#but like a lot of fixations i haven’t actually done a lot of research beyond exploring vibes

[corpus-incorporated]

current frame of mind is i think of everything in stock market terms now. i don’t know jack shit about economics i dont invest in anything but i will be talking about how my stocks are doing all the fucking time. not stocks i own but stocks that are me, the value of the stocks of me the company. which is REALLY funny considering my url here. it’s not just me too if something or someone does well at anything i go OHHHHH X STOCKS ARE SKYROCKETING and if something goes poorly it’s like OHHHHH THE STOCKS ARE PLUMMETING FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY. this is the new it’s jover and we’re so back. this isn’t something that’s gonna catch on though it’ll probably just be this micro joke amongst my friends for a while lol

[kanene-yaaay]

Cute Laughter (Valentickle)

Kanene Note’s: Heyaaaa!!! I know, I know, I’m a week late but… hey! It is me! The timelessness in person, what were you expecting? :DD)/

XDD

Just joking, lol. But sorrey for the lack of fanfiction here, though. I was on my Test Week and so busy that I didn’t even remembered to post it here on Valentine’s Day. Anyway, Carnaval’s Holiday had (finally!!!!!!) arrived and I will try to be more active here as well to write a little some some!!

Weeeeelll…. Hope you all like this fanfic! It is a short oneshot for an awesome Valentickle that happened on Discord! \0/

Warnings, fun facts, random things and stuff:

* This characters don’t belongs to me! They all belongs to Thomas Sanders! Yaaay!

* This is a SFW Tickle-fic focus on the shipp Moxiety (Virgil x Patton), so, if you don’t appreciate this kind of content, please, look for another arts. There are a lot of wonderful arts in this site!!  ^w^)b

* Something around 2000 words. -w-)b.

* Sorry for any spelling, pontuation and grammar mistakes! Any and every advice is very very welcome! \(-w-)/

* Oh, they’re all humans here. Patton is a tired lovely dad and Virgil is the kind shy employee from one of his favorite stores.

[~*~]

Virgil was about to flee.

And ‘about to flee’ means that he already had deposited all the bags on the bed as gently as possible, which consequently meant that he had no escape beyond standing right there, staring the other with black rims glasses and a warm smile tenderly and with a little of tiredness rocks the baby in his arms.

And for ‘had no escape’ I mean that even going back to work was impossible, since by the time his coworker would already have stowed all the things and closed the store, letting the children’s products bathed themselves in the end of the sift’s darkness.

And by ‘end of the sift’ I want to made clear that the shift has ended just now, and not fifteen minutes before, when the loyal costumer with a considerable amount of hurry and messy hair (which unfairly looked so stunning on hi- Focus, Virgil! Focus!) ran into the store, urgently needing a series of products on and for that night. By the way which he hurried from his home (What? He lived in the front house! You can’t blame a guy for being observant.) he probably really needed those products, and one of the last attendants, that one who was always tidying up some things and always got some time to attend him, couldn’t get himself to say ‘no’ to those shiny eyes, which should be illegal.

Definitely and totally illegal.

So he decided to help him.

And with ‘help him’ I seek to show that the employee not only contributed on the choice of the products, but also in a outslaugh of bravery, offered himself to carry part of the bags to the other’s house.

Which brought him to his very actual situation: in the baby and Patton’s room, with no way out and that annoying persistent voice in the deep of his mind screaming and twinkling in red alert as the one who wore glasses approached and putted Simon on the baby crib. Something that made Virgil extremely conscious that they were just a few moments to talk, which leaded all the alerts to implode and beat throughout his body at the same accelerated way as his heart.

Too much data? Ok. Let’s recapitulate:

Virgil was in love, and probably would spontaneously combust if Patton kept staring him with that adorable, thankful smile. Signalized for both leave the room as quietest as possible, promptly attended by the purple-haired employee. It don’t took too long for them found themselves in the living room enjoying the silence.

