Rethinking Measurement: Smarter Data, Attribution, and AI | Arnout Hellemans
Hi! I’m Gianluca Fiorelli. In this episode, I’m speaking with Arnout Hellemans, an SEO, PPC, and analytics consultant whose mix of expertise gives him a well-rounded perspective on how digital performance comes together. We talk about smarter data measurement, attribution, and the growing role of AI in PPC and automation.
Here’s what you’ll take away from our conversation:
Why truly understanding the business—and asking the one right question—is the most overlooked step in SEO.
The value of combining GA4’s first-party data with backend metrics to create decision-focused dashboards.
How privacy laws and user consent are reshaping data tracking limitations.
Why blended metrics like profit on ad spend offer more reliable insights than exact attribution.
Essential practices for keeping the analytics governance clean, consistent, and genuinely trustworthy.
Ways to manage AI-powered PPC campaigns effectively while tackling the visibility challenges of Google’s evolving AI features.
Emerging models for ad integration in AI Mode and what they could mean for future monetization.
Practical ways Arnout uses AI to work smarter—from faster problem-solving to scalable creative automation.
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I'm Gianluca Fiorelli, and welcome back to The Search Session. Today, our guest is a freelance SEO, PPC, and data analytics consultant—which, let me tell you, is not so common nowadays. These days, especially among freelancers, people tend to specialize: maybe just SEO, or even a very specific vertical within SEO, or maybe they only do PPC. Or maybe they specialize as an “analytics nerd”.
But our guest? He does all three—and does them really well. He's been in SEO for many years. He's Dutch. And his name is Arnout Hellemans. Hey Arnout, how are you doing?
Arnout Hellemans: I'm good, man, I'm good. Nice to see you! Awesome.
How SEO Feels Right Now
Gianluca Fiorelli: Nice to see you too. Let’s start with a classic question of mine: how is SEO treating you lately?
Arnout Hellemans: Different, I guess. You get fewer people specifically asking for basic SEO—they want broader help now. Like, “How do I get into generative AI?”—those kinds of things.
But luckily, like you said in your intro, I don’t just do SEO, so there’s plenty of work. I still find SEO extremely interesting, especially at a meta level—what’s happening with the big battles between the major players, and the new players stepping up with their own search indexes and all that. So yes, I actually find it a really interesting space to be in right now. I love it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Sure. It is interesting—and it’s especially interesting because of the ever-changing landscape. It moves so fast that just when you finally think you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, and you’re starting to feel like you’re in control of something, something new happens.
Arnout Hellemans: But that’s what keeps it interesting, right? I think otherwise—like, in the beginning, in the early years—it was just: get some links, tweak a page title and an H1, and you’ll rank. Where’s the fun in that after a few years?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and also, as our common friend Martin McDonald said in a previous episode of The Search Session—he was very honest—he said, up until maybe three or four years ago, he was starting to get really bored with SEO. It was always the same stuff. Nothing really changed.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And now, with the introduction of ChatGPT first, and then all the other LLMs…I’m finally feeling alive again as a professional. These changes are making me feel younger—like when I was just starting out, experimenting and doing all this. And I think this is quite a common feeling — many of us are having it right now.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, experiencing it.
Common Onboarding Mistakes in SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: But as I was saying in the introduction, you’re kind of an exception. I sincerely admire you, because I really don’t know where you find the hours to do all the things you do.
You do consulting for SEO, for PPC, for analytics — which, even if someone is just doing SEO and offering services as an SEO consultant, obviously, they should at least know what’s happening in the PPC world. And surely, they should know how analytics works. Because if not, they’ll miss 90% of the things they’re trying to fix or optimize.
But off the record, before we started this recording, you also pointed out something even more basic, but so, so often overlooked by so many professionals — not only by consultants, but also surprisingly even by in-house professionals and in-agency professionals— which is knowing the business of your company, of your clients, and so on.
What are the classic mistakes you see when people start working with a new client, or when they join a new company? What are the things that someone—if they’re not asking the right questions about the business—is going to misunderstand?
Arnout Hellemans: Basically, there’s only one question that matters. And I think it’s a very simple question: “How do you make money?” That’s the only one you have to ask, right?
And it sometimes opens a Pandora’s box, because people will say, “Well, we sell this and this,” but in the end, they might not make any money selling that, but actually make money on the services around it—or just by selling half of their products really well.
