New research: AI will steal organic clicks in 2025

Happy Monday, dear ecommerce champions!

Ada here, ready to help you crush your sales goals this week. Today, we’re making sense of the latest AI, tech, and media research report from Reuters in conjunction with the University of Oxford, England.

We’ll cover:

• AI and the “zero-click” environment

• Growth Hack: Video that converts

• Trend Alert: Collagen masks

• 60-min Challenge: Quick video wins

See how top Shopify brands are leveling up their lifecycle marketing

• 3X the opt-in rate of your existing pop up

• Grow your subscriber list by 40%

• Increase abandonment flow revenue by 55%

See how it works

AI is slowly eating organic search results

According to a fresh Reuters/Oxford research report (released 9th January 2025), customers are clicking less on search results… Purely because AI is creating a “zero-click” environment where people can get answers to their queries without actually clicking to visit (or buy from) websites. Ouch!

The study highlighted a few bombshells you might want to pay attention to:

• 74% of businesses are losing traffic to AI snippets

• Google Discover traffic is up 12% (while Facebook/X traffic is tanking)

• YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram video content are eating traditional content alive

Growth hack: How to win with video

One brand we checked in with went all-in on video and had a significant number of their videos hit >100K views in 2024.

What worked for them was they stopped making boring product videos. Rather, they made more "Day in the Life"/Behind-the-scenes videos with the product and got 3x higher engagement than standard product demos.

For some other brands (Like True Classic in the image above), creating funny spin-offs of popular dramas drew 35 Million free viewers on YouTube alone.

At the end of the day. it’s a matter of finding what resonates with your brand and testing it across all platforms.

Trend alert: Collagen masks

I know we’ve covered quite a lot of beauty trends recently - forgive one more - but Collagen masks are exploding right now.

So far, there are 2,831 #biodancecollagenmask TikTok videos and ONE brand makes $1M monthly on Amazon alone! 

This tells us that the 1.5% yearly collagen loss = a very hungry market. Also,

• Overnight beauty is trending HARD

• It’s easy to demonstrate results

• Perfect for video content

3 ways you can cash in:

1. Bundle with other overnight treatments

2. Create before/after content

3. Partner with skincare influencers

Weekly challenge

This week, your mission is to create 1 viral-worthy product video and test it across the top 3 growth platforms. (Don’t worry, we’ll make it easy!)

If you don’t have a video creation team, ask your supplier for video footage and repurpose it in 1 minute using AI for the following platforms:

• 60 sec for YouTube

• 30 sec for Instagram

• 15 sec for TikTok

The Formula:

1. First 3 seconds: Hook with problem

2. Middle: Show solution in action

3. Last 5 seconds: Clear CTA

EXAMPLE: "Tired of wrinkles? Watch this collagen mask transform my skin overnight! 🎭 Link in bio to get yours"

Test these across all 3 to see which of these platforms get over 10 views.

That's all for today! Keep testing, keep growing, keep winning! 🚀

P.S. What’s the biggest challenge you’re having with your store at the moment? Hit reply and risk getting featured!

Till next Monday, Ada