- You are so sweet! Thank you for helping me with the bags. - He headed to the kitchen; his excited voice filling the entire place even in whispers. - Come on, stay for dinner, I insist!

- I, huh,… - MAYDAY!!! Come on, Virgil! Your dream guy (literally, since that one time when he dreamt tha-O.K. Now is not a good time, Brain!!) is asking you out to dinner! His hands started to shake, mind spinning non stop, dry mouth. - No, thanks. I’m not hungry.

And, as if it were a movie, his stomach chose that exactly time to contradict him in a protesting rumble. The employee coughed, following the only escape that his bluescreen brain manage to arrange.

- That is not what it is saying to me! ~ - Patton poked his tummy, watching him to move away, a wobbly smile painting his face. Behind the lenses, his honey colored eyes shone, initiating a beating danger alert in Virgil‘s core.

- Wait… - He began to put distance between both, watching the other reflect his movements, although forward with an angelic smile in his traces, a not so naive look. 

- So… - Patton sang. - Are you staying for dinner?

- Why are you approaching? - Fixated his look on the exit door. Patton was just some few centimeters from him; it would take a miracle in order to escape.

- I just want to know if you’re staying for dinner. - The host shrugged, his hands rising a bit over the necessary, his fingers wriggling.

- I- His back hit the cold concrete and, in the exact moment that their eyes unfolded themselves, two hands attacked his armpits, unlocking a muffled squeal that remotely sounded like a ‘wAIT-’.

The fingers started to stirs, skillfully kneading and poking every inch of the ticklish skin while the victim’s hands ran to his mouth, only being capable to muffle his giggles, since the gigantic smile was easily noticeable on the corner of his lips. Virgil struggled for quick seconds, squirming vigorously before Patton began to scratch his nails in that exactly spot in the middle of his armpits. His legs then weakened at the same time as a series of snorts rushed through the cracks beginning to form on the barrier of pressed lips. Patton followed him to the floor, giggling as noticed the red spreading on the other’s face.

- Virgil…~ - His face was on flames. If he opened his eyes and saw the owner of that tune, his entire face would definitely melt. - You haven’t answered my question yet.

The employee shook his head, squirming helpless as realized that didn’t mattered how much his upper body jumped in every new scribbling, each tickle was so light and so unbearable that would make him broke at any momen-ACK! OHMYGOD! How he was so good at this?? It wasn’t evENONonononOT THERE!

He was giving up, already sensing the laughter falling through his lips, intercalated by snorts and squeaks, embarrassing an uncontrollable as the quick, skilled, focus on provoking every inch of ticklish skin, finge-

It stopped.

His lungs automatically took over and the purple-haired gasped, sipping great amounts of oxygen, the huge smile being so impossible to erase as the sensation of flying butterflies in his stomach. His watery eyes opened and bumped on that smile.

Limpid.

Shiny.

And magnificent hypnoti-

A pair of hands squeezed his sides and the feeling was too much strong for be interrupted when a high pitch squeal flied from his mouth. That idiot smile increased even more.

- Wait! NonononO! – Now the laughter flowed freely, falling in an incoherent mess of yelps and shrieks. His shoulders trembled in the attempt of not letting his hands go from his mouth. The other’s fingers found way to his tummy, every squeeze making him instantly try to curl, which was impossible with the host on his legs. The said now lifted his hands as it was claws, cooing when saw Virgil’s gleaming eyes following every infinitesimal move, and wriggling in the air just to appreciate the bubbling giggles before quickly lowering and vibrate them in the victim’s belly.

A muffled scream filled shortly the room.

- Awwww, twe cute little Virge is too much ticwlish for this? Uh? Uh? Can some tickle tickle tickling transforms him in an adorable mess of beauty giggles? – Each word spoken in that baby voice was a stronger shade of red in the employee’s face. His entire body jumped a little when a curious finger reached his bellybutton. He denied.

