Zapier's traffic jump to 6.3 Million visits, $800M expansion halted by AI, Klarna AI, and more

Did you see Zapier's traffic jump from 1.2 million to 6.3 million monthly visits from SEO? Did you see that?

No, what did they do? They just created a ton of pages on the zaps? They've had that for a while though.

They've done that. So they're pretty good at programmatic SEO. But I looked at their Ahrefs. So in Ahrefs, by the way, Ahrefs isn't sponsoring this, but they have a site structure section. I don't know if you've ever clicked on this.

Okay.

But it's fairly new, it seems. So I clicked on their site structure section after looking at this tweet. And they basically added a lot of international pages. So French, Spanish, Dutch, right? And so that added a bunch of traffic, but there's also a lot of programmatic content they're creating, like, you know, AI templates and things like that. So they've been pretty on top of it. I'm going to click on this tweet over here just so everyone can see it.

The globalization, I've been talking about that for years. You know, it's worked. I've been running that playbook for more than 6, 7 years now.

What percent of your traffic comes from global? Like the international pages you made, the translations? Because that's what they did, translations.

Oh, like 80+%. Yeah, it's a lot.

Okay, so check this out. I'm looking at it right now.

Template-based pages, we've done that a lot too in the past. We don't do it anymore. Most of those template-based pages like AI templates or whatnot, you can increase your visitor count, but the visitor count to sales count when you just create a lot of pages that aren't necessarily like exactly what you do, You don't get tons of conversions, you just get extra traffic with no extra revenue.

So get this, I didn't, I didn't say this part, but they— this is genius. They got so lucky they ranked for this. So they rank for how to use ChatGPT, and that drives right now, that drives about 1.1 million visits per month. And how does ChatGPT work? 300,000 visits a month. Best AI chatbot, 263,000 visits.

Okay, but check all this out. You're talking about ChatGPT. Do you think any of this is going to convert into real revenue for Zapier?

I think it might. Because it's like, because they have all these ChatGPT workflows on how it ties into like, you can do this because they have that little AI prompter, right? It's like, hey, connect my, my Google, my Google this with like that, right? Using ChatGPT.

Do they connect anything with ChatGPT to something else? Yes.

So it actually feeds in well because then you have a product like Growth Motion with the blog content and it probably converts well.

I actually don't think it converts well. I think the content that converts well for them is Mailchimp to WordPress integration. I think that—

I bet you that converts better.

Yes, that converts. I'm not saying from these type of posts like, how does ChatGPT work, they're not getting any conversions. But I bet you this increase in traffic from those kind of pages isn't even, like, let's say if that makes up 20% of their traffic now, I bet you it doesn't even account for 5% of their new monthly signups. I bet you it's lower than 5%.

How well did these pages— I'm sending this to the Zapier CEO right now.

Yeah.

What was your last question that you just asked?

I bet you it's less than 5%, all these pages. I'm saying they make up, call it 20% of their traffic. Because one's at 1 million, you add in a few more, you get to 20% really quickly, if not more than 20% on these how ChatGPT type articles work. I bet you it drives less than 5% of their revenue.

So I said, Neil Patel and I are betting. And I said, if I lose, I will never marry someone. So that's what I said. Anyway, let's continue here.

By the way, if you want to date Eric, he's single. Go DM him on Instagram.

If you can find me.

But— Eric O. Siu, isn't that your Instagram?

It is. It is. Well, thank you. But so anyway, I found that to be interesting. We'll know the metrics. I think Wade will probably respond to me. So he's as happy as you. So stick— stay tuned. Tell all your friends about this. In the next couple of episodes, we'll probably be able to get the answer on this.

Dude, I'm telling you, I could talk about how we can help companies with their Discord marketing. We used to rank for Discord on Google on page 1. Guess what it did for us? Drove zero revenue. Like, we've had a lot of generic— Dude, I rank for like how to get more Instagram followers, how to get more engagement on Instagram and all these keywords. We help a lot of companies with their social media marketing. It doesn't drive much revenue at all.

By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Dude, This guy Wade, I'm sure if you listen to this, Wade, he deleted his wade.foster@zapier. Now I have to email wade@zapier. Anyway, so I believe they convert less than 5%, but—

I bet you it's way less than that. It's just too generic.

I think its highest is 1%, probably.

Because if you look at the articles, what was the one, 1.1? It's not even related to Zapier.

