Clicks Down, Dwell Up, Goal Agents on Deck🎯

Weekly briefing for AI-first marketers. News, tactics, and tools that move the whole funnel.

Author

Rohit Maheswaran
May 21, 2025

Hey growth guru👋,

Google’s AI-first SERP is draining clicks, LinkedIn now rewards how long people stare at your post, and OpenAI just wired ChatGPT straight into GitHub. In the bustle, marketers who measure lift, not vanity, are compounding wins. Let’s dive in.

On the Menu đŸœïž

  • Organic CTR falls 30 % after Google AI Overviews—three fixes

  • Threads ads go global—early CPMs $5-10 for first movers

  • LinkedIn’s passive-dwell era + a carousel case study

  • TikTok’s AI Alive turns stills into motion—creative recipes

  • Retail-media metrics that still matter in a cooling market

  • GPT-5 rumours, GitHub-aware ChatGPT

📉 Search Survival: Google AI Overviews Cut Clicks

Recent findings by BrightEdge reveals that SERP impressions continues to rise up 49% YoY but organic clicks down 30% since the “AI Overviews” rolled out.

Three fast plays 🏏

  1. Answer-boxing: Add schema-driven FAQs to snag AI Overview citations.

  2. Silo test: Freeze SEO work in one region for four weeks; compare with a geo-matched control via MMM (the hold-out shows true lift—Lifesight surfaces it automatically).

  3. Content velocity: Publish two short-form explainers/week; freshness is now a ranking weight in Overview inclusion.

Takeaway: Treat SEO like paid media - run experiments, measure incrementality, reinvest.

📣 Paid Social Expansion: Threads Ads Go Global 🚀

Meta has flipped the switch—ads in Threads are now available to every eligible advertiser worldwide (default-on for both Advantage+ and Manual Placements).  Early benchmarks put CPMs in the $5-10 range, roughly 35%–45% cheaper than Instagram Feed.

Try this:

  1. Duplicate a top-performing IG Feed ad set, leaving the creative and targeting intact.

  2. Enable Threads placement only and cap spend at 10 % of the original budget.

  3. After 7 days, compare CPM, CTR, and incremental traffic. If you’re seeing ≄25 % lower CPM with stable CTR, scale the budget in 5 % increments.

Takeaway: Threads’ 320 M-user feed is underpriced while the platform courts advertisers. Lock in learnings (and audiences) before the crowd arrives.

🔍 Social Pulse: LinkedIn Bets on Passive Dwell-Time

LinkedIn’s 2025 algorithm now ranks posts by how long users hover — even if they never tap “Like”.

Three hacks đŸ„·

  • Tension first: Open with a cliff-hanger line that forces a pause.

  • Carousel dominance: PDF slide decks drive the highest engagement across formats.

  • Story depth: 150-300-word narratives outperform quick tips on dwell metrics.

Mini case study :💡A mid-market HR SaaS ran two posts: a 7-slide carousel and a plain‐text summary. Carousel view-time averaged 19s vs. 7s for text, lifting demo requests 34% week-over-week (internal data). The magic? Each slide teased the next with a “swipe to reveal” hook.

đŸŽžïž Video Frontier: TikTok’s AI Alive

TikTok’s new AI Alive animates any photo into a video inside Stories (launch: 14 May 2025. Generations clock in under three minutes.

Creative recipes to test

  1. UGC remix: Turn customer selfies into motion testimonials; boost via Spark Ads.

  2. Product spin: Animate 360-shot thumbnails for “unboxing” in-feed teasers.

  3. Concept loops: Upload storyboard sketches—AI Alive adds movement so viewers grasp complex ideas fast.

Track completion rate and cost-per-thru-play—early pilots report sub-$0.02 CTP on AI Alive assets vs. $0.05 baseline (TikTok Ads Library).

🛒 Retail-Media Reality Check

US retail-media spend will hit $106 B in 2025, but growth is slowing as the channel fragments. Off-site inventory (think news, CTV, recipe blogs) is growing 3× faster than on-site placements.

Metric that matters: Incremental ROAS tied to verified sales.
Microsoft’s new Curate for Commerce lets brands buy on a cost-per-sale basis, matching ads to loyalty-card data—a lift clean rooms struggle to prove. Unified measurement platforms like Lifesight normalise those conversions into one MMM model, so every channel sings off the same ROI sheet.

🧰 Framework of the Week: The 3-C Metrics Ladder

  1. Coverage – reach & qualified impressions

  2. Conversation – clicks, comments, shares

  3. Conversion – incremental revenue or CAC delta

Start campaigns only after defining baseline Coverage benchmarks. Then ladder up; never skip rungs. It keeps teams from optimising thumbnails while measurement gaps hide in step three.

đŸ€– AI Lab: Goal Agents & GitHub-Aware ChatGPT

  • GPT-5 chatter is heating up — industry insiders peg launch for “mid-2025” and hint at default goal-chaining agents.

  • OpenAI quietly shipped a GitHub Deep Research connector to ChatGPT (Plus, Team, Enterprise). Marketers can now audit pixel or tag snippets straight in chat—no more Jira tickets.

Try this: Paste your GTM container, ask ChatGPT to hunt for duplicate GA4 events, then auto-export a cleaned JSON

đŸ› ïž AI Toolbox

What it does: AI-powered content research and optimization platform that helps marketers plan, create, and improve content strategies based on topic authority and competitive analysis.
Fast payoff: Accelerates content planning and boosts SEO effectiveness by pinpointing content gaps and optimizing existing pages.

What it does: AI copywriting tool designed for marketing teams to produce persuasive sales copy, ads, and social media content quickly and efficiently.
Fast payoff: Generates multiple copy variations in minutes, speeding up A/B testing and campaign launches.

What it does: AI storytelling and presentation tool that creates visually engaging narratives, slide decks, and reports automatically from brief outlines or data inputs.
Fast payoff: Transforms ideas into polished presentations instantly, eliminating manual slide design time.

Giveaway of the Week 🎁

Use AI to generate n8n workflows, an extremely powerful chatGPT 4o based custom GPT that generates n8n compatible JSON code that converts into a n8n workflow of your wish. Trained on 100s best n8n workflows, n8n best practices and its docs, this GPT can generate any workflow step-by-step with just a prompt. Try for FREE

See y’all next week  👋

Got value today? Forward this email to one operator wrestling with SERP shifts, algorithm tricks, and an overflowing tool stack. Let’s grow the smartest room on the internet.

— Full Funnel Team 📹