simplify processes. I created this React Workbook as part of my Digital PR for SEO Mini MBA course. You can use it to create an audience journey map, identify assets, and create an integrated PR and SEO strategy. Screenshots are below.

Create An Audience Journey Map

Start by mapping your audience’s journey, identifying key stages, touchpoints, and content needs. This will serve as the foundation for your strategy.

Understand and visualize the path your audience takes from first becoming aware of a need or problem to making a purchase decision.

The screenshot below is of an audience journey map template I created to make the process of mapping the audience journey more actionable.

Create Owned Assets For Each Stage

Develop a variety of unique assets and resources tailored to each stage of the audience journey, designed to engage, inform, and convert your target audience. These assets should be useful for both digital PR and SEO.

Instead of creating endless blog articles, create assets that are linkable and shareable.

• Expert commentary: Leverage internal experts and the C-suite to provide commentary on trends in the media.
• Unique data: Research unique data and insights into trends or data about the company’s growth.
• Expert resources: Have internal experts identify resources that are helpful to the audience.
• Guides: Create easy-to-use guides that help your audience accomplish something at a stage in their journey

In my webinar with SEJ, I gave the example of how my digital PR team earned links by analyzing publicly available data in manufacturing around the outsourcing of manufacturing overseas due to increasing labor costs in the US.

This idea was a result of recent media trends discussing the idea that US manufacturing may be in a recession. We did this for a CFO consultancy that worked with manufacturing companies.

Thus, these assets can show your overall expertise in a given category.

With assets in hand, start an integrated digital PR and SEO program.

Implement Integrated Digital PR And SEO

Launch a coordinated digital PR and SEO campaign that leverages external media coverage (links and brand mentions) and optimized online content to improve organic search visibility and drive targeted traffic to your website.

I use this integrated topic tour canvas to simplify the planning process.

• Digital PR tactics: Pitch story ideas, unique data, and expert commentary to journalists and influencers to secure media mentions and backlinks.
• SEO integration: Align your digital PR efforts with SEO by targeting keywords and phrases that have high search volumes and are relevant to the content being pitched. Use the media coverage and backlinks obtained through digital PR to enhance your website’s E-E-A-T and ranking.
• Cross-channel promotion: Amplify the reach of your media coverage and owned content through social media, email marketing, and other digital channels, ensuring that your target audience sees your brand across multiple touchpoints.

Pro Tips

• Use digital PR strategies instead of traditional link building as it builds your E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) and the associated ranking factors.
• Have a technical expert or leadership contribute to on-site content and digital PR.

Leveraging Digital PR and SEO Builds A Powerful Online Presence

Implementing this full-funnel strategy requires ongoing collaboration between your PR, SEO, and content teams to ensure all efforts are aligned and focused on guiding the audience toward conversion.

By systematically mapping the audience journey, creating engaging content for each stage, and leveraging both digital PR and SEO, businesses can build a powerful online presence by ranking in the top three and driving brand search.

More resources:

• Why Brands Should Prioritize Bottom Of Funnel Keywords In SEO
• How To Use SEO To Target Your Audience Throughout The Funnel
• The Dark Side Of Link Building

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

A lot of PPC accounts are built from the bottom up. You start with keyword research, group them by themes or match types, maybe throw in some location targeting, and go from there.

But then reporting becomes messy. Budget allocation feels random or reactive.

Then, when leadership asks for performance broken out by product line or region, you’re left pulling together a spreadsheet patchwork that still doesn’t tell the full story.

That’s because your PPC account structure doesn’t match how the business actually operates.

When your campaigns mirror your business model, everything starts working together.

You’re not just optimizing for clicks or conversions, you’re aligning with how revenue is made, who’s responsible for what, and how success is measured across the company.

This article will walk through how to shift from a keyword-centric approach to a business-aligned strategy.

Additionally, you’ll leave with practical advice for both restructuring existing accounts and building new ones the right way.

Why Structure Is More Than Just A Clean Campaign View

Let’s be honest: Campaign structure is rarely the most exciting part of PPC. But it’s one of the most important.

The way your account is structured affects everything from how you manage budgets to how clearly you can report on performance.

And yet, too many accounts are still structured around what’s easiest to set up, not what makes the most sense for the business.

If you’ve ever found yourself duplicating reports just to slice performance by business line, or struggled to isolate budgets by region, chances are the issue isn’t performance. It’s how your PPC campaigns are structured.