If you truly understand the business model, it helps you not only optimize the website, but also get the right traffic, in the right phases of the funnel. And I see so many people who come to me and say, “I want to rank for this keyword”. And we’ve all been there.
And I’ll go, “Well, looking at your website, I don’t think that’s the right keyword.” And they’ll say, “Yes, but I want to rank for it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s not exactly what you’re offering.” And they’ll go, “Yes, but it has massive search volume.”
I don’t really care—because in the end, I want you to make more money. That way, you can afford to pay me, right? As I said in a quote on learningseo.io, from Aleyda Solís—I think it was four or five years ago, she asked a few people for quotes—and I said: “Traffic costs you money. The right traffic makes you money.”
And in order to determine what the right traffic is, you need to understand your client’s—or your own—business model. You need to understand which conversions, which actions on the website, actually make them money. And I see this being overlooked so, so many times. And I guess you’ve seen the same.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, in fact, as I was telling you before—and now sharing with everyone watching or listening—I usually spend a good amount of the first calls with a client just talking about the business.
I do that in order to really understand how it works: what the mechanics of a conversion are, what the steps are, what terminology they use, and what terminology their clients use.
I ask them, even if it’s not strictly SEO-related, about things like the checkout process.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Where do they see gaps? Where do they see people struggling to continue?
Arnout Hellemans: But haven’t you noticed that sometimes, when you ask them these questions, they don’t even know the answers?
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s why I also ask to speak with more people than just the one who contacted me.
It’s like—this is a totally different situation, going back to the movie industry, which I know well because I worked there for many years before doing SEO—if you are the director of photography, and you’re only asking questions to the director. Yes, of course, you need to ask the director, because he foresees the picture in his head, but you also need to ask the actors about the photography, because they know how well they’ll appear depending on the lighting. And you need to talk to the art director, because he can help you figure out where to put the lights, how to use natural light on set, and so on.
And it’s the same with marketing. Not even SEO. You have to ask: “Please, let me talk to the customer care director or the person responsible for customer care”. Or someone working in the product team—even if they’re an engineer. And I’ll ask them 20,000 times to explain things to me, because I can’t understand, especially in B2B, what they’re actually saying—literally.
But this is the only way to fully understand. It’s not just about asking your counterpart at the client side—or in your company—“Send me the buyer persona.” You need to ask, “Why did you create this buyer persona? Why this one and not another?”
Because, for instance, in SEO, you might discover that some kind of content is totally off…
Arnout Hellemans: Irrelevant.
Gianluca Fiorelli: … for that buyer persona. And so on.
Why Proprietary Data Beats Standard Analytics
Gianluca Fiorelli: But then, as you were saying, knowing the business is a qualitative assessment of the work. Now there’s also a quantitative assessment of it, which is analytics. And you're really vocal about using proprietary data, instead of relying only on classic GA4 or third-party data, and so on, to create a better, more useful way of talking about the business—a better, more meaningful dashboard of data and information. Why is that?
Arnout Hellemans: Well, it’s very simple, right? I got so frustrated with people talking about bounce rate. And then, when you’d ask them, “What is a bounce?” they’d say: “Well, somebody comes to your page and then leaves.” Well, it isn’t. It’s basically one hit that was recorded in GA—this was Universal Analytics right back in the days.
And I think when they moved to GA4, it actually became really customizable and usable. But loads of people are still complaining—or have complained—about GA4.
The thing is, GA4 is actually set up for you to configure it in a way that lets you measure the things that matter to you, right? It could be little things, like someone scrolling to a lead form and they’ve spent more than X amount of seconds getting there—so you can see that they’re interested. You can start measuring loads of other things. You can add labels to sessions. You can do all these kinds of things, right?
I think basically, Universal Analytics was just a visualization of the log files—it would just give you pages. But as we’ve moved to progressive web apps and all kinds of JavaScript-based websites, things have become really, really different.
And I think GA4—and other tracking tools—give you a lot of opportunity to send usable, first-party data into a measurement system that you can actually use. You can build dashboards on it, and you can connect it to BigQuery or other databases to do even deeper analysis.
So, if you can start measuring this—and also bring in your backend data about users, sales, returns, or whatever—into the same dataset, you’ll get a massive amount of extra insights that will help you run your business a lot better.
And this is where I think a lot of people have struggled—and are still struggling. The number of basic GA4 setups I bump into is quite astonishing. And you’ve probably noticed the same.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I had a very long and steep learning curve with it.
