Transcript
John: Hello, everyone. Thanks to everyone for coming and joining us today. We're excited to be digging into our 2026 marketing plans. I wish I had a fire that we are having with our fireside chat, but let's just pretend or get some fire emojis in the chat to make sure that we have some fire around this.
I do want to introduce everyone that we have on the call today. First, my name is John Paglio, the digital marketing manager here at flyte. I’ve been with flyte for almost 10 years now, spending most of my days lately focused on the measurement side of marketing. So I'll be covering those topics today as we talk through this.
I also have with me Rachel Burgard, who has literally been with us since the pandemic started. We actually hired her in January of 2020. What a wild time that was. I think Rachel was in our office for about a week before everything shut down and we went home. So she is our resident Google Ads expert here, and she has a lot of insight to give us as we head into 2026 with the Google Ads side of marketing.
And then lastly, I have Izzy Siedman with us. She is our SEO copywriter, who also loves running Meta ads. She's a wiz with words and loves using those 10 cent words that I typically don't understand.
There's a lot to unpack today in our mini marketing planning session that we have. We're going to talk through what's worked, what didn't work, what we're focusing on as we head into 2026. And of course, the elephant in the room, AI. AI has impacted everything in 2025, it's only going to be a bigger disruptor in 2026.
So let's just rip the Band-Aid off. Izzy, what do you see as a success with SEO in 2025?
Izzy: That is admittedly a pretty difficult question to answer. We'll hint at the AI impact now, but I'm sure we'll talk about it more later. We lost some visibility into our typical SEO strategies in 2025. But I think that maybe the biggest lesson learned, if not necessarily a success, is just remembering that SEO is about serving your user. Really honing in on what is useful, what is specific to your unique audience, and creating content or optimizing content around that, feels to me like the most solid ground to stand on among all of the changes that we've seen so far.
John: All right. Rachel, I'm just going to throw it right over to you now. What worked with Google Ads in 2025?
Rachel: Mine does loop into AI a little bit, too. But Performance Max, though it's been around for a little while, we really started diving into it. Because initially, there wasn't a ton of data around Performance Max and how well it worked for people, because it's a little bit elusive. But we did have some clients that had great success with it. I would even say the clients that we didn't have as much success, we learned a lot about Performance Max and who it works best for, and the signs of how you can spot that it's not necessarily working well. So I would consider all of that a success.
Izzy: Who does it work best for?
Rachel: We found that e-comm does well. Things like events, not so much, which isn't super surprising. But yeah, e-comm was great, it was definitely, yeah.
Izzy: When you have that really clear conversion.
Rachel: When you have that multi-platform exposure.
John: I mean, you're able to use all of the Google channels at that point, right? If you don't have a product that can go into the auction, you can't show you're missing a place right off the bat. And I think when P Max rolled out, it was actually like a shopping… like evolution of shopping.
Rachel: Yeah. Smart shopping all turned into Performance Max. Yeah. And you are able to run Performance Max exclusively as a shopping campaign, if you set it up properly.
John: Yeah. Would you say that you are mostly setting up shopping campaigns strictly P Max now, or is there still a way that you are using
Rachel: No. Initially, I think we have one client using standard shopping just because they didn't want to be showing on all platforms. They wanted traditional shopping ad placements that we knew where everything was going to be and how it was going to look. Where Performance Max, there's a little bit of a mystery there as to how things are going to show up.
John: And now I'm realizing as we're talking about P Max, probably not everyone is aware of what a P Max campaign is. Do you think you could talk to that a little bit?
Rachel: Yeah. It is a relatively new campaign type in the world of Google Ads. It shows your ads across all different platforms. It shows on… see, I'm not always good on the spot. I know these, but I'm just going to look up the list just to make sure I get them all.
They show on Search display, YouTube, Gmail, and Google's Discover feed. There's a lot of exposure. It tends to be best for people who don't necessarily have a lot of time to manage their ads. We do, but it also is helpful in other ways.