Well-structured accounts give you clarity, not just control. They help you:

• Allocate budget where it matters most.
• Tie campaign results back to business outcomes.
• Make faster decisions with cleaner data.
• Align with sales and finance teams instead of operating in a silo.

When your PPC structure reflects how your company makes money, your campaigns do more than drive leads or sales. They’re taking it a step further to support actual business growth.

Rethink The Starting Point By Beginning With The Business Model

Most marketers are taught to start with keyword research. But when you begin with the business model instead, you’re already thinking strategically.

Now, for agencies, this can be harder to manage because you’ve likely got someone trying to win the business, and then a completely different team going to execute on what’s agreed upon.

If you’re still in the discovery phase with a client, start by asking some of these questions:

• What are the core revenue drivers for the business?
• Are there different business units, product lines, or services with unique goals?
• Do some offerings have higher margins, longer sales cycles, or different audiences?
• Are there geographic differences in how the business operates or sells?

These answers should directly inform how your campaigns are structured.

Let’s say you’re managing PPC for a multi-location financial services brand.

Their retail checking accounts, home loans, and business banking products each serve different customers, generate revenue differently, and likely have different internal stakeholders.

Instead of grouping all financial keywords into one campaign, each of those lines should have its own campaign with distinct goals, budgets, and creative.

You can then track performance in a way that lines up with internal reporting and make adjustments based on real business priorities, not just ad metrics.

A Better Framework For Structuring Your Account

Once you have a clear picture of how the business operates, use that to inform a top-down PPC campaign structure.

Here are three starting points that typically work well.

1. Mirror The Business Unit Or P&L

If the business tracks revenue separately for each product or service line, your campaigns should reflect that.

Not only does this make budgeting easier, but it also keeps reporting clean and relevant for internal teams.

You can speak the same language as your stakeholders and clearly show how paid media supports each part of the business.

Here’s an example breakdown:

• Campaign A: “Personal Loans | Search | US”
• Campaign B: “Student Banking | PMax | Northeast”
• Campaign C: “Small Business Lending | Search | Canada”

Each one can then be built with appropriate audience targeting, bidding strategies, and conversion goals.

2. Segment By Funnel Stage Or Intent

Not all keywords or users are created equal. Think about structuring campaigns around the user’s stage in the journey.

Some examples include:

• Branded campaigns (warm leads and returning users).
• Non-branded high-intent campaigns (ready to convert).
• Informational or research-stage campaigns (top-of-funnel).
• Competitor-focused campaigns (comparison shoppers).
• Awareness-driving campaigns (creating demand).

This lets you tailor bid strategy, messaging, and landing pages to match the level of intent and measure success more appropriately.

3. Separate Testing From Scaling

Every account needs room for experimentation. But, testing new keywords, assets, or audiences shouldn’t get in the way of scaling what already works.

A good PPC structure separates out:

• Evergreen campaigns that consistently drive results.
• Test campaigns with new targeting, creative, or offers.
• Seasonal or geo-specific initiatives that need short-term budget support.

This makes it easier to measure impact, allocate budget, and avoid letting unproven elements tank your top-performing campaigns.

For Existing Accounts: When To Rethink Your PPC Structure

If your campaigns have been live for a while, restructuring might feel daunting. But, sometimes a reset is the only way to make your account work smarter.

Here are a few signs it might be time to make a change:

• You can’t easily map campaign performance back to business priorities.
• You’re constantly building workaround reports for internal teams.
• Budget shifts feel reactive instead of strategic.
• Performance has plateaued, but it’s unclear why.

Before making big changes, start with an audit. Compare how the business is structured vs. how your campaigns are organized.

Are your campaigns aligned with revenue-driving units? Do you have enough control over budgets, bids, and assets for key areas?

If not, consider starting small. Choose one business unit or region and restructure those campaigns first.

Document what you changed, how it aligns with the business, and what you’re measuring. Then, repeat the process for other areas as needed.

If You’re Setting Up A New PPC Account, Here’s Where To Start

New accounts are a blank slate and a great opportunity to get it right from the beginning.

Here’s a simple approach to building a structure around your business model:

1. Outline your revenue centers. Products, services, regions, etc. Whatever makes sense for the business.
2. Group campaigns around these core units. Each campaign should have its own budget, goals, and audience strategy.
3. Map audience intent to campaign type. Use ad groups or asset groups to segment further by funnel stage or user behavior.
4. Plan for scale. Use a naming convention that can grow with the business and makes sense to anyone reviewing the account.
5. Set conversion tracking and bidding by campaign type. Not everything should optimize toward the same goal.

