Google had us completely fooled

We’ve missed the mark badly!!

Most likely, you’ve been thinking wrong, investing wrong, and measuring wrong.

When you start calculating how much of the marketing budget has been misallocated, it can be pretty overwhelming.

A two-year study conducted by Kapero in collaboration with ANFO (The Norwegian Advertisers Association) and MBL (The Association of Norwegian Media) was published in March 2026. The new insights change a lot of what we think we know about digital marketing.

Everyone knows that the results we see in Google Analytics do not match reality.But this study shows what actually drives sales.

The study, “The Commercial Power of Brands in the Digital World,” shows that the brand is the most important driver of sales, both offline and online.

Even though digital platforms appear to generate a lot of traffic, demand is largely created by the brand. Search engines often function more as a navigation tool on the path to purchase.

This becomes even clearer when you look at search advertising.

Brand-related advertising (for example, “IKEA sofa”) is significantly more effective than generic searches (“sofa”). The cost per conversion is lower and the return is higher.

That actually makes sense. When someone searches for a brand name, they are searching with intent.

But then the question is:

How did the customer become aware of the brand in the first place?

This is also a big part of the explanation for why so many marketing budgets are used inefficiently.

The analysis shows that 70-90% of revenue comes from just 5% of keywords. The remaining keywords account for a large share of the costs without contributing proportionally to sales.

In other words: the gains from the good keywords are often eaten up by the bad ones.

Many companies could achieve both higher growth and better returns with fewer paid keywords and more focus on building demand through brand-building activities.

With that, I’m pointing you in the direction of Lyll and broad brand-building in leading digital newspapers. That is the best thing you can do for your revenue.