Rand Fishkin on the evolution of digital marketing:

Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last twenty years is ending. I’m serious. I believe that Rand in 2010 would have told you that digital marketing was all about being able to track every view and every click, so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them, is wrong today. Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. That’s because clicks are dying and attribution is dying. There’s only one way forward.

A 7 minutes video, with transcript, is available here.

Yes, he’s stating the obvious in some ways, but it’s his job to spread the word to the masses, and he’s been doing that for quite a long time. I remember seeing him on stage in San Marino many years ago when his gospel was about SEO, SERP attribution, and traceability. I am glad to find that he’s still on the go.

My colleague Stefano correctly points out that Rand’s final advice on moving where the public is today is sound and reasonable, but it is nothing new. It’s always been about that. In 2014, we went to Google AdWords and the likes because that’s where the public was back then. In the 2020s, the public has flocked to platforms’ walled gardens and digital marketers follow the herd, like a pack of wolves.