- Nohohohot cutehehehe!

- Aww. – Patton almost lost the ‘evil’ posture, for a moment, he lightly bitted the tip of tongue excitedly, trying to hold himself from just stop and fill Virgil’s face with kisses (A guy can dream, okay?) for being so adorable. However, in the end he succeeded to gather his willpower and paint a frown on his face. - ‘Nohohot cute’? Lying won’t make you any good, mister! – And, to prove his point he scratched that ticklish point just below the navel, what didn’t have that squeaky cute laugh, but made his blush research his ears.

- Stohohohohop!! ‘ahahahaham not a chihihihihihild!!!

- Sure you are not! If you were, I definitely would have done this earlier! – For a second the attack ceased and Virgil could breathe almost normally, at least until a raspberry was replaced right in his bellybutton.

The sensation exploded through his whole body and his laughter became silent, the entire world disappearing for a moment. Suddenly a blast of strength hit him and, after a second, his eyes faced a Patton pinned on the floor, a playful smile shining in his features. The host tenderly wiped a happiness’ tear on other’s cheek. His touch was incredible soft.

- You laughteeeer!!! - His phrase was interrupted by a squeal; it seemed as if the host would bounce through the walls. Virgil felt the flames in his face also infected his neck. – It’s so beautiful and adorable!!

Maybe it was the playfulness mood between both, maybe it was his competitive spirit or maybe it was a crazy thought from his tickled mind, albeit a suddenly smirk took over his face and made goose bumps ran Patton’s spine.

- I bet it’s not as much as yours.

He turned, taking advantage of his position and tossed Patton’s, who weakly protested, slippers across the room, being rewarded with excitedly giggles dancing in the place before he even did something.

-  Vir-r-gil! – And he was prevent to continue by a series of snorts flying around when the said began to lightly brush his fingers across his sole, being careful to not lead to loud laughter that would wake the baby up. Went up and down, amused with how much high he could make the giggles be by just slightest scratching his nails near to the toes and how much he was capable to transform Patton in a puddle of jumpy squeaky yelps running over themselves by focusing in his heel.

It was like a symphony, and only one instrument was missing…

- What? The big Tickle Monster can’t stand a little of his own medicine? - He turned back and joyfully noticed the heat increase further in the host’s already-scarlet face. -Who am I kidding, ‘tickle monster?’ It is more like Giggle Monster, don’t you think? Look how helpless and at my ease you are! 

Patton started and tripped over his own words a couple of times, hugging himself and almost melting on the soft and equally impossible to ignore (or even don’t laugh) touch, until finally managed to form a phrase.

- Wohohohohorth it! Youhohohohou werehehehehehehe so cute! - And one more time let himself be subdue by the onslaught of frenetic and ​​high-pitched laughter, since Virgil concentrated on that extremely sensitive skin right under his toes.

This gave the purple lover an idea.

- Oh, is that so? - His predatory look only got wider when the other nodded, agreeing. - You know, on the subject of children I remembered something interesting… Tell me, giggle puddle, does ‘This little piggy’ sounds familiar to you?

- Wahahahait! Nohoho! 

- Oh, no? Allow me to remind you, then. - With a calm precision he ignored Patton’s squirming becoming a little stronger, as well his excitedly, wobbly giggles. He held the first toe, snorting along with the other when he let go a shriek. - This little piggy went to Market.

- Vihihihihihihrgil! Nohoho! – Squeak, squeak, squeak.

- This little piggy stayed home. ~

- Nohohohohot my tohohohohohoes! Ticklehehehehehehes sohohoho mu-u-ch!! – Squeak, snort, squeak, squeak.

- Better keep it low to not wake up the baby, then. This little piggy had roast beef. ~

- Stihihihihihill worhohohoohoht it!!! Ack! Virgehehehehehehe! – Squeak, snort, squeak, snort, yelp!