It's just how to use ChatGPT.

Yes. Most people would—

It's more informational search.

Don't have a business. If I had to really guess, I'm doing 5% to be conservative because I'm like 99.999% sure it's under that. If I had to really guess, I bet you it drives less than 1% of their new monthly signups.

That's exactly what I just said. But the internationalization, I bet you converts pretty well.

Internationalization converts really well. I've been running that playbook for 7+ years.

And now, now, now we just uncovered another one. So go do internationalization, especially with all the AI stuff going on.

So yeah, but what people get wrong with the internationalization They just go to ChatGPT and they translate their content. You got to transcribe it. So if ChatGPT translates your content, you got to actually do keyword research within those regions and adjust based on what's popular within those regions. And you got to adjust the content to work for them culturally. And then if you post it, you'll do much better. You still got to build links. You still got to get awareness in those local regions. You can do that from conferences, advertising, whatever you want to end up doing. It works, but if you miss those few steps that I talked about and if you don't use hreflang, it just doesn't work.

And didn't you create a fat resource on this?

No, you didn't.

I did.

I have tons of resources on going international. I started blogging about it so heavily when I was doing it because my traffic was just going through the roof. But what was funny is very few people actually do it.

Actually did it, yeah.

But it's perfect for our agency because where we are, we focus mainly on enterprise. It gets us amazing enterprise clients who are global and have issues. You know why we're so open to sharing everything?

with everyone, it's because we know that less than 1% of people are going to do something about it.

It's more like less than 0.1% are even going to do it. I know this sounds bad, but like, look, by us giving away everything for free, we're getting notoriety for it. We get branding from it. We get followers from it. It drives us leads. And it actually doesn't create that much competition. The revenue outweighs the extra competition we're getting.

I talked about this with my team. We're having lunch at Eataly, right? And then I was like, you know why most people, when you come back for— in America, there's this thing called Global Entry, and that lets you walk right past the line. So, Neil and I have it. We just walk right past when we come back. We don't need to go through security, right? But the vast majority of Americans are sitting in security. Well, why? Because most people aren't willing to do the work.

That's so true. But I think the real reason why a lot of Americans are sitting in that line is because they don't travel often. Well, you and I travel a lot. Most people who travel like us have Global Entry.

Okay, I don't know. There's some people I know that don't have it. It's like, oh yeah, I should really get it next time. I should really— and they just never get it, right?

Does Syed have it?

He for sure has it. Knowing him, he for sure— I don't know.

I'm telling you, most people have it. If you do like 4 or 5 international trips at least a year, it's worth it. Yeah, but you and I do way more than that. I think I'm on like 30 flights.

But even getting to TSA, a lot of people to this point, a lot of people still don't have TSA PreCheck. That's basic.

I'm telling you, dude, most people don't fly. Watch, check this out. How often does the average person fly each year? Okay, check it out. What do you think the number is?

Like 2 times?

You're spot on. 1.5 to 2 flights a year. That's why most people don't do this.

This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it, and then you can apply and we'll see you on the other side. $800 million studio expansion halted because of AI. Did you read about this?

No. Okay, so this guy, uh, what kind of studio? Like creative shop?

It was a— here, I'm gonna read the tweet right now. Okay, 4 months ago— so this is from AI Safety Memes, that's the handle— 4 months ago, DreamWorks founder Katzenberg said AI will cut animated movie jobs by 90% in 3 years. It's already happening. After seeing Sora— so OpenAI Sora, that which is the— it makes like cool videos for you, just text, text to video, right? Tyler Perry halts $800 million studio expansion. And so what specifically really convinced him. He said, I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I recently saw the demonstration of what it's able to do. It's shocking to me. Being told that AI can do all these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing. Okay, here's, here's the main piece over here. I think it's going to be a major game changer because if you can spend a fraction of the cost to do a pilot that would have cost $15 million, $20 million, or even $35 million, if you're looking at HBO, of course the bottom line of those companies would be to go the route of lesser costs. So that's, that's what's going on.

It is. And they're going to crank out way more volume and content and then they're going to double down on the hits and spend the money there. It'll be a much more profitable model in the long run.

Did you see the Klarna example that I shared with you?

I did not.