Arnout Hellemans: I think we all did. I think we all did, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, thankfully, I know a few people who are really good at it, so I was able to learn things through them. Now, I’m not an analyst in the sense that I couldn’t do the actual implementation myself. But I know how to guide people in order to get it done properly. And I think that’s important.
The Attribution Problem
Gianluca Fiorelli: But let’s talk about what happens once we have this quantitative information, thanks to a good GA4 implementation. There are two things that, for me—and I think for many others—are quite complicated to calculate, or even to properly understand.
One isn’t new, really, and that’s everything related to GDPR, cookies, and ad blockers. Everything related to a user not giving permission to be tracked for statistical purposes.
And the other one—something that, for me, is still quite unclear—is the ability to give correct attribution anymore.
Which is, it can be painful—especially for clients or businesses—not knowing how to attribute value to something. For instance: “Where is this conversion coming from?”, “What’s the best contributor to that conversion: was it because I was visible on ChatGPT, and then people typed in my brand name directly in the browser and found me, or did they go to Google and click on organic search results, or on PPC ads?” This is becoming more and more complicated.
Arnout Hellemans: It is, and especially because we’re using different platforms that don’t leave clear traces.
With HTTP traffic, there’s usually a referrer—some are obscured, but most of the time, it’s there. But if you’re in an app, and you click a link—say you’re in ChatGPT and click a link—what it basically does is open a browser window, without a referrer. So, this is happening everywhere.
That’s why, when it comes to attribution, I usually dumb it down a lot. I basically say: “Let’s go with a blended return on ad spend, or revenue on ad spend.” So, I take all of my ad spend and I plot it to my revenue—or, even better, to my profit.
Then I look at that number and ask: “Is this okay for the business case?”, “ Is this a number I’m happy to experiment with?” Then again, I also think it’s important to distinguish which traffic source is valuable at which stage of the conversion cycle.
For instance, price comparison on Google Shopping is definitely end-of-funnel—just pre-purchase. Whereas if somebody is looking for comparisons or features, that’s way earlier in the funnel. And even before that, it’s more about awareness—it could be LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever.
And I think you need to start getting to feel what people need, and where your customers are. That’s why I like to blend it all into one—basically, take ad spend and hold it against my revenue and then start playing around with it to see how it influences it.
Because I’ve basically given up on attribution, and I think the only company that can do decent attribution modeling is the team behind Chrome. Which is Alphabet/Google, right?
They’ve got a lot of data. They’ve got a lot of touchpoints, even more so if you combine Android with that. However, the rest of the companies, even the likes of Facebook with all their pixels, still won’t be able to do proper attribution, in my opinion. It’s just not an exact science. And I think we need to let that go.
So we need to start looking at the broader picture: “What are you willing to spend to get your results?” That’s why you need to start with first-party data. Because, as you said—and now this is a little step back into your first question—GDPR prevents a lot of things from being tracked, right?
I know Google Analytics is still tracking it somehow—doing, like, “This probably is a conversion”—but you won’t see it, right? So they do some stuff in the background. But other than that, you need to start working with what you have.
What I’ve done in one of my projects is actually look at the real backend data—and store it. Just by looking at the path of hits on the server, you can get some indication. In this case, it showed about 20% higher, right?
So yes, we do lose a lot. And I think this is because a lot of the retargeting and stuff and nasty things that were happening, and as with a lot of things, we’ve abused it. And as such, there's heavy regulation on it. So we’ve got to work with the data we have. And I would recommend looking at the blended revenue on ad spend, or even better, profit on ad spend. And once you have that, you can start asking: “What is reasonable for me?”, “What am I willing to spend to get these actions?”
You also need to start measuring what happens in between. Like, “Hey, I ran this awareness campaign on TikTok, and two weeks later, I see my funnel activity going up.” Now, then you can correlate that. And you can learn from it.
But it’s not an exact science. Some people will say it is, but I’m highly doubtful.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s why maybe one of the—you could call it trivial—recent additions to Google Analytics, I think it was the possibility to annotate.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, they’ve reintroduced it! That’s awesome.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s great because now, you can finally start to put these correlation effects into a timeline of annotation.
Arnout Hellemans: What I used to do—and what I still do now for a client—is basically keep a Google Sheet with all the releases, all the website changes, and everything plotted in. And then also include Google’s Core updates and annotations—just in the Google Sheet. Then, in Looker Studio, you can connect that sheet and plot it on the timeline—of traffic, or conversions, or whatever.
