Matt Bertram, Head of Digital Strategy at EWR Digital and seasoned Fractional CMO, breaks down why traditional digital marketing metrics no longer tell the whole story and how a new, AI-fueled game is emerging.
Is your marketing team still measuring success the old way?
In this episode, Matt Bertram, Head of Digital Strategy at EWR Digital, fractional CMO, and podcaster, shares how the digital landscape is shifting beneath our feet. Traffic is down. Impressions are up. Buyers are more informed than ever — but most of the buying journey now happens before anyone lands on your website.
Sara and Matt dig into how AI, off-page search behavior, and frictionless web experiences are changing the rules of digital strategy. They also explore why it’s time to retire outdated KPIs and focus on building brand equity, not just lead funnels.
Matt:
“They're true buyers if they're coming to your website because 75% of search is happening before it even gets to your website. So, your digital PR needs to be strong.”
Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Matt: linkedin.com/in/mattbertramlive
Listen to The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing
Listen to Oil & Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast
Learn more about Progress: progress.com
Timestamps:
00:30 – Changing Landscape of Search
02:20 – Adapting to New KPIs and Metrics
03:10 – The Role of AI in Digital Strategy
09:35 – Navigating Negative SEO
12:40 – Inspiration for Martech Insights
0:00:00.2 Sara Faatz: I'm Sarah Fatz. I lead community and awareness at Progress, and this is 10 Minute Martech.
0:00:05.1 Matt Bertram: People are kind of still playing the old game, and there's a new game that you have to be playing. Like, there's no silver bullets, and we have to look at KPIs in a different way.
0:00:14.9 Sara Faatz: That's Matt Bertram, head of digital strategy at EWR Digital, a fractional CMO, and podcaster. Let's get started. Matt, thank you for being here. So excited to talk to you. I know that you have some strong opinions about things like fractional search. What is keeping you up at night right now?
0:00:41.8 Matt Bertram: Well, search, like you said, is fracturing, and people's attention is going everywhere. So that top of the funnel, where traditionally it might be Google, of where they would do research, is fanning out. It's all over the place. So we're seeing a huge rise in Reddit and Quora and just intent-based searches. We're seeing Google really doubling down on YouTube. We were talking in the pre-interview about how you have to wear a lot of hats, and you really do. You've got to be everywhere. If you're reaching the LLMs, ChatGBT or OpenAI is trying to become Google faster than Google's trying to become ChatGBT or whatever.
0:01:23.3 Matt Bertram: And you've got to be speaking to the LLMs. And things continue to change. And when you look at search, because of the zero searches, the AIO reviews, everything's dropped. Like, search on average across the board, when we look at our clients, conversions are still high, impressions are growing, traffic 40% to 60% down. And traffic used to be a measurement metric that we've drilled into everybody's heads. Hey, where's the traffic? How are you ranking? Now, there is some hope, and there's some correlation between what shows up in the LLMs to where you rank in Google. And through RAG, it's grabbing still from Google. That was a big question. Is it generating the answer and then trying to verify it or vice versa? And it is using the corpus of information mainly of Google. But now there's so many more different things that you have to do to achieve the same goal because people are searching everywhere. And so I don't think that that calibration has translated all the way through. People are still playing the old game, and there's a new game that you have to be playing. That's definitely keeping me up at night, is it's constantly evolving, it's constantly changing, and we're building out new KPIs and new metrics to target that, and then really it's about communicating that through to the clients and going, hey, we got to build a brand here. Like, there's no silver bullets, and we have to look at KPIs in a different way. And so, there's this kind of evolution of where things are going, and AI is underpinning everything that we're doing.
0:02:59.8 Sara Faatz: Yeah. Well, and I guess my question to you is, what advice do you give to your clients right now who are saying, hey, I used to measure traffic? What are you telling people today? Like, is it a combination of impressions and conversions, and how do they know that what they're doing is actually driving all of that?