But if you're running your own ads, it can be great because they do a lot of AI-driven audience work and it tends to be really cost effective. A lot more exposure for a lot less money. It's multiple campaign types combined into one for the cost of one campaign.
John: And you're able just to give Google ads all the assets and the headlines, the descriptions, the products, the images, and just say, go use this in the best place possible. The best optimal place.
Rachel: Yeah. And the downside is that you have less creative control. There's a little bit less data than you normally get for a regular search campaign or a display campaign. So there's definitely some give and take to it. And you don't get as much control over your branding, and for some people, that’s a non-starter. It doesn't work for everybody, but for those it does work for, it has been really helpful.
Izzy: Yeah, it's good. I feel like 2025 was the year of these proprietary named AI-driven tools. So like on Meta we had Advantage Plus, which I actually think it came out before 2025. But it became fused throughout the platform in a lot of different ways. And very similarly, there were some elements of it that were really successful and some elements that just didn't seem to work. And there was a lot of experimenting going on this year.
I feel like Advantage Plus for four-year budget and your targeting can be really helpful because it's meant to do the same thing, maximize your reach with minimal touch points. So it's less work for, like you said, people who have maybe less time to spend managing their ads or less experience in the platform.
But I personally found that there were some features that still really bugged me. There's Advantage Plus creatives where it's like making images for you or writing copy. And it's improved since it started, but much of it still feels unbranded or just very average. So I think t you can use it in some ways, and some ways you shouldn't.
John: So would you say that Advantage Plus was something that worked in 2025 when it comes to Meta ads?
Izzy: Yeah. Similarly to Rachel, it worked for I would say awareness building campaigns, occasionally for traffic campaigns. I would not use it for conversions, any kind of website conversion event. I think that just needs a more specific touch on targeting. So if you have a small budget and you're just looking to build your brand, totally Advantage Plus was a success.
John: Now we've heard about success stories. Let's flip the script here and say what didn't work? Or what do we want to leave behind that maybe we were planting our flag on the top of the hill, let's say in June 2025. But now as we head into January 2026, we're like, what were we even thinking?
Rachel, Izzy, one of you two, whoever wants to jump in.
Izzy: I can think of something that, I don't know if I'm ready to completely leave it behind, but it does feel like there was a lot of hype at the beginning of the year and now that has calmed down, which is okay.
So to go back to SEO and AI things like the TXT files meant for LLMs, there's all of these little technical SEO tactics that have emerged in the last year that are supposed to get you more visibility on LLMs and yada. Which sounds really great in concept, but I've gotten the sense that it's a lot of repackaging of things that we're already doing. Make your website readable for robots, aka search engines and LLMs. Like, yeah, duh. We were already doing that. And adding a LLM.txt file isn't necessarily going to move the needle.
I guess my caveat is some of that stuff is still worth experimenting with, or it can be a good way to remind you of the best practices you should already be doing, but the like big hype around basically fancy new terminology for SEO was kind of a bust.
John: That would probably be the one thing I would leave behind when it comes to SEO is naming it something differently. I think like you said, when you boil it down, it's still SEO, it's still your best practices of what you're doing.
I think there are little ways, and we will talk about this coming up, but about how AI's impacted marketing strategy, and we'll get to that. But I do think there is some little things that you could be doing heading into 2026 with your website and your SEO as a whole that you could be doing.
But definitely I would leave behind all the acronyms that someone wants to come up with for SEO. I know that's not a tactic we're leaving behind, but I do think that's a good mindset to have about what we're leaving behind.
Izzy: Can I put the question on you, John, and say, is there anything, I don't know, in your dashboard builds or something that you would leave behind going forward?
Rachel: He didn't prepare for this.
John: I'm good at thinking on my feet like a cat.
Rachel: I was going to say, I can answer if you want.