Okay, well, Neil was traveling this week. Let me update you. So Klarna, I think they did like e-commerce, right? And they launched an AI bot. It's an AI chatbot, right? Here's what happened. 2.3 million conversations happening with this chatbot and the time to solve a ticket, like a support ticket, went down from 11 minutes to 2 minutes. This AI bot did the work of 700 chat customer service people. They're estimating that this AI alone is going to add $40 million in profit per year. And so they're saying—

For their company?

For their company. They're saying, hey, like, this is happening right now. This is going to have a big shift. They wrote like a blog post, like a press release about it. And yeah, that's pretty significant.

That is significant. And you know where that money is going to be spent? The savings?

It's going to be spent on R&D.

Sales and marketing.

Yeah, well, and a lot of it, I kind of lumped two and two together, but yeah.

Yeah, because AI, the big thing that it's going to do is going to help companies be more efficient, which is going to allow them to increase their CAC. Because if the profit is way higher per customer, they can now just go and spend more money.

Spend more money and just grow faster.

Yes. And then we're going to get back into the old cycle of everyone's like growth at all costs.

It's more profitable. The cycles. Yeah, it's a cycle. And it's going to crash again.

Dude, this has happened before too. We're like, oh, you can't, growth at all costs. Oh, this is foolish.

This time it's different.

Yeah, this time it's different. Then growth at all costs, it's like, it happens. Will it happen in the next 5 years, 10 years? I don't know. But if you fast forward 20, 30 years from now, I bet you we'll have another season of people talking about growth at all costs.

I just, I'm really excited about this because we're just trying to build like a customer acquisition system where it can handle the initial call bookings for you and then it can handle discovery call, book the meetings for you, eventually, hopefully even gift wrap the customer for you at the very end. It's going to take a long time to get there, I think. Maybe, maybe sooner. But if you can build an entire customer acquisition system for people, then you're going to be good because you're cutting out big costs for people.

I think this works really well in SMB. I do believe this is going to be much harder for enterprise. And the reason I say that is when you typically have a business that's servicing enterprise, each enterprise corporation typically has their own unique set of problems, which is why they're willing to pay a lot of money for a solution versus SMB, it's a lot more cookie-cutter sales. And I think that's easier to replicate over AI.

Exactly. So what if you did— there's an SMB angle for this, but there's also an enterprise angle where you custom build for each enterprise, right? And you're only doing it for maybe a couple of them.

So depends what volume you're closing, right? If you don't have tons of customers, it may not be needed.

But I mean, it's just— I was talking about this with, with a friend yesterday on a podcast. It's just like, I think— remember we talked about all the pay-for-performance marketing agencies out there, the 80— one doing $80 million, $30 million profit, 30 employees. I think we forget the pay-for-performance piece. We're going to see a lot more efficiencies with these companies. That's all. Yes.

You're going to see way more efficiencies and you're not going to just see the efficiencies on customer service or marketing. You're going to see it on all ends. I do think marketing won't have as many efficiencies as people think because they're going to take the savings in the efficiencies and spend it all on acquiring more customers. Yeah, I think the shift is going to be Less spent on human labor and more spent on ad dollars.

Or buying more companies.

Yeah, but marketing doesn't really do that, right?

Actually, so here's the question, right? If you add all this profit and it's like M&A used to be like a big lever, but the other thing is like companies are going to get a lot more efficient. And so then what do you do? Like you have to constantly re-underwrite all these companies that you're looking at buying because you don't know who's going to be staying and who's not.

Well, the other cool thing too is if you're doing M&A and you see that they're not using technology like this e-commerce example you gave, they're like, oh, this is a competitor. They're actually our size. They do terrible margins. They spend a lot on customer service. Let's just buy them and use this. And oh, that $40 million drops to the bottom line and it helps kind of pay for the business.

Genius. M&A with AI, looking for AI efficiencies. Because any, anytime you do M&A or like private equity is looking at stuff, they're looking for efficiencies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's no difference.

Yeah. All right, well, that's a great place to stop or end today, but go to the next episode. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. I know some of you like to give us nice ratings when we talk about certain subjects, but marketingschool.io/agency if you want to join the Agency Owners Association, you can apply for it. We got different groups for you if you're an agency owner, and Neil and I look forward to meeting some of you in person. So go do that.

Oh, and Eric's looking for a new girlfriend.

Oh my God.

Go DM him on Instagram. Eric O. Siu.

Alright, goodbye.