- And this little piggy had none. – He very lightly scribbled his fingers across Patton’s tingled soles, appreciating the little jump leaded. Patton melted even more into laughter.

- And this piggy went - The one who wears glasses couldn’t take no more and boosted himself to a sit position, hugging the employee from behind and hiding his face on his neck, seeking to muffle himself. - Wee wee wee, all the way home! –Virgil felt his heart expand and softly danced his nails through all extension of the other’s feet, weak enough to produce only giggles mixed up with squeals, but strong enough to still tickle.

- Still worth it now? – He turned, his teasing tune dying right when he faces the other’s expression. His glasses, almost falling from his nose, went up and down as Patton sought to recover his breath and probably the normal coloration of his face completely assaulted by the tickles. The remaining laughter gently hit Virgil’s features, who for a heartbeat was also breathless.

Silence.

Patton kissed him.

Stilled giggling, which made the purple lover also to giggle, transforming the whole experience in the most giggly kiss they ever dreamed to have.

They broke the touch, eyes meeting.

- I needed to muffle my giggles or Simon would hear! - Virgil rolled his eyes at the obvious excuse. Their glare met again, a bright smile stamped on their expressions.

…

Reader, pleeeeease, they are dating now!

[forasecondtherewedwon]

17 or 48, both together, or just one, or whatever you want if they haven't already been requested, NSFW I guess if you don't have any problem with it. I wanted to add, in honor of Tom wearing glasses: for some reason, any silly reason or plot device you need, that makes Peter have to wear glasses, and MJ freaks out about it finding she's especially very attracted to him wearing glasses. You're super awesome btw!!!!

Thank you so much for these requests, Anons! As 48 and 17 were requested together more than once, I have included both prompts in this fic. And it’s NSFW (if you’re a perv, I’m a perv, Anon #3). And Peter wears glasses (feel free to determine the level of silliness of my reasoning for them, Anon #1 haha). Extra thanks to you, Anon #1, for your kind words! Hope you all enjoy!

This Spa Day Provided to You by Stark IndustriesPairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle)Rating: E/NSFWWord count: 3752

17. “I know what I want, when I want it. So get over here.”

48. “If you want to get me naked, you’ll have to convince me it’ll be worth my time.”

Peter sighed into the phone.

“When I said the decathlon team really needs to relax beforeour next competition, that was just me complaining! I wasn’t asking you tospend money on us!”

“Yes, but that’s the beauty of being Tony Stark’s favouriteintern―”

“―only intern,” Peter mumbled.

“―I solve your problems before you even realize they needsolving.”

“I did realize,”he argued, flinging himself down onto his bed.

“And you weren’t going to do anything about it besidescomplain? That’s not very ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ of you, kid.”

“I… had some thoughts,” Peter said defensively.

“Such as?”

“Puppy room?”

“Like you rent puppies to help your pals cope with pre-competitionstress, is that the definition of ‘puppy room’ we’re working from?” Mr. Starkchecked. “Meaning you have puppies brought into your school, meaning you exposethose halls of learning to the evils of… what’s it called? Pet dander! Becausethere’s always one kid, Pete, always that one kid who’s allergic to puppies andspoils things for everyone else. And then, gee, it’s not the puppy’s fault, butnow there’s sneezing and itching and throats swelling shut, an ambulance iscalled to cart poor Timmy off to the hospital, and in the meantime, the puppieshave peed and ralphed all over the floor, thereby causing more stress than whatexisted to begin with! Then, of course, you’re blamed for the whole thingbecause it was your idea, probably kicked off the team, definitely sociallyostracized, and always left wondering, ‘Was it worth it?’”

There was a long pause.

“What happens to Timmy?” Peter wondered.

“Oh, they couldn’t save him. Anyway, doesn’t a spa day soundmore peaceful than all that?”

“Only because you turned the puppy room into some kind ofhorror movie epidemic.”