I think that’s a better way to automate loads of things, just using a Google Sheet or some other dataset where you store all these changes.
But yes, I definitely love the fact that annotations are back. Because there are so many times when you go, “Wait, what happened back then?” Right? And I think we’ve all been there. So yes, I’m really glad it’s back.
Data Governance Fundamentals
Gianluca Fiorelli: And speaking of setting up data analytics correctly. One of the boring things to do is to set up governance rules. All the rules about how to measure things are consistent across the organization. Of course, rules can change from company to company, but what are your cornerstones in this kind of matter?
Arnout Hellemans: UTM naming strategy is a really, really big one. Because—uppercase, lowercase—people just do something. It makes it a pain. You can’t repair it in hindsight, right? So it has to be done the right way from the start.
I would always go lowercase, define it, and build templates. You can just create a macro in Google Sheets or Excel that people can use. Just—UTMs are a really, really big one.
I think another one, which is often forgotten, is just to remove internal IP addresses or even the development agency IP addresses and stuff. Because, especially if you have a big office where the homepage is your own website, it just screws up loads of your data, right? And that’s also part of governance, in my opinion.
Then there’s the standard reports you want to set up. Another bugbear of mine is people with access. I’ve seen so many GA accounts where there are, like, three administrators—
And when you ask them: “Who are they?”, they go: “We have no clue.”
That is dangerous, right? So they could make changes as admins, they can do loads of things. They can do a story. But the same thing goes for Search Console access. And I think Google is now saying: “These meta tags are not being used, and as such you might want to remove them,” and stuff.
You probably have the same as a freelancer. If I go into Search Console or Google Analytics, there’s a gazillion. Even though I pointed them out: “Could you please remove me?”They don’t.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Actually, quite recently, I did it myself. I opened my Search Console, and then started to remove myself from properties where clients from six years ago were still there.
But I must admit, some of them I’m maintaining the view for my own knowledge. Because maybe they are very big websites, so it’s always cool to see them. But obviously, not maintaining an extended personal NDA for them. Sometimes, there is the classic single project that lasted two months for an audit, and I still have Search Console access there.
And it's making a mess for me. Because when I need to start searching for the ones I’m really working on, I have this big list of properties.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, but you need a company-wide strategy. I’ve worked in multi-million dollar businesses, and I’m still in. That was five years ago, right? And I’m there as an admin, with DNS verification. So it’s not very easy to remove myself—because they need to do that. So, it’s those kinds of things.
But also, UTMs are really big, and the others are as well. There’s a lot, but just to name a few.
Google's AI Push in PPC
Gianluca Fiorelli: Let’s move a little bit into another activity you’re really into—and one that, for me, is quite fascinating—because sometimes it can actually offer a lot of insights for SEO as well: PPC. What’s your opinion on this?
I mean, even in PPC—as we see in classic organic search—Google is pushing AI into the hands of advertisers, like Performance Max, and all the others. AI-Max also. They are not original names they’re giving to their advertising solutions. What’s your opinion about that?
Arnout Hellemans: They can work really well if you feed them the right first-party data. A lot of these algorithms and AIs can do awesome stuff. But if you feed them shitty things, shitty things will happen, right?
And I think this is a famous story, but it also happened to me—though not on the same scale. There was this company—I think I read about it online—and what they did was import a Google Analytics goal into their Performance Max campaigns. And they basically said: "If you can get me one of these goal completions for $150, you can spend 10K—easily—or even 20K."
Normally, it would only get two or three conversions, so the maximum spend would be, like, $500 or something like that. Then somebody made a mistake in GTM—triggering that event a gazillion times. They probably changed the goal or something like that. So suddenly, Google was getting signals that they were making a lot of money. They were hitting the CPA as promised. So it started spending—up to like 10 or 15K a day. And they only noticed like five days later. Now imagine how dangerous that is, right?
So it’s all outcome-driven. I’m not a big fan of a lot of these things, but with the right data and giving it the right time to gather a lot of user signals, they can do awesome things. But you have to set the boundaries because I’ve seen so many campaigns just cannibalizing my brand traffic. Basically, they would get the brand click and then they would say, “Hey, my CPA is awesome!” Yes but that’s because a brand conversion is a lot cheaper than getting the one I actually told you to go for.