John: No, I got it. No, I think it's a mindset shift. I think in 2025, maybe it was just for us here in Maine, but it's a mindset shift of what we're tracking and how we're getting that data. It's not just we're going to get every single number that means something to somebody and we're going to put it into a dashboard, and all of a sudden that dashboard is 5, 6, 7, 10, 12 pages long. So it's one of these things where creating better systems of getting data and understanding that it may not be the cleanest data in terms of telling the whole story, but us being able to tell 75% to 80% of that story with the data that we're pulling from different sections.
We're pulling some Facebook data, we're pulling some website data. We're even talking to a sales team and getting a sales team member involved in getting their data. So we're able to marry the themes of data together. Which is probably one thing that I'm leaving behind is I'm not doing as much data lift in a dashboard and I'm trying to really minimize the impact on the data that we're providing clients, and to ourselves as well.
Izzy: Simple and useful, over complete.
John: Yeah. For example, if we're running a Google Ads campaign for purchases, do impressions matter? Do impressions need to be in the main focus of the dashboard? Impressions have a place. They can be a guardrail to give Rachel insight of, is this performing well or not? But when I'm showing a client maybe a half of a page of a report, I want to be able to show them a full funnel approach, and impressions may be there, but it's not going to be a focal point for us.
Rachel: Yeah. I feel like that is a theme in general, is finding the sweet spot of the amount of data to provide clients and not to overwhelm them and confuse them. But also to make sure that it feels like they know what we're actually doing and what we're trying to accomplish.
Izzy: Sounds like you had an answer.
Rachel: Yeah, I do. I would say, again, this is one that, I don't know if this is like a universal thing or if it was just my sort of thought process. But there was a point where when I would create a campaign, I would use as many ad extensions – now assets – as possible, because that was the best practice initially when I had first started, was you just always add site links. It's silly not to use site links because they take up a lot of space. Your ad gets more real estate.
But if we're focused on conversions, why would I want additional links in my ad to bring users to a page that potentially doesn't have a conversion on it and it just draws them further away from the journey because I wanted more ad real estate on the search engine. So trying to focus more on what is actually useful with a little more intention rather than just adding things because we're supposed to add them.
John: It’s interesting. It's such an interesting insight because, call me old school, but I would always add every extension asset possible. Phone numbers, site links, not headlines, but call callouts, call structured snippets. There's a bunch of them, right? And the goal was always to take up as much real estate as possible.
But to think about, okay, now let's narrow it on where we want them to land. Definitely a good insight to have of saying okay, that's where I want to maybe focus efforts going into 2026. Have you found a reduction in click through rate or anything? Or is it still new to your repertoire to do that? Like you don't really have any data to back your decision up?
Rachel: It's more just a logical thing, honestly. If we're so focused on getting people to this place, why would we want to send them? And honestly, I can't back up that these are connected, but we have had really strong clickthrough rates in 2025. And I know it's been a trend outside, in general, that click-through rates are dropping a bit, but I mean, we had really great click-through rate numbers for a lot of our clients.
John: I was going to say, Rachel, you and I have been talking about this a lot. You and I have been sharing articles back and forth about how a lot of users are turning to the LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini, to ask these questions, these very rudimentary questions that might be higher up in the funnel, which is then freeing Google Ads budget.
So that could definitely be one of those trends where, the top of the funnel queries that are happening like, “how do I get this?” “where do I find this?” are now being asked in AI. Whereas now, people are doing a much deeper search of ‘brown leather boots’ on Google and then therefore now that ad is showing and people are converting from that ad.
Rachel: Yeah. That is true, we are getting less clicks for educational searches. Which for most of the time when you have a small business and a small budget or even a medium sized business in a medium sized budget, it's still a lot of times not what you want to focus on is that top of the funnel.
Unless maybe you're doing like a display campaign or something like that, you really want to go for bottom of the funnel. And yeah, I think that is the funny thing with the AI overview is it has actually helped – it hasn't helped everyone in a lot of ways…
John: It has also taken real estate too.