“It was a rhetorical question, since the obvious answer,”Mr. Stark informed him, “is a simple ‘yes.’ By the way, why am I having to sellthis to you so hard when I’m the one who paid for it?”

“That one’s gotta be rhetorical,” Peter said, but his mentorhad already hung up.

\\

“So, there’s, like, a sauna, a pool and hot tubs, or you canget a massage, or―”

“Living in a luxurious, fluffy spa robe for a day isbasically my dream,” Ned declared, interrupting Peter.

With a glance around the room, Peter saw that most of histeammates seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Ned, expressionssmiling and full of relief. Most of them. MJ was frowning.

“Have we done research on this place?” she asked. “When wasits last health inspection? How regularly do they test the chemical compositionof the pool water? Have there been any reported cases of―”

“It’s fine,” Peter assured her. “Mr. Stark goes there allthe time. Actually, I think he might own it…”

“And there’s never been a negligent billionaire businessowner with his fingers in so many pies that he lets standards slip at one ofhis investments,” MJ replied sarcastically.

He didn’t know where to start grappling with that, but hismouth hung open, waiting for his brain to fill it with an intelligent yetsensitive response.

“Yeah, but, MJ―” Flash jumped in.

“Michelle to you,” she corrected flatly.

“―free massages!” He raised his eyebrows like she was anidiot for having any misgivings in the face of complimentary spa treatments.

MJ rolled her eyes.

“Fine, we can focus on that, in which case, I have questionsabout the staff’s training, techniques―”

“Are you serious?” Peter said, accidentally out loud. Dumbquestion; his girlfriend was always serious.

She gave him a fixed stare.

“I’d like the person who massages me to know what they’redoing. If you want to get me naked, you’ll have to convince me it’ll be worthmy time.”

He felt the heat seeping up his neck into his face.

“I don’t want… N-notme personally…”

“I’ll do some research before we go,” Betty cheerfullyvolunteered. Peter smiled gratefully at her as she turned to face MJ, uncappingher pen and holding it poised over a pad of paper. “What were your concernsagain?”

“Happy thoughts,” Ned instructed as Peter cradled hisforehead in his hand, rattled. “Fluffy, fluffy robes.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, tone striving for levity. “Robes. Right.”

What he was really thinking about was how much trouble hewas in. If MJ was this brazen in front of their friends, how was he supposed tohang out with her at the spa? Sure, they’d found enough opportunities sincethey’d started dating to make it to second base, but actually seeing her in abathing suit was a whole different thing! The robes were Ned’s idea of acalming thought, but what did people wear underneath them? Nothing! Picturinghim and MJ in matching robes was therefore not a very calming thought.

This spa day was going to kill him.

\\

“What’s next on your itinerary?” Peter asked distractedly,leaning against one of the large lockers in the men’s changing room. It wasuncanny, being in a room full of lockers without even the faintest odour offoot sweat―this spa was a distinct step up from the locker room at school.

“Couples facial with Betty,” Ned replied happily.

Peter frowned.

“That’s a thing?”

“Yes, Peter,” Ned sighed, exasperated. “Maybe you should’vespent your time doing a more thorough scan of the veritable smorgasbord oftreatments instead of concentrating on avoiding MJ.”

Peter jerked away from the locker.

“What? Avoiding her?” He shifted his feet.

Ned sighed again.

“You can’t hide in the changing room all day.”

“I haven’t been!”

“Every time I come back here to get my water or change into swimtrunks, you’re here.”

“We’re obviously very in sync,” Peter insisted. “And I wasjust leaving.”

Ned folded his arms and stared his best friend down.

“Uh huh.”

“I am! I’m going… swimming.”

“With your shoes on,” Ned checked, glancing down to Peter’ssneakers.

“I don’t want to contract a foot fungus. Better safe thansorry.”

