This might be one of my biggest marketing mistakes yet, and I want to share it because there’s an important lesson in it. For a long time, most of our traffic came inbound through SEO. We were getting 10's of thousands of organic clicks, and I also had an understanding of exactly which pages were driving qualified leads and which were simply generating traffic. Then, a little over a year ago, I noticed a major shift in the search results. AI Overviews were taking traffic away from top-of-funnel content, and within a few months, our organic traffic dropped by roughly 30%. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I told myself that a lot of our content wasn’t very good anyway. Some of it attracted the wrong audience, and SEO was changing, so I needed to focus on other acquisition channels. There was some truth to that story. But because part of it was true, I stopped questioning the rest of it. Fast-forward a year, and our organic traffic had fallen by around 70%. I was busy, so I still didn’t take the time to properly investigate it. I continued believing the same story: AI was taking the traffic. The content wasn’t great. SEO was becoming less valuable. It was time to move on. I finally decided to dig into the data because, despite the decline, we were starting to gain more visibility inside LLMs, and traditional search was still capable of creating value. What I found was difficult to admit. Yes, AI changed the search landscape. But I had also made some major technical SEO mistakes over the past year, particularly during our website migration away from WordPress. Had I caught and corrected those mistakes earlier, our organic traffic probably wouldn’t have taken nearly as large of a hit. The good news is that I’ve identified the problems and started working through plan to fix them. But the honest truth is that I screwed up. I created a story in my head, found enough evidence to support it, and then kept believing it... even while the data was trying to tell me something different.

The contact-information step is often where lead forms and funnels experience their biggest drop-off. Why? Because the moment someone is asked to enter their personal information, anxiety and uncertainty increase, especially when they don’t fully know or trust the company yet. In this video, I’ll show you a simple test you can run today to reduce that anxiety and potentially increase your conversion rate. Using LeadCapture’s AI CoPilot, I’ll demonstrate how to: • Add trust-building copy near your submit button • Explain exactly what happens after someone submits • Highlight benefits without adding unnecessary friction • Avoid privacy language that could accidentally create more anxiety • Launch an A/B test to measure the actual impact You don’t always need more traffic to generate more leads. Sometimes, a small improvement at the highest-friction point in your funnel can produce a meaningful lift. Run the test, review the data, and keep iterating. If it wins, you’ll generate more leads from the traffic you already have.

A few years back, watching a user scale from 1K leads/mo to 88K leads/mo in a very short time taught me something I didn't fully appreciate before. Growth doesn't mean problems go away. Problems multiply... and sometimes become harder. For example, when you're getting off the ground, the problems are the obvious ones. Conversion. Creative. Getting anyone to fill out the form at all. As you scale a completely different set takes over: 1) Ops. The manual steps that were fine at 1K/mo become a full-time job at 80K. 2) Lead quality. A few bad leads is noise early on. At volume, it's real money and real buyer/client relationships on the line. 3) Abuse. The bigger you get, the more of a target you become. Bots, junk, bad actors show up and hammer your pages. 4) Speed. At scale, every bit of latency from API responses to doing the actual work compounds across tens of thousands of leads. But with all that said... here's the part I've come to believe: These are the good problems. They're the ones you actually want, because you only get them if things are working. If you're wrestling with abuse and infrastructure and quality at volume, it means you made it past the point where most people stall out. BUT ... this is a big BUT.... They only stay good problems if your foundation can hold them. The best part of being on the other side of stories like this: everything these users hit at scale, we learned from and built back into what we're building at LeadCapture. So if you're building out a lead gen campaign... even if you're early on... I'd ask yourself one thing: When the good problems show up, is what I built ready to carry them? Because they're coming. That's the goal.

I've been testing ChatGPT ads over the last few weeks and here's how I feel. - HUGE Potential - ... BUT right now I'm giving it a big 👎 with the potential for it to switch to a 👍 What I found - Compared to Google paid search, the CPL is 2-4X lower... seems great, right? CPC is also about 2-4X lower - But most leads are low quality. Google paid search has produced actual revenue I'm having no issue getting traffic and clicks from ChatGPT ads, but here's the biggest problem. I have no idea what's driving the traffic and clicks. So I can't figure out how to improve lead quality to match my ICP. With google, I can open up a search term report and actually see and fine tune and optimize to bring down my CPL and bring up the ROAS. But with ChatGPT, I feel like I'm flying blind. So for now, I'm kinda of at a fork in the road. I want to continue with ChatGPT ads just because I think it's interesting. But at the same time, it feels like a distraction until they provide deeper insights and more views into what's driving clicks. So for now, I've paused and I plan to switch most of my focus back to Google (and eventually some Meta) while keeping at eye on their platform. I want to see if they develop it... or if it's just a money grab before they go public. I'm seeing a lot of hype from influencers out there, especially on YouTube, but the red flag for me is that these are the same people selling courses. I still think the potential is huge and we're going to keep building out tracking features for their platform, and that alone might drive me back. I'm really hoping they find a way to provide deeper insights soon. EDIT FOR ANYONE WHO DOES TEST IT Here's what someone suggested: "I think the easiest way to optimise might be to follow the old PPC SKAG model: make hundreds of ad groups, each with keyword-level instructions ("only conversations a{insert topic}"), state or city targeting, and specific ad copy, then tweak from there." This is something I did not consider. SKAGs for chatgpt ads. Pretty smart approach. You still have to trusted that their AI is delivering ads to the right people, but could be a good way to test.

I'm abut 3 days into running open AI Ads, following-up on this post https://www.skool.com/leadcapture/openai-chatgpt-ads?p=c07e98d2 and here's my experience so far 1) Very easy setup 2) Reminds me of a hybrid between Google paid search ads and Meta. 3) The review process is insane. All of my ads went through a review process. It took about 2-3 hours. They were running for about a day and then went back into review and have been stuck there for almost 24 hrs. Very weird but maybe there's a reasn. BTW - we now have a conversion tracking feature for chatgpt ads