What inspired you to start your career in digital marketing?
Back in 2015, I spent like 8 months studying day and night SEO. Pure self-directed study without being employed. This was my life. By the time I secured my first junior role, I already felt fully prepared and confident in handling much more than what was expected. So SEO was always my passion, I really liked it.
What’s your approach to staying current with digital marketing trends?
I stay updated through Search Engine RoundTable, MarketingFOMO, Search Engine Journal and X.
What’s your stance on paid advertising?
I do like Google Search Ads and Reddit Ads. Meta Ads also have very strong capabilities. I expect more brands to find shelter on paid ads especially if they see organic traffic getting less and less due to AI.
What other areas online businesses need to optimize?
Conversion Rates. Users have limited time. If you are selling products, make sure your website is easy to navigate and has a hassle-free checkout process. Also, online brand reputation. Many businesses are unaware about the discussions happening on Reddit or about the reviews they get on other platforms. Many times third party pages host false or outdated info that hurts brand image.
How do you approach marketing attribution in a cookieless future?
Regulations like GDPR have made our work significantly more challenging, as we cannot track users who reject or ignore cookies. As much as 50% of sessions end up untracked. A solution is first-party data collection (e.g. server logs) or privacy-friendly tools like Cloudflare Web Analytics, which do not store cookies on the client side. However, these tools have their limitations and provide less detailed reporting.
What’s your approach to social media marketing for business growth?
Social media can serve multiple functions: from brand awareness and community building to lead generation and customer support. Therefore, I consider them indispensable tools for modern businesses.
How do you measure content marketing effectiveness?
Beyond engagement metrics, what matters to me is actionable metrics like percentage of users taking a meaningful action (e.g. making a purchase/deposit). Vanity metrics are good but do not pay the bills.
Has AI search affected your marketing efforts?
Yes and no. When Google launched AI Overviews globally we all saw the reports claiming a 30-40% reduction in clicks. Now with AI Mode kicking in to more countries organic traffic is expected to decrease even more. However, I still have not felt the impact. CTR and Average Position have actually improved lately after Google cracked down on the num=100 operator that was abused by scrapers and bots. We also know that the vast majority of ChatGPT users also use Google search. The top 3 AI chatbots sending the most traffic to websites are ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Do you know what their combined market share in search referral traffic is according to Cloudflare? 0.26%. Compare that to Google’s 88.9%. Thus, Google is still relevant and is still the largest source of traffic for most websites.
How are you incorporating AI into your marketing strategies?
Although I do use AI for sourcing information and getting answers, I strive to maintain an authentic voice, so AI usage is very limited in content creation. We have to admit that AI chatbots have improved. Take for example Gemini’s image generation or Perplexity Labs’ ability to transform ideas into web applications without any coding needed.
You can follow Nikos on X and LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikos-aggelidakis