0:03:18.9 Matt Bertram: I think that taking that data and utilizing AI as far as like uploading that data to help process it, to give you insights, is one of the places I would start. Also, I'm seeing across the board webmasters and hosting companies are blocking all these IPs because there's so many attacks that are happening right now, and these LLMs are using rotating and not static IP addresses. And so, it's very difficult. You got to do it on a website-by-website basis to basically whitelist all these different bots, because if you're blocking the bots, it's not going to show up in the search. And there's this evolution right now of a lot of different tools trying to tackle it, but you kind of got to piece it together right now from a number of different sources, but figure out how you're showing up with the LLMs. And again, there's this association with brand and where you're landing on a vector basis based on the entity. So, I think entity SEO or entity associations on the knowledge graph are where things are going.
0:04:37.0 Matt Bertram: And so, you got to make sure that your entire funnel is set up properly. You got to make sure that you're retargeting on multiple platforms. It's a pendulum, and it goes back, and you got to start with the foundational stuff and keep building on there, but you got to take it back to the beginning, break everything down, look at your target personas, look at your customer journey, make sure that that's mapped correctly. Use AI to get insights to then build those steps and make sure you're meeting all those things. I also think that competitive metrics, like when I'm talking to CMOs, looking at scorecards, we built some analytics scorecard dashboards that, how are you doing versus the competition? So, you want to be looking at everything holistically and from a 360 platform and to figure out where your gaps are. Having all those analytics at your fingertips is really, really important. So, we're saying, hey, do you have an exit pop-up? Are you heat mapping? Where are people getting stuck in your content? Are you making sure that you're answering the questions? So, even what I'm seeing with the LLMs is a lot of people have not focused as much on transactional content off-page, okay?
0:05:50.8 Sara Faatz: Yep.
0:05:51.9 Matt Bertram: So why someone should hire from you. That's what the LLMs want to know is when people are in that decision-making part of the process, they've not come to your website, and it's not at the beginning of the website, and they're coming back to the website and looking at it. All of that's happening off-page. When they're coming to your website, they're pretty much narrowing it down, verifying a few things, but they're looking to buy. That's what I'm seeing, right? Less traffic, more informed, more accurate, but very, very transactional. And so, you've got to decrease that friction, and you've got to get their information and follow up with them because they're true buyers if they're actually coming to your website because all that search is happening off-page. So, that reorients the definitions of SEOs and digital strategy of what you're trying to do is, okay, yes, the site's got to load really quickly, and it's got to be low-friction and convert, but man, 75% of that stuff is happening before it even gets to your website. So, your digital PR needs to be strong.
0:06:56.9 Sara Faatz: There's been a debate in the digital marketing side for a while about whether or not content should still be gated. Do you think in this new era that that changes the conversation in any way, shape, or form? Should people be gating content on their site, or does it go back to the comment you just made, which is let's make this as friction-free as possible?
0:07:18.7 Matt Bertram: The barometer of what you're doing or what you're delivering or what people are willing to exchange stuff for has gone up. So it has to be super valuable that they would typically pay for it. I'll just give you my email and stuff that is just like, oh, that would be nice to have. You should give that away for free. I still think people need to build out the middle of their funnel, and I think a lot of that messy middle that sometimes you hear in conversations is because that's not structured tight enough. I do like the idea of getting people into webinars, for example, getting them where there's some education-based component and you're building some rapport. One of the things, a framework that we use that is a Google study, is 7-11-4. We did talk about this.
0:08:11.9 Sara Faatz: Yeah.
0:08:14.3 Matt Bertram: Seven hours of content consumption, seeing your brand, logo, whatever, like association with your company, 11 times on four different channels. So giving away content to help them consume that content to try to, when you're building that customer journey, get them to seven hours. You should also give away the best stuff, right? Give it away in shorts, hook people into snacks or 15-minute clips or even longer clips, and then drive them into true engagement or a customer platform walkthrough or whatever you're selling. But I personally think that there is absolutely a place for that. Now, we talk again in another six months. Who knows how search changes because Google has just said, hey, we're going AI mode on all search. And even Google is looking to replace Amazon in the buying side of things, on the e-commerce side of things, without even going to Amazon to buy it. Like they're going directly at that. They're saying, hey, this is where you started the search. We'll take you all the way through the process and we'll help you buy here. So in that environment, you might not even have a chance to get it downloadable based on the new customer journey.