Rachel: Yeah, it's definitely, but we're not getting clicks as much for what is a X, Y, Z, which is not necessarily what we want to be drawing in.
John: And to bring it back to 2025 and what we're bringing into the new year. I think it's one of these collaborative approaches too, that we've talked about, the three of us, of saying can we use Meta as top of funnel?
We can still use Meta from a retargeting standpoint, but that can we then split our budgets to say, okay, I want to get top of funnel, brand awareness from my Meta ads, and now I want to get more consideration and conversion ads via Google. And then how do we make those work together? Not so much as in talking to each other or saying the same thing, but in a thought process within our marketing team of saying, okay, we're going to set aside funds to do brand awareness over here and then do set some funds and do some purchase campaigns over here.
Izzy, would you say that you've been doing more brand awareness type campaigns on Meta recently or in 2025?
Izzy: Yeah. I think it's one of those things that is really hard to convince clients of sometimes because you don't get a direct conversion from brand awareness ads.
John: And that's what we're all about.
Izzy: Yeah. We like to be able to show value. But multi-channel marketing, or in some cases omni-channel marketing, is absolutely becoming, I think, the maybe overarching direction of 2026. Where it's like, how does every different channel you're using work together? And that goes for UTMs in your data, right?
John: Oh, you’re speaking my language.
Izzy: That’s something where we're trying to combine our approaches. So it's like you have one big business objective, but we're using these different pieces to work towards it. And you want to be able to tell the story of how that goes. And even SEO, like maybe on Google Ads, if you're going after those educational keywords less, you might be going after them more with your organic strategy, for example. And then you could be getting citations in ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity and all that stuff, so that when they get to the conversion point in the journey and they are searching and a Google ad shows up, they're ready for that action. I don't know if that answers your question.
John: In short, yes. And I think like one of the things that I talk to a lot of clients about is you need to start at your business goal and reverse engineer it from there as a marketing goal. Just because your business goal is that you want to get more lead purchases, your marketing goal is now to do lead generation. And how do you do that lead generation? And then you have to break it down, right?
You have your phase one approach is Meta, and your phase two approach is Google ads. Maybe phase three is email marketing with a drip campaign, right? So you can't always rely on the business goal. The business goal is going to drive your marketing goals, but your marketing goal can never be end result unless you are an e-comm business. Because you can draw that line of saying, okay, I spent $1,500 on Facebook and I made $3,000 with purchases.
A lot of lead gen or B2B campaigns, you're not going to get to see that through line. And that's one of the harder things that you need to figure out, which is why we talk about, okay, what is marketing's job in this, right? What's marketing's job? What's lead, what's the sales team's job? What's the executive's job in all of this to get to that greater business goal? And I think that's sometimes where the disconnect happens with a lot of it.
Izzy: Yeah. Okay. So that brings up the age old question of, especially when you don't have an e-commerce going on, what are the KPIs that we should be looking at or that we want people to be looking at?
John: I think your classic marketing example, right? Or your marketing term, right? It depends. Like it depends on where you are in the funnel, right?
If we are doing some sort of brand awareness campaign, then those KPIs, those key performance indicators should be impressions, they should be reach, it should be video plays, right? Because if you think about it during that brand awareness phase, it's like going and buying a billboard. You can't buy a billboard here in Maine. So let's say you're on I95 in Massachusetts and you're buying that billboard space. You're spending $5,000 – $10,000 – probably way more than that, actually – on that billboard for a month or longer. Unless you have a QR code on that billboard, there's no way for you to track any of that.
And so we need to take that approach of, if I'm in the brand awareness phase of my campaign, whether it's a paid campaign, email campaign, whatever, those KPIs need to be just about how many people have I gotten in front of or have seen or opened what I've provided.
So really then, now you need to figure out what those KPIs, I don't think we're going to get into all the KPIs for every step of the funnel, but I think that's the mindset you need to take is what step of the funnel am I in or what I'm advertising or talking about, so then what are those KPIs that I need to measure?