This setup makes it easier to scale, test new ideas, and keep everyone from marketing to finance on the same page.

Why Alignment With Sales & Finance Is A Must

When your campaigns align with the business model, it’s easier to speak the language of the teams around you.

Sales wants to know where leads are coming from and how qualified they are. Finance wants to understand return on investment (ROI) by product line or geography.

Executives want to know if paid media is supporting growth in the right areas.

If your campaign structure mirrors the way they already think, the reporting becomes instantly more useful. You’ll spend less time explaining what a campaign does and more time discussing what it’s driving.

When performance is strong, it’s much easier to justify additional investment if you can show that spend ties directly to core business units or revenue goals.

Supporting PPC Structure With The Right Tools And Workflow

Having a smart structure on paper only goes so far. To actually execute and manage it day to day, you need systems that support clarity and consistency.

First, start with naming conventions. A standardized way of naming campaigns, ad groups, and assets helps everyone understand what each item is meant to do.

Include details like business unit, funnel stage, and region to keep things clean and scalable.

Then, align your conversion tracking setup with how the business defines success.

If you’re managing multiple product lines or customer types, don’t lump everything under one conversion goal. Set up separate conversion actions for each key area so you can measure impact more precisely.

Reporting also needs to reflect this structure. Build dashboards that slice performance by business unit, product, geography, or intent stage.

Whether you’re using Looker Studio or a different reporting suite, make sure the views match the way leadership wants to see results.

Don’t forget workflow tools and collaboration. Use shared documents or project management platforms to track which campaigns map to which business outcomes.

Make sure your internal stakeholders understand what each campaign is doing and why. This keeps cross-functional teams aligned and eliminates confusion about what paid media is actually delivering.

Finally, plan regular check-ins to ensure your structure still fits the evolving business.

As product lines shift or priorities change, your campaigns need to reflect that. Structure is not a “set it and forget it” task. Your PPC structure should evolve alongside your business.

It’s Time To Move Past Legacy Structures

Old habits die hard, especially if you’ve been in PPC for years. But, if your campaigns are still organized by match type or broad themes, you’re probably limiting what you can learn and what you can improve.

Campaigns should be built to reflect what matters most to the business.

If you’re not sure where to begin, talk to your sales or finance counterparts. They’ll give you a clearer picture of how the company thinks about performance, and you can structure campaigns to match.

This doesn’t mean throwing out everything you’ve built. But, it does mean stepping back and asking, “Does this structure actually help us measure success and allocate resources in a way that reflects how the business operates?”

If the answer is no, then it’s worth rethinking your setup.

When you take a top-down approach to structuring your campaigns, your PPC program becomes more than just a lead or sales generator. It becomes a strategic driver for the business.

More Resources:

• 9 Proven Ways To Improve Your PPC Campaign Performance
• Scaling PPC Campaigns Sustainably: Use The SCALE Framework To Move Beyond Actionism
• PPC Trends 2025

Featured Image: SvetaZi/Shutterstock

In an ever-increasing world of messy attribution – thanks to privacy law changes, differing platform conversion tracking methods, new sources emerging like AI, and even just continuing to deal with Google Analytics 4 – digital marketing and search key performance indicators (KPIs) can be tough to stand behind or have a lot of confidence in.

We have a lot of great third-party dashboard tools, reporting integrations, and software to help us.

Plus, there are custom routes for data visualization and APIs. Even if you’re a wizard with analytics and pulling it all together, there are still risks and challenges with marketing KPIs.

Whether you’re part of an in-house digital marketing team, an agency, or simply wearing a lot of hats – including digital marketing and analytics – leaving KPIs open to interpretation or not having a complete story to tell is a big risk.

Believing that digital marketing – specifically search marketing – is an investment that should yield returns, I’ve seen firsthand how things can go sideways when we can’t connect the dots between dollars spent and dollars earned.

I’m going to unpack several aspects of marketing versus business goals to help shed some light on how to get the best of both and get things in alignment.

Why Good Marketing Metrics Can Still Get You Fired

It wasn’t until I started writing my book a couple of years ago that I unpacked and started telling my personal story (one that goes back nearly two decades) about how I learned the hard way just how important this topic is.

In my first role as an agency SEO, one of my first clients was a local attorney. I put into practice a great SEO strategy, and after four months, we saw great rankings, increased traffic, and even conversions through web form submissions.

I was stoked going into my monthly reporting meeting with the client. Back then, my reports were generated by software and were pages long. I printed it on glossy paper, stapled it neatly, and got ready for the meeting.

