Why Traditional Digital Marketing Metrics Are Failing Banks
By Garret Reich, Senior Project Manager at The Financial Brand
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For decades, bank marketers have justified their budgets with clean attribution: search traffic, click-through rates, keyword data, conversion paths.
That could be ending as soon as next year, and executive teams aren’t prepared yet.
In fact, Wil Reynolds, founder of Philadelphia-based digital marketing agency Seer Interactive and a longtime presenter at the Financial Brand Forum, argues the reckoning is already here.
Traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity? Untrackable.
Referrals from WhatsApp, Signal, or Facebook groups? Untrackable.
Mobile users with degraded cookie data? Untrackable.
Need to Know:
- AI traffic can’t be tracked. Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools offer no monthly search volume, click-through rates, or keyword data, leaving marketers blind to a growing share of their audience.
- Cookie degradation is nearly total. Apple’s privacy changes delete tracking cookies after seven days, and “not provided” keywords now account for 99.2% of organic search visits, gutting traditional attribution models.
- The hard conversation can’t wait. Marketers need to reset executive expectations now, before 2026 budget meetings collide with attribution gaps that no amount of explanation will fix after the fact.
“What was trackable is now untrackable,” Reynolds says. “That means I’m going to have to invest more on my gut — and get used to it.”
Wil’s advice: Don’t wait to have to explain why the numbers look wrong. Have the hard conversation with leadership now, reset expectations for 2026 and start building the case for directional metrics before someone demands answers you can’t give.
We talked to Wil about this new reality in advance of his presentation at The Financial Brand Forum in April.
Learn more from Wil Reynolds at
The Financial Brand Forum 2026.
Don’t miss Wil’s breakout presentation on AI and the New Rules of Search — a session loaded with proven strategies and real-world examples you can put to work immediately.
Meet Wil in person live at the Forum 2026, and see why he’s one of our all-time top-rated speakers with sessions that are standing-room-only!
Step One: “Untrain” Your Managers
Q: How should bank marketers prepare for budget meetings for 2026?
Reynolds: We have trained our bosses by basically saying, “Here’s all my numbers. This is how you know I’m good at my job. Here’s my rankings, here’s my traffic, here’s my conversions, and I can track all of it.”
We now have to untrain. We have to say, the reality is that I can’t track that stuff anymore. I can’t track somebody on an Apple device after seven days, they delete the cookies.
You need to spend some time in December training your managers that we live in a new world, and say, “This is how much tracking I’ve lost in 2025.” These numbers don’t add up the way they used to. Anything that comes from AI, we cannot track it. We have no monthly search volume. We don’t have click through rates. There is no Google Search consoles. We can’t tell you what words they search for.
This idea that we can track everything is a crutch that a lot of marketers are gonna have a hard time letting go of. But as what was trackable becomes untrackable, I’m going to have to invest more and more on my gut — and get used to it.
Q: How should you handle pushback from executives who are frustrated by this new reality?
You just have to have the ability to stand across from somebody who is frustrated and say, “I get all that. But I don’t have the ability to tell Google to give me the prompts people are typing in. I don’t have the ability to go to Perplexity. I don’t have the ability to go to these platforms. I do not have this data anymore, and there’s no amount of anger that will ever allow me to get it.”
Q: So, what metrics should marketers be using instead?
We have to come up with directional metrics we’re more comfortable with, directional metrics that allow you to say, “Look, this is the direction things are going. This is what I’m trying to do. If it’s more or less than this big range, then we’ve got a problem—or we’re crushing it.” But there’s a big range now because I don’t have the ability to track at the level I used to.
Proof will be indirect. Example: My social traffic is blowing up. And because my social traffic is blowing up, I’ve overlaid all my traffic sources against my revenue, and you’re like, “Huh—my pipeline increased at the same rate my social traffic increased.” Why? Because people are sharing with other people, which also brings a ton more trust.
Just yesterday, I was presenting how I need 13,000 visitors to get the same number of signups to my newsletter as I can get from 2,000 visitors that come from social. These are the kind of metrics we need to be showing our managers.
Reconfigure Your Web Content for the World of AI Search
Q: How should bankers be setting up their websites now to be more AI-crawl friendly, even if they can’t see the AI results?
I think there’s more of a spotlight on answers to specific questions which, to me, is all about how you lay out your web pages. For a bank, one of the most important things is rates. Are you competitive for your rates? If it was me, job number one would be to make sure that I had the rates for all my products on a homepage, or not more than one page away from my homepage.
Then it has be displayed as text, text, text. Not wrapped around a little graphic or scrolling element that looks good. Do it in a list. If you don’t explicitly put it out there like that, you will probably have some issues having your answer show up.
Do everything you can to get people the right information. You have to give it to them directly, straightforward, and simply.
Q: Talk me through how early SEO and search engine growth can help us to understand the modern marketing world now driven by AI.
When I first started in search, Google was a minor player. The beauty of that experience is that I’ve seen all the other major search engines fail, and I know why they failed. I can compare that against what’s happening with AI today.
People don’t remember, because they weren’t around Googling, when search engines kind of sucked. They were better than going to the library, but it had its own version of hallucinations, bad answers, spam that you wished you weren’t getting — for the first 8 to 10 years.
Then, Google came along and destroyed everybody, and they earned it.
Fast forward into an AI world, and you see a lot of [bankers] concerned that their rates aren’t showing up right on AI engine results. But, you forget when Google did not have the crawling infrastracture to crawl your site every couple minutes. Back in the day, it would update once a month — when it was called the Google dance — or once every three months.
People forget that Google used to do the same thing 20 years ago, because it’s been so good for the last 20 years. People can’t remember when Google sucked.
Q: Is there any hope that platforms will start sharing more data with marketers?
I’m 50/50 on that. This is the historical context: Google used to give you all the search terms people typed in. And then they had “not provided.” They said it would only be a few percentage points of your traffic because they were doing it for privacy purposes. They announced “it’ll only be 5% of your traffic, you’re still going to see 95% of your keywords people type in.”
If I look at my own data right now — I think it’s something like 99.2% of all my organic visits — comes in as “not provided,” which means they came from Google, typed something in and clicked on a result.
Google got rid of our ability to understand the keywords people were searching, which tells you how they think. Today, the only way I think Google would offer it up [again] is if ChatGPT or Claude offered it up first — because they don’t want to be behind for marketers. If Claude or ChatGPT said, “We’re going to give you some intel on what people are typing in,” I think Google would begrudgingly be like, “We probably got to do the same thing.”
Lean into Authentic Intelligence to Power Marketing
Q: You’ve talked in the past about “authentic intelligence.” What does that mean for smaller institutions?
Reynolds: The concept of authentic intelligence is interesting and powerful for a smaller credit union marketer, because they know their customer so much better. This might not go over well with my big banks, my mid-size banks, but [smaller institutions] know their customer better because they actually meet and talk to them on a regular basis.
If you take a marketer who’s overwhelmed by all the things they have to do, and you say — “Hey, can I just interview you to pull your content out of you?” — it’s your smaller bank marketers that are closer to the day-to-day that always give me better content.
They’re like, “Oh no, I was at the rodeo last week.” That’s different than, “I was looking at a survey of 10,000 households and I found that…” The stories are richer. They’re meeting their customers where they are in a way that larger banks, who have more distance from their customers, just aren’t able to do.