“Can you even get a foot fungus?” Ned asked, lowering hisvoice and leaning closer for increased discretion. “Wouldn’t yoursuper-spider-ness protect you from something like that? Wouldn’t seem right ifyou could avoid supernatural attacks only to be felled by a foot fungus. Orwould it―”

“Bye, Ned,” Peter interrupted, and exited the room.

He did actually have his bathing suit on underneath therobe―Ned had been adamant about the robe-wearing―so he might as well headtowards the pool. Following the scent of chlorine, Peter turned down a quiethallway, lined with doors on both sides.

He could swim for hours if he had to. Just until―oh man, hewas totally avoiding MJ. He’d only seen her for about two seconds today afterthey’d arrived. Being gifted a spa day by Iron Man wasn’t the same as astandard field trip, so the team had had to make their own way here. (Peterwasn’t going to remind Mr. Stark that he’d blanked on providing transportationin luxury cars; Pepper would take care of that.) Too chicken to even sit nextto his girlfriend in the back seat of a car, Peter had waited until Abe offeredto pick up Flash, Cindy, and MJ before assuring a few of the others that hisaunt would be happy to give rides as well. This was pathetic.

Peter went to brush his hair back anxiously and bumped thecorner of his glasses, unused to them. Disoriented, he stopped walking tosettle them back into their proper position on his face. His arms tingled as helowered his hands and Peter became tense and alert. Quickly glancing around, henoticed that the door at the end of the hall was ajar. He flattened his back tothe wall and crept hurriedly and silently towards it.

The hairs on his arms were completely standing up once hewas right outside the door, so Peter pushed it open and darted inside, shiftingto a defensive posture and pulling the door closed behind him―one less escaperoute for whoever or whatever was in here with him. Besides the soothing soundtrackof wind chimes by the ocean.

Beyond the massage table dominating the space, a door at therear of the room opened and out stepped MJ, head down, tying a robe identicalto Peter’s. It was suddenly difficult to swallow.

She looked up and gasped, then sighed, hand to her chest.

“What the hell, Peter?”

“S-sorry,” he blurted, straightening up. “I thought… therewas something…”

Peter studied his arms, confused. He’d believed that extraSpidey sense was just, like, a space donut alert system. Now it was an MJfinder? He guessed he had been thinking about her a lot lately. Possibly, theconscious fixation plus theunconscious longing that had her appearing in his dreams most nights hadtriggered some kind of biological recalibration, thereby setting the sense toprepare for hormones instead of intergalactic battle. The potential science ofit was pretty cool and Peter tried to think about that in order to maintain hisrapidly failing composure.

MJ flipped her trapped hair out of the neck of her robe. Holyshit.

“I’m still not used to the glasses,” she said, approachinghim and sounding enviably calm. “Are you self-conscious about them? Is that whyI’ve barely seen you today?”

“No, I’m not… I’m not self-conscious,” he choked out.Clearing his throat, he continued. This was a safe topic which would aid him withnot stare at her legs below the hem of the knee-length robe. “They help my eyesrelax. Dampen stimuli. Kinda like those old black goggles I had. The ones Ishowed you―”

“―when we were in your bedroom.”

Abort. That was not a neutral memory. He revisited it―ohboy, did he revisit it―but only in private, in bed at night. Sometimes in theshower. His pulse pounded unmistakeably in his groin.

“Yeah,” Peter agreed weakly. “Then.”

“I like the glasses.”

“You do?”

MJ stopped in front of him and Peter imagined the feel ofher robe’s tie in his hand as he pulled it free of the loops. It was so easy topicture.

“Mhmm, you look… They just make you look more…”

Peter caught her eye and noticed something. She wasflustered. While MJ searched for whatever she wanted to say, she shoved her handsinto the pockets of her robe; it strained the tie, slackening the fold offabric across her body to expose a larger V of her neck and chest. Petergestured awkwardly at the bared skin, then reached out, intending to fix it forher. (The swelling in his swim trunks pleaded for him to yank the materialapart.) Her hand collided with his as she went to do the same thing.