So, these kinds of things—it’s all about the first-party data, giving the right signals and setting the right boundaries. And I think we’re getting into an age where Google wants to take more control. They’ll just say: “Give me your profit target—how much profit I can spend to get you a conversion—and I’ll do the rest.” Just give me a blank checkbook, and let’s go. That’s where they want to go—like, that’s truly where they want to be.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, it still happens now, but especially in the past, it was a classic situation. I’d talk to friends—especially those working in companies—and they’d say the Google Ads representative would call them almost every week, pushing: 'We can do this, we can do that.' But now, with AI, Google is basically replacing human contact with an algorithm.
Arnout Hellemans: It’s pretty bizarre, right? Because there are so many relatively dormant ad accounts, and if you don’t check them, they’ll just auto-set up campaigns for you. They auto-make suggestions, auto-create—it’s bloody scary in a lot of ways.
And I think they’ll get better and better at doing this. But I think it was three years ago when they started removing all the search terms. They basically said, “For privacy reasons, we’re not going to show you all the search terms your ads appeared for.” And I was like, that’s just BS, right? You’re basically making me blind and expecting me to fully trust you. Which is something we as SEOs—but also we as PPCs, or at least me as a PPC—don’t really do. And I think a lot more.
However, sometimes those Google reps do get you into betas that will move the needle for your campaigns, so I tend to talk to them—but only after second-tier. I don’t want to talk to some random rep who just calls me up saying: “Hey, why aren’t you running this campaign?” “Because it doesn’t work for me”.
AI Overviews Impact on Paid Search
Gianluca Fiorelli: And I’ve got another question. You’re kind of one foot in SEO, one foot in PPC. But as an SEO, you know that AI Overviews are now essentially cutting even more clicks than before. So, all the complaints we’ve been making are rightfully regarding the shrinking of organic traffic for informational queries. I am now also starting to see people in PPC begin to complain about the massive presence of AI Overviews and, let’s say, generative synthetic answers, as well as the expansion of “People also ask,” “Things to do,” “Things to know,” etc. And I’m wondering how much the presence of AI Overviews is affecting the CTR of ads, too.
Arnout Hellemans: It does.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Even though ads technically still appear above the AI Overviews. They’re now squashed to the search menu, so they became invisible.
Arnout Hellemans: They are, but mostly for Dynamic Search Ads pages. That’s where Google chooses both the right landing page and the right ad copy for you. In those cases, I think it leads to a lot of cannibalization. And, as you rightly said, it’s mostly targeting informational queries.
But a lot of the informational queries are ones we’re actually running ad campaigns on. Say you do city tours in Barcelona—you want to be there if someone, basically, a consumer, asks Google: “What’s up this weekend?” “What can I do?” “Where should I go?” If you’re a tour operator in Barcelona, you want your ad to be shown, even if it’s not directly conversion-related.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I remember a classic example from Booking. For instance, Booking was showing ads for queries like just the name of a city—because more often than not, a search for the name of a city can’t really be anything else.
Because they know that usually, if someone is searching for the name of a city, it can be one of two things: either it’s a student who needs to know about the city, or it’s someone who is really, really at the beginning of starting a conversion journey.
Arnout Hellemans: A typical one is: “What’s the weather in Barcelona in that week of October?” That’s a very early sign that somebody’s thinking about going on holiday, or a business trip, or whatever.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Arnout Hellemans: But it’s actually an informational query.
Ad Placement in AI-Generated SERPs
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. And talking about AI and advertisement—another thing that we usually say, that people in our industry say—both SEO and PPC—is that Google is still not pushing, for instance, AI Mode. But I think that Google will push AI Mode as the main search surface when it understands how to put advertisements in it.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, monetize it. I agree.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, but have you ever thought about how the placement of advertisements could be in a totally AI-generated SERP?
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, and I’ve thought about it a lot. I think the big battle that AI companies—generative AI companies—are now facing is “How can I get more context around a question?
So you see Perplexity with Comet, OpenAI now coming out with a browser; they announced it live this morning. So it’s basically Chromium in the background, but then skinned with an assistant next to it.
And I feel like an AI can become really helpful if it knows more about you. And then, at some point, you build a trust that it will do the right thing for you. And then you're happy to basically—especially for the free versions— see a five-minute, non-skippable ad, just as we have on YouTube.