0:09:33.1 Sara Faatz: Yeah. I think that there's some fear, trepidation by practitioners saying, okay, I don't know, I can't control this anymore. I had a playbook, I knew what I was supposed to do. You've mentioned you're seeing some people maybe fall into some bad behavior. Talk to me a little bit about that and maybe share a little bit about what that is that you were seeing.
0:09:57.2 Matt Bertram: It depends what your definition of negative SEO is. Because I'll tell you right now, for a couple of our clients, we're helping them monitor responses, like quick time responses, if a sales lead comes in. So we see what their leads are, and there's a lot of spam that's coming in, which that's also something that could take people away from focusing on their business. If someone keeps sending you fake leads that you're responding to, or for a different industry, it takes you away from focusing on what you need to do. So it's just a distraction. But I've seen people start offering packages of negative SEO to basically say, well, we don't know how to make us rank better, and that's too difficult, so let's just tear down everybody else around us. And we have multiple clients in competitive industries that are all getting attacked.
0:10:54.0 Matt Bertram: So I would tell you the negative SEO attacks, and it may not just be from bad actors in our space. And it could be geopolitical, it could be a lot of different things of things that are happening. But I've seen in spades when you're in very competitive industries, there are groupings where you can build out. And I don't want to go into details, give anybody any ideas, but essentially we're working with a law firm right now and sending takedown orders where getting people listed on different sites, and they're grouping multiple competitors so we know, okay, well, if everybody's grouped on this page, that's really poor quality SEO. So just think about it like if over time, if someone's doing something that looks like really just badly executed SEO, and you're not monitoring for that and responding to Google saying, hey, this is not me, this is not us, I don't want to be associated with it. Over a certain amount of time, the algorithm is going to say, well, this is you, and we're going to penalize you for it.
0:11:58.4 Matt Bertram: And once that penalty happens, whether it's algorithmic or it's a physical penalty by somebody looking at the site and giving it to you, it is extremely hard to untangle it. And there's different levels of access that you need to have to be able to reach the right people at these platforms to actually have them look at it and roll it back or whitelist it for you. And so we've actually gone the route of working with a couple different law firms to actually strip away people that are hiding some of these websites and what they're doing and going after them directly. And so what I am going to continue to see, I believe, is this bifurcation of companies that are figuring it out and are addressing it and are doing all the things they needed to draw in. And even if the market's shrinking and economy's down or whatever is happening with tariffs, they're going to dominate because they're going to get more market share and a lot of companies are going to get left behind. Like I said, you've got to be playing the new game and not the old game.
0:13:03.9 Sara Faatz: Yeah, no. Excellent advice. Great. Two last questions for you. Who do you follow for inspiration or information and what is your Martech hot take?
0:13:13.1 Matt Bertram: What I'm looking at right now is agentic AI workflows. That's where my attention is being focused. There is a guy out there by the name Dale Bertrand. And Spark and Fire, I think, is his company. And some of the stuff he's doing is just absolutely next level. I also listen to some major CEOs of what they're saying. The head of Fiverr, he puts out some fantastic stuff. I can tell you Gary Vanderchuck, if you're not following him, I'm sure people have mentioned him. He has a really good take on what's happening. And if you don't mind the cussing, I think he's calmed down a little bit. It depends where you are on the spectrum of what you need for what. But yeah, that's where I would start. Tanya Wolf is great as well.
0:14:15.7 Matt Bertram: And then my hot take on Martech is, I think that SaaS companies are really trying to incorporate these AI tools very, very quickly because you can now build some of these tools in an afternoon through Vibe Coding. And we've built a couple SaaS solutions that are customized for solutions we have. Now, I think Microsoft and Copilot have integrated that in and a lot of people are thinking, hey, I'm using AI, but that's just touching the surface, okay? And I'm seeing a lot of these tools repackage not even really tuned LLMs with what they're offering. But Martech's a zoo right now with all these new tools and what you need and you can build your own and we're going to build a custom solution in-house. So I think that that market is probably the next big market to be turned over just like SEO was just like the whole cart was flipped.
0:15:24.1 Sara Faatz: Awesome. Thank you so much, Matt. This has been a really great conversation and I really enjoyed our time together today.
0:15:29.9 Matt Bertram: Well, appreciate it so much. Thanks for having me on.
0:15:34.1 Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. To never miss an episode, make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.