When the client sat down, I walked him through page after page of green numbers and upward-trending graphs.

When I got to the end, there was silence. Then, the client shared that he knew I was working hard and had no problem with these metrics.

However, he hadn’t landed a single new client or case from all of this SEO work. Worse, his front-office staff spent a lot of time on the phone screening bad leads.

My stomach dropped.

That day, I learned the hard way: SEO KPIs don’t equal business goals or return on investment (ROI).

The good news is that I recovered from that, and it wasn’t the end of the client relationship.

However, I hope that gives you some context as to why, at least for lead generation, we can’t just stop at conversions or make dangerous assumptions that they are positively impacting the business.

I don’t want anyone blindsided by things that could have been prevented. That includes making assumptions that key stakeholders – or even those two or three levels removed – can connect the dots between marketing expenses or investments and actual returns.

Yes, some things in marketing are harder than others to quantify, such as branding and design projects. However, there should be a key metric somewhere that you can measure.

The KPI-ROI Disconnect

Starting “at the end” is a recommended approach for getting as deep into business metrics and mapping things out as possible.

Whether you do this during a broader strategy and planning process or you/your team have to do it ad hoc, it is worth doing.

Understanding the complete picture of how your organization (or client) makes money is key. Even in non-profits, this applies.

If you can get to the ultimate business metric that defines performance and success for your organization, then you have the opportunity to work backward from that to connect it to marketing based on the metrics along the way.

For some organizations, this is easy. For others, it’s a challenge, hitting roadblocks with getting the data, getting through silos, or getting a complete picture.

Examples of some of the business metrics that might be tracked include revenue, margin, lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, and some level of ROI (if not connected with margin metrics).

Those are not the most common metrics when it comes to digital marketing. Search and digital marketing metrics often translate to conversions, visits, clicks, click-through rates, return on ad spend (ROAS), and similar.

When you can map things out and see beyond the deepest digital marketing KPI to how it impacts the business metrics, you can get to a defensible and accountable position for the ROI of marketing versus leaving gaps or leaving it up to a “feel” test or someone else’s interpretation of success.

Bridging The Gap

Marketing and business teams need to align to ensure shared success.

At this point, if any of these points or scenarios resonate with you, you might wonder, “How did we even get here?”

That’s a question I’ve encountered personally and one I’ve helped coach through during my career. When there’s a gap or disconnect somewhere, it can often be traced back to one of these reasons:

• We didn’t start with a defined strategy and planning process.
• We didn’t loop stakeholders in the strategy/plan.
• We didn’t get new or changing stakeholders up to speed on digital marketing/search marketing strategies and plans.
• We inherited the ecosystem or plan.
• We didn’t challenge changes in expectations along the way.
• We encountered changes in tech (reporting, attribution, customer relationship management (CRM)) and didn’t adapt.
• We have too much on our plate already and not enough time.
• We don’t know how to navigate politics or the workings of the C-suite and other functions.

I could go on and build an even longer list, but it is too painful. My honest hope is that we can all continue to work to build bridges between functions.

Sometimes, it isn’t fun to step outside the search and digital marketing bubble, but at times, it is in our best interest – for us, our teams, and our organizations.

Gaps often exist due to ignorance, arrogance, people protecting their territory, or other factors. Unfortunately, closing them can be harder than doing the deep level of subject-matter expertise work that you are paid to do.

Finding common ground, aligning metrics at different levels, and getting consensus on what you’re doing – what it can impact and why it is important – are critical to avoid both the surprise “firings” or tough conversations that happen the longer things are not addressed.

Address The Gap Before It Hurts The Business

No matter the size or structure of a business or organization, gaps between digital marketing KPIs and business outcomes seem inevitable.

In some cases, things map out easily with just a little extra effort going beyond the digital marketing department or function – whether internal or as an external partner.

Regardless, getting fired or losing a contract over a KPI-business gap is extreme – the real risk and outcome we don’t want.

At the same time, we don’t want to spend our days dealing more with politics than SEO, paid search, or other digital marketing.

Recognizing gaps, addressing them, working as a team to link things up, and staying on the same page leads to respect, predictability, and a mindset shift – one where digital marketing is seen as an investment instead of an expense.

More Resources:

• The 9 Most Important SEO KPIs You Should Be Tracking
• 12 Essential Steps In Building A Winning SEO Strategy
• SEO Strategy: A Full Year Blueprint (+Template)

Featured Image: A9 STUDIO/Shutterstock