“…sexy,” MJ concluded.

Peter’s fingers slid across her skin until his palm was flaton her chest, then he brought his other hand to the back of her neck and kissedher. They held each other with shaky hands, nervous and giddy. Everything withher was still brand new. Internally, Peter felt like he was inside one of thosepaint can agitators at the hardware store―the kind that he’d seen when May hadpicked a new colour for the kitchen and dragged him along to pack-mule the cansto and from the car―but his lips were becoming more certain against MJ’s. Andhis dick was really committing to this erection, thickening with every passingsecond.

Peter was getting lost, unable to tell how theirclosed-mouth kiss had opened up to allow their tongues to meet and tangle. MJmoaned softly and he wrapped both arms around her with urgency. He wondered ifhis glasses were fogging up, like the windows in steamy movie scenes; he didn’topen his eyes to check.

Touching his face in a way that felt more profoundlyintimate than what seemed possible for the length of their relationship so far,she pressed her body closer. Oh god. Snatching a shallow breath between kisses,Peter let his hand tumble from her neck, sweeping unevenly across the plushstretch of her robe and resting on the small of her back. He didn’t push her―wouldn’t push her―just braced herlightly as his hips rolled forward. MJ gasped, tenderly tracing his earlobewith a fingertip.

Peter tilted his head forward until his forehead and hersseemed to support each other. He listened to his thumping heart, a steady bassto balance those tinkling wind chime noises. The natural ambiance of MJ’sragged breathing was magical. But everything was moving so fast. They weren’tsupposed to get this! A parental figure should have been interrupting rightabout now, or a ringing phone. A pizza delivery guy maybe.

Uncertainly, Peter took a step back, hands still on MJ’swaist. She wrapped hers around his and he opened his eyes to see her face.

“Stark booked this whole place for us, right?”

Oh, they were talking about Mr. Stark now. Peter was thrownby his girlfriend’s lack of transition. She always did like to get to thepoint, not waste words. He jiggled the corner of his glasses.

“Yeah…?”

“All day?”

“Yeah,” Peter answered with more conviction, focusing now.

“Well, then there’s no one else coming to use this room,”she informed him. “I went through the team’s treatment schedules myself.”

Just when he’d thought he was getting the gist of thisconversation.

“You’re saying…”

“I’m saying I really like the glasses.”

Yeah, her eyes were saying a lot more than that. What wasgoing on in there was much easier for Peter to follow. Like the absoluteawareness while MJ let go of his hand to draw her wavy hair forward over oneshoulder; she knew what she was doing to him. Were spa robes any good atconcealing erections? He was curious.

To give himself a second of clear thinking (which in itselfmight be wishful thinking), Peter released her waist, arms hanging at hissides.

“Are you sure?” he checked.

She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth had flickedup.

“I know what I want, when I want it. So get over here.”

Rather than going to her, Peter took a deep breath andbrought her to him, guiding MJ by her hips. Before he could kiss her, she put ahand to his chest.

“Just for now,” she assured him, and plucked his glassesfrom his face.

Folding the legs in carefully, MJ set them on a counter nextto an orderly line of jars. All Peter could think about was being able to kissher more roughly without worrying about his glasses getting in the way; hedecided to make a move based on the likeliness of her thinking the same thing. Hecupped her face, touching his mouth lightly to hers only momentarily, thendiving in with a firmer pressure.

There wasn’t a clear path in his mind, but he directed MJanyway, steering her by the hand on her hip while they kissed, until the solidspa table halted them. Her lips parted as though the minor impact had sent ashockwave through her body and Peter stepped right into her space, tongueteasing the inside of her lip. Incredibly (to him), his hips weren’t shyagainst hers, pressing flush, as much as the thickness of theirever-more-irritating robes would allow.

His eyelashes fluttered on her cheek as he barely opened hiseyes.