Izzy: I've been thinking about it and struggling a little bit with the answer to that question for SEO. Because it used to be that the KPI for SEO was how much organic traffic you got. When you go into GA4 and your number one traffic source is Google organic, that means your SEO is working or being organic? Maybe not your number one source, but sure..
John: But top four.
Izzy: Yeah. And that's just not the case anymore. And that doesn't necessarily mean that SEO isn't working, because it's become so much more about like your holistic digital presence than it is just about where you rank on Google search.
And I don't know how true this is going to continue being, but from where I stand right now, I'm thinking that some of those KPIs for SEO in 2026 will be things like branded search impressions. So like how many people are looking for your specific business? Because that means that the work you've been doing to do brand awareness elsewhere, is going well.
And then that will, in all likelihood, translate into an increase in direct traffic, which we've always considered to be like the black hole. Oh my God, I don't know where those people came from. They're just in this big bucket together. But if it's because you've been doing a good job branding, your presence has increased on many different platforms, then yeah, they might be typing your URL directly into their browser and becoming a direct traffic hit. And so that, I don't know, I think that is what I'm thinking about for KPIs in 2026.
John: Yeah. And I would even go a step further in two different directions here. But in one direction, I would say looking at that direct traffic and maybe going back and then drilling deeper into the return rate of those direct users, if that return rate is 2.3, 2.4, 2.7, then I think it gives you a good inkling of, okay, people are coming back to the website and you can look at your conversion rate from direct traffic. So that is one way I would approach that aspect.
And then the second way would be, just because the search traffic from AI isn't necessarily trackable in terms of what prompts people are using, what's the conversation they're having? The LLMs have done a good job of UTM-ing that traffic coming back into your website. So you can track all of that AI traffic in your GA4 profile. So you could see what ChatGPT is sending you. You can see what Gemini is sending you, et cetera.
So while it's not an exact way to measure your SEO and your effectiveness of SEO, I think your SEO is a big reason why you are getting cited.
Izzy: Yeah. And sorry, this is a little bit of a tangent.
John: We are going down a tangent. It's okay. We'll get back to Google ads, don't worry.
Izzy: We don't know what people are asking specifically in ChatGPT, whatever. But I think that because we have that UTM tracking, when someone does arrive on your website, there are clues, especially looking at where they landed.
So I've noticed personally, looking at our client's data, that their blog content, if they have strong blogs, those tend to be really popular landing pages for users who have come from an LLM. And I think that is a great clue as to what kind of information they were searching for in that chat.
And so it's not as direct as, here's your keyword and then they did this, but it can still give us an idea of what are people using these platforms to look for, and how can we serve it to them as easily as possible?
John: All right. That was a big tangent.
Rachel: I was just going to say that has been really surprising. Like one client in particular, a financial advisor, they ask where everyone found them. And like a large chunk are now saying from ChatGPT, which is not what I necessarily would've thought.
Izzy: I know. It still surprises me when that happens.
John: Yeah. Even Rich has said a few of our leads have come from Microsoft Co-pilot, and we're like, okay.
John: Yeah, we just assume ChatGPT or Gemini might be one too, but there are people out there who are using Co-pilot or there's a bunch of LLMs sprouting up from every which way.
John: All right. We've talked about AI a lot. So let's just keep rolling with it. But really the question becomes, how does AI in general impact marketing strategy going forward? So that's from a Google ad standpoint, an SEO standpoint, Meta ads standpoint. Like how are you integrating it with what you're doing on a day-to-day basis?
And then we've already mentioned how Google has introduced Performance Max, which is an AI algorithm type thing, and Advantage Plus, which is an AI with Meta. But are there other aspects to tools that you're using? So it's a two-pronged question of like, how does it impact your day-to-day of what you're doing, and what tools or inside certain tools do you see it helping as well?