So I think that could be a way of monetizing. But I think it’s too early days, because you first need to get proper buy-in from the user. Because right now, you’ll scare them away. And I think the big battle now ongoing is basically: who gets these users? Like, who gets the sticky ones? Who will go for Perplexity? Once that becomes clear, you can start thinking about monetizing in different ways.
I think that it's way too early days now to talk about that. The other thing I could see happening is—especially in the assistant kind of way—where they take a cut of what the assistant buys or saves you.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Oh yes. And I think a third probable way to introduce advertisement is something like a mix—let’s call it—between AI Overview, AI Mode and Web Guide, for instance. And using advertisement, especially the content of a landing page of the advertisement, as a promoted bit of a synthetic answer. So, integrating the ads into the answer—but obviously needing to label it.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, but I think that could easily be done with Dynamic Search Ads, which you basically get to say: “Hey, anything in this folder—you can send paid traffic to it, and this is your budget,” So for that, it would definitely work.
I’m thinking with loads of these things—it’s really, really early days, and Google’s being attacked. And what you said about AI Mode, I really think they just built that to cover their bases.
If things get too big—say, adoption at OpenAI, or at Perplexity, Claude, or whatever—then they’ll start pushing it more. And they highly likely have an even better version. But they really wanna just keep the—I call it the money printing scheme, which I think Google Ads is—they want to keep it running. That’s basically my opinion on it.
AI Tools in Arnout's Workflow
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. And, let’s talk about how you use AI? How do you introduce using AI in terms of self-made tools or other tools to work better?
Arnout Hellemans: Loads of things. So I use it a lot as my sparring partner. Describing problems I run into, or debugging things.
It basically gives an answer, and then two of those points are completely stupid. Three things are already checked. And one, I’m like, “Oh wow, I didn’t think about that.” So I use it a lot in that way.
I’ve done a big campaign lately where I had product photography, but I didn’t have it as a video. And I used Veo 3 to generate probably 40–50 variants I could use on TikTok, and that I could use on YouTube Shorts, and that I can use in Instagram and Meta ads. I was really impressed with what Veo 3 could do—so that was another use case.
Another one I've been working on with a friend of mine—you might also know him—Robin Ellenson, in his company, which was basically just looking at a page, determining whether it was a good enough page to get in the index, and then write a meta description, an on-page description, a page title—but all based on instructions from a condensed brand guideline. And then we basically just used the API to get all of that. That was another use case.
I’ve done a lot in automation—basically doing image recognition. And that was home-trained. So we had a lot of image data recognized. This was the early days, so this was three or four years ago—we basically built an automated eBay listing tool because we had to list about a thousand items a day.
The Modern Customer Journey
Gianluca Fiorelli: I have another question—the last one before talking about you. During all these years, there’s been the zero-click phenomenon—it’s not recent—but how much longer has the customer journey become compared to, let’s say, a few years ago? Is it really taking as many steps as it seems or not?
Arnout Hellemans: I don’t think so. I think I’m gonna answer it the typical Dutch—or rather, the typical SEO—way: it depends. It depends on your product, it depends on your price, it depends on your audience.
Think about things like Shein and AliExpress—for those, it’s literally just boom, boom, and you’re out. Right? The decision is very fast.
If you look at the younger audience—my kids are all teenagers, I guess yours are slightly older or about the same age—they need to get to an answer fast, instantly. And they make purchase decisions pretty spontaneously again.
But think about a car, right? I think over the past 20 years, buying a car has massively changed. It’s completely different. Is it faster? Is it not faster? I think it’s way more dispersed. We don’t go for test drives—we just see a Top Gear item on a car, then we Google the car, we look at a few pictures, and we go away. We get retargeted. Then we see something else.
Gianluca Fiorelli: When I was saying it’s becoming longer—I mean, it’s becoming more multi-step than it was before.
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, but not in one go. It’s these chunks. And I was really amazed by something you can type into Chrome—where you say: chrome://topics. And what it basically does—it takes all of your open tabs, or if you're logged into Google, it basically puts them into these topics. And you can basically see—hey, somebody’s looking at buying a car. But at the same time, he’s looking to go on holiday too. So those are different journeys, and those journeys might be massively apart.
Back in the days, it was literally: “I want to go on holiday to Southeast Asia,” and then I’d spend two hours investigating that and making a choice. Nowadays—it’s my phone, this happens… we’re everywhere.
And that’s why I said—the one who’s best positioned to do advertising on this, and knowing about all of this—as long as they’re not forced to sell Chrome—it’s Google.