“Did they massage you?” Peter asked quietly. The room wasvery still. Seemed like the wind chimes must have run out of breeze.

MJ’s legs shifted against his, thighs parting provocatively.

“Not everywhere.”

With a groan, he squeezed her hips, not really helping asshe perched, then wiggled onto the table. MJ continued spreading her legs soPeter could come closer and his hands skipped down to her thighs, smoothing upher skin as the fabric drew apart. He almost forgot about kissing, gaze slidingdown her body, but MJ grabbed his jaw and leaned forward, initiating somethingfiery. It made his hips jerk ahead and his fingers clenched on her legs. MJ’sother hand found the tie of his robe and quickly worked past that barrier, thenthe next―which was the tie on his swim shorts. Peter inhaled a rapid doublegasp, experiencing the wonder of her hand wrapping tentatively around hiserection. More securely after his slow moan.

He broke away from the kiss, nosing languidly below her jawand down her neck as he pushed his hands to her hips. Hypothesis confirmed: peopledid not wear anything beneath those robes. Or at least MJ didn’t. Peter shapedhis hands to the front of her hips, thumbs settling into the warm crease at thetop of her thighs where the band of her underwear would’ve been. She wasstroking him now, stoking his own heat with the warmth of her palm, and he lethis thumbs descend until he could feel her pulse thumping resolutely. By then,his hands were between her legs, covering everything but the place he waslonging to touch; Peter skated one thumb towards the middle and it was slickedwith her arousal.

MJ was breathing heavily, nudging herself against his hand,so he rotated his wrist and slipped his fingers along the track of her wetness.She shuddered, rolling her fingers against his length. Peter gave her throat awet kiss. When she tilted her hips, lifting them slightly like she wassearching for something, he made sure they came back down on his fingers,easing one inside her.

“Peter,” she said,fast and sharp, and jerked her hips forward with the same desperate haste.

He released MJ’s hip with his other hand to reach into hisswim suit and tighten her grip around him, his hand over hers. Then, Petercurled the finger he had inside her, probing gently as he got his bearings.Cautiously, darting a look up at her face, he added a second finger. She made asoft, contented sound and rocked so that his fingers sunk deeper. Peter’s hipsbucked reflexively and she gave him a short pump, his hand tense on the back ofhers.

Wetting his lip with his tongue in concentration, he hookedhis fingers more insistently, tapping her taut front wall. MJ groaned, tooloose to produce an “oh.” Peter dug in, repeating the motion she’d enjoyed, andpushed his thumb against her clit. A hissing, sucked in breath from hisgirlfriend had him feeling tingly all over―seriously, his super-senses weregoing to be even more goofed up after this. Something in him had realigned,attuning him to MJ.

He worked his fingers faster, moving with her when shecouldn’t sit still. Actually, Peter started to worry that MJ was going to falloff the massage table because she kept scooting forward, so he encouraged herto lie down, gasping as her hand disengaged from his dick. Watching hisgirlfriend on her back, he forgot about missing her grasp; her neck arched whenhe rubbed her clit in a circle and every time he thrust his fingers intoher―sneaking a look to witness them emerging glossy―she thrust the opposite wayto take them, slackening the wrap of the robe until its V stretched nearly toher waist.

Peter was fantasizing about crawling on top of MJ (only fantasizing for now because theyhadn’t really talk about that yet and he certainly didn’t have a condom at theready in the fluffy depths of his spa robe’s pocket), yearning to drag hisfingers out and plunge his cock in. He was grinning, hot and hazy in his dirtydaydream, fingers wrapped around himself while he continued to, well, massageher. The word would never be the same for him.

“Mmm, god,” shesaid, legs twitching where they hung off the edge of the table.

Hearing himself faintly echoing her less distinct butequally impassioned noises, Peter was almost living her pleasure. He kneadedher clit, bent and scooped his fingers frantically within her. MJ came with anextended moan, muffled because she pressed her