Rachel: I think, again, Performance Max has been such a huge a huge platform for AI content on Google ads. A lot of audience creation, audience data that is pretty big. We're moving a little further away from just specifically focusing on keywords and focusing on audience signals that you give to Google.
I would say that's probably the biggest way, and then it depends also what kind of business you are. Because for e-commerce, there's now a ton of opportunity to use AI creatively in a way that is safer than just generating an entire image, but taking maybe less than ideal product images and removing the background or adding a new background in.
Not a ton of our clients have used that yet, because a lot of them happen to have pretty stellar creatives and photographs of their products.
John: They just released Nano Banana. And, spoiler, we're pre-recording this because of the holidays and we have employee evaluations, we have a bunch of stuff happening in December, so we're prerecording this.
So Nano Banana just got released into the Google Ads asset library like two days ago. So you know, to your point Rachel, it's giving the users… and what Nano Banana is, is it's Gemini's image generation. And apparently, it's like the strongest image generator out there right now, from what I've read.
Izzy: Yeah. I just used it this morning to make an ad.
John: Oh, perfect. Yeah, so it's one of those things where it's taking the background, making those product photos look better. Yeah. It's definitely one of those tools.
But Rachel, one thing that you've been doing that we've talked about, is you've been going to ChatGPT to talk about audiences and what signals you should be creating, right?
Rachel: Yeah.
John: Can you walk us through that? I tee’d you up there.
Rachel: Yeah, just asking about giving a lot of information of what's on the website, who we're going after, and it's just like a brainstorming session, basically, just with someone who's a little bit more well informed than you are. Yeah, that has been super helpful. Yeah, just using LLMs in general just for idea generation and inspiration has been really, that has been super helpful.
John: Has it gotten better at all with character count?
Rachel: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, it has for me a lot. They actually are giving me the right…
Izzy: Yeah. Maybe it's just because I gave up and haven't used it for that.
Rachel: But yeah, like if we're talking about AI in that capacity, for sure. Just idea generation has been really helpful. Just having another person basically to kind of bounce ideas off of.
You never really want to use anything a hundred percent, like just input something and take everything that it has given you. That tends to be a little generic and there's a lot of problems there. But just to have an extra brain, basically. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
John: And it can be a sounding board too, at what I've found.
Izzy: Yeah. I want to take bets on how long we think it's going to be before there are ads inside of LLMs.
John: They've already started to sneak in, like I know with ChatGPT’s Atlas, so their browser that they've released, apparently ads are starting to show up there. I think ads are starting to get sprinkled into the mix of LLMs, but I wonder. It won't be long. Let's be real.
Izzy: It's so funny to me, it's like fashion. Rachel and I talk about this all the time. Everything goes through a cycle. John, I think you've been wearing the same outfit for your whole life.
John: No way. This is a different hat every day.
Izzy: This was John's formal outfit for the webinar, but it feels weird that the stuff that was popular in the 2000’s is coming back again. And it feels a little bit like that's what's happening with LLMs in some ways. They're just becoming more similar to what a search engine used to do. Provide you with different sources of information, show you some ads, give you some answers in different formats.
John: Yeah. I think it also is going to disrupt the buying cycle for everything as well. Like people are going to start to turn to LLM and basically book their entire trip with an LLM. They can have the LLM buy their plane tickets, buy their hotel tickets, personal assistant, buy all their attractions, when they're traveling someplace.
And shopping ads could probably start, I think you can already start buying right from LLMs, I believe. So all of these things, you're just going to have to do it all in one place. Whereas like Google is like, you can start here, but then go elsewhere to do it.
Izzy: Is it N8N that you can create automated processes?
John: N8N, yeah. Yeah. There's a bunch of those systems out there.
Izzy: I was thinking about this the other day. Could I make an N8N that would monitor all the things on my Christmas list and automatically buy them when they have the biggest sale or something?
Rachel: Probably, yeah. I'm sure we're not far from that, if that's not already possible.
Izzy: I'm sure it's possible. I just don't have the time or energy to do it.
John: All right. So SEO-wise and AI, we've already talked about it through this whole thing, but is there anything day to day that is making it easier for you to do SEO or some tasks? Not easier, but just more time efficient.
Izzy: Especially for our clients who are in really niche industries, I've found AI to be really helpful in getting started on keyword research. It will never be as accurate as a platform like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner or Moz, because it just doesn't have data on how many people are searching for it ad where, and the exact phrasing.
But when I'm getting started on a new project, it is really good at giving me ideas for topics and subtopics related to the original industry or business model that I, as a human being with limited knowledge, just might not have thought of. And then I can take those, I guess what I'm calling them are like semantic keywords. Like they're related, but they're not necessarily a key word in the traditional sense. So take that from ChatGPT or whatever, and bring it back to my research platform to then narrow down to what are the actual targets that I'm going after.
John: Are there any tools that you're using? Obviously, we use Ahrefs here for all of our SEO work, but are there any AI tools that you're working on integrating within your SEO or copywriting even that you do?
Izzy: Yeah. I'm a creature of habit. I like ChatGPT. It's the first one that I used, and it's the one that I use the most often.
But a lot of the other tools have had AI integrated elements to them came out with an AI writing assistant that I actually think is really useful. It will tell you keyword frequency of use, related terms that you haven't incorporated yet, all based on what your target is and what the current SERP landscape looks like. So that is a useful writing tool if SEO is your goal.
John: Now Rich Brooks, our president, all in on AI. He talks a lot about AI assistants in building those custom GPTs or Gems. Are either of you two building those AI assistants for what you're doing currently, or do you plan on doing it in 2026?
Rachel: I do plan to. I haven't been quite yet. I'm still doing just individual prompts each time.
Izzy: I have one or two very basic custom GPTs that's really about teaching it who an individual client is and who their ideal buyer persona is. And then being able to use that to ask for individual tasks within the chat. But I would say that's still, it's like level 1.1.
John: Yeah, it’s definitely not your beginner level AI usage. Personally, I don't want to flex or anything, but I have a client who writes blogs weekly. We are sending emails out weekly. So from a time efficient standpoint, I've actually built an AI assistant where I take the blog and I drop it in, and within the instructions, it has their voice, it has their brand guide, it has the instructions on I want subject lines that vary in psychology. I want you to write an opening paragraph. I want you to write a paragraph for this section and that section, a little more detailed, right? And then it just spits it all out and I tweak it as I go. And I would say it's probably saved me 15-20 minutes every week.
Again, it's not a lot, right? But it adds up over time. And then the more I learn about that, you can then roll it out to other clients doing other things. And obviously those brand voice documents, the client persona documents change client to client, and it's just helping that AI assistant learn better. And then you can actually have back and forth conversations with it. You can ask them questions. They could ask you questions.
And it's crazy how smart they can get because I'll be just talking to that assistant and then that assistant will be like, “Do you want me to draft this message to client name and client name?” And I'm like, oh wow, I didn't even say their name in this chat, but I may have said it in a different chat, and it picks up and it has that remembering of what we've talked about somewhere else, which is pretty cool in my opinion.
Izzy: I feel like at the start of 2025, there was all this messaging like, hey, it is going to make it faster and easier and more efficient. And maybe the biggest lesson learned is that at the beginning, that is not true. Like it's more work to get it set up and build that momentum. But then once you have all those tools in place, that's where the long-term efficiency gains start actually coming back to you.
Rachel: And I think it's just about even without building something, if you're not building a custom prompt or anything like that, even just you learning what it absolutely responds to, how it's going to respond to certain things. I feel like that has just, you can't really expedite that, that has taken me like a year to really figure out the best way to phrase things, what to qualify and say, don't give me this kind of information.
Izzy: No! Save the m-dash.
Rachel: I do love them, but now I don't want to use them because I don't want everyone to think that I'm using You're ChatGPT to respond to them.
Another way that, I wasn't even thinking about this, but where you were talking about audience data. I had a little bit of a brain short circuit for a second, but I have in the past uploaded a search term report with however long, six months to a year, of search terms, and had Google identify patterns from that, identify what they would assume the demographics are of those people, giving ideas for audience segments based on those search terms. So that has been, I want to do that a little more in 2026 because I just started experimenting with that.
John: That's really cool.
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty smart.
John: Yeah, no, way too smart. With the essence of time, I want to make sure that there's some questions and answers here, but everyone's prepared a little bit of an elevator pitch for going into 2026, so I feel like we're all going to talk about those. And then, like I said, we'll go into questions after that.
I'm happy to start. I'll pass the buck, but where I see measurement in 2026 is all about clarity, alignment, and action. I believe measurement is not about more dashboards, it's about decisions with tighter budgets and smarter users.
Every campaign needs a clear success metric before it ships. Vanity metrics are out for the most part. What matters are revenue driving KPIs tied to business goals, meaningful behavior signals from GA4 and your site, and then cross team visibility. So marketing, sales, your product team if your e-comm, act on the same truths, the teams winning right now are not guessing. They build measurement into strategies from day one. So that's really my elevator pitch when it comes to measurement.
Rachel, do you want to take a stab at your Google ads elevator pitch?
Rachel: Will you do yours, Izzy, actually? Because mine is still old. I meant to update mine.
Izzy: Yeah. We've said it plenty of times in this conversation alone, and we'll continue to say it in 2026, but AI is here to stay. And more than just those new tools that are emerging, the way that search engines themselves rank and serve content is changing. If you haven't already noticed, that probably means there's a bit of a disheartening impact on your organic traffic. But… big ‘but’ that doesn't spell the end for SEO. SEO is not dead, in my personal opinion. And hopefully, everyone else here today agrees.
John: I agree. Not dead.
Izzy: I think the key is that SEO and content marketing in 2026 will be about finding ways to distinguish your business from all of the AI, I believe ‘swap’ is the latest term. Shifting how we measure that organic growth, like what I was talking about with brand awareness and direct traffic earlier. Making space for experimentation even on things that may later come up as silly, like LLM.txt files. And expanding the purview of what we think of as SEO beyond owned sources like your website, to more holistically manage that digital presence overall.
John: That was more like a stairwell pitch. Just kidding. It's fine. Izzy is just always long-winded, and I always like to give her some crap for it. But it's always, it's always great.
Izzy: It’s always those 10 cents words.
Rachel: I was going to say, there's never any fluff or irrelevant information. It's always very important.
John: Very true. Alright, Rachel, you're up.
Rachel: Google Ads in 2026 is no longer about micromanaging keywords. It's about orchestrating the partnership between AI automation and human strategy. As Google shifts shifts towards AI driven signals, brands that win will feed the machine with strong first party data, authentic creative – which these things we didn't even end up talking about – and a diversified library of high-quality assets that can power everything from conversational search results to immersive visual formats.
So the sun setting of third-party cookies isn't a setback, it's a forcing function to build smarter data systems, more human-centered content, and tighter alignment between media creative and CRO.
John: Conversion rate optimization, for everyone who doesn't know that acronym.
Rachel: Which we should add to our glossary.
John: Our flyte new media glossary. Absolutely.
Rachel: Link in bio, by the way.
Izzy: If you ever can't interpret any of the words that we're saying, go visit the dictionary.
John: Can I get an Izzy dictionary, while we're at it?
Rachel: Oh, I would love that.
Izzy: There's one on my shelf in my office.
John: Perfect. I'll use it. All right, as I mentioned earlier, we prerecorded this so we're going to do a quick outfit change and then we'll take some questions. So I'm going to say thank you. Now, I'll probably say thank you after this, but thank you everyone for joining us.
Rachel: We have to time travel.
John: I know. And we're going to jump to December 4th at whatever time it is, because I forget, and we'll chat with you there. Thanks everyone for attending.