Oysters and Events: The Personal Side
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. So, let’s talk about you. Arnout is a really nice guy, you probably know this.
Arnout Hellemans: Thank you.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And he's famous in the SEO industry for one big passion, which is oysters. So let’s transform this video podcast from being about digital marketing to cooking, recipes, and food.
Arnout Hellemans: Oh, I’d love that. I’d love that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Your expertise—let’s say we have two different kinds of occasions. One is, say, an easy-going meetup with friends, and one is a more formal dinner. For these two different types of situations, which type of oyster—and combined with wine or other alcohol—would you suggest from your experience?
Arnout Hellemans: So, the first one—the less formal one—I’d go for the larger oysters. These are the number zeros or the number ones, because the lower the number, the larger they become. And then I’d do them with garlic butter on the barbecue. So you put them on the barbecue as a whole, then you basically cook them in their own moisture, which is the seawater. You open them up and then you put some garlic butter on, with a lot of parsley in it, a little bit of cayenne pepper, and then you finish it off with some Parmesan cheese.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool.
Arnout Hellemans: Everybody will love them, right? My kids—everybody. So it’s more for a casual thing—because it’s also kind of messy. Garlic butter in an oyster—a large oyster—and then serve it with a little bit of white bread, so you can dip it in the extra taste. It literally tastes more like a big mussel, steamed mussels. I have yet to find people who don’t like that one.
Whereas the more formal one—I’d go for a Merlot red wine vinegar. I specifically say Merlot because it has less acidity than the normal one, so it’s slightly nicer. And then, the classical way—with a bit of shallot, and then thinly cut. Do a bit of that, a bit of fresh ground pepper, open them up.
I love the really nutty ones—the nutty taste of a native oyster. You can get them from Scotland. In the Netherlands, we’ve got the native oyster—they’re slightly flatter, so they open up. They’re really, really good. So that would be my go-to.
And then, if I wanna do a fancy one, I’d go and make a lemon granita, and then put a lemon granita on there with a bit of—how do you call it?l—a bit of lime zest. Because it becomes very cold, it’s wonderful.
So those would be my fancy ones. I’ve got plenty more, but those are the ones I would do. So if somebody doesn’t like oysters, they get the barbecued ones—because they don’t actually taste like oysters. It’s just like garlic butter. And who doesn’t like garlic butter, right? And the other one is the more formal one.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Where can people catch you? Are you going to attend or talk at some conference in the next months, so people can catch you, catch your brain—and not just talk about oysters, but also other things?
Arnout Hellemans: For sure. They can find me—of course—on X @hellemazz, on Bluesky Arnout Hellemans, or LinkedIn Arnout Hellemans.
I’m gonna be on a panel in Barcelona, in—where is that? Three weeks’ time?
Gianluca Fiorelli: International Search Summit?
Arnout Hellemans: Yes, ISS. So that should be good fun. I’ll be in Barcelona, I think, from the 12th to the 14th. Reminds me I need to book a hotel.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Ok, I’ll remind you because that’s very close.
Arnout Hellemans: And, I’ve only confirmed one next year, because last year I did 18 and it was way too many. So, next year it’s gonna be Hive in Manchester.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Oh! So that’s organized too.
Arnout Hellemans: Are you gonna be there as well?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Arnout Hellemans: That’s awesome. Yes, I spoke there last year—I did a panel. Charlie put on an amazing event. Hopefully, I get invited to Search & Stuff again in Antalya, because that was two weeks ago, and it was a blast. It was really nice. Really good.
Gianluca Fiorelli: A big shout to Yagmur, who was a guest here a few weeks ago.
Arnout Hellemans: And where are you speaking, Gianluca? If people wanna catch you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I’m speaking at International Search Summit—and I already reserved the hotel.
Arnout Hellemans: Ah, very good.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Then I’m going to an Italian conference in December. Then, in Manchester, HiveMCR and Friends of Search, I’m coming to your lands.
Arnout Hellemans: Oh wow, well done! I’ll be there, because I’m judging the awards—but not speaking. But you’ll see me. So, basically, we attend the same conferences—so they must be good, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s great. Thank you, Arnout. No, it was a great pleasure to have you here.
Arnout Hellemans: Thanks for having me.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And for you all—remember to ring the bell and subscribe to the channel so you won’t miss any episode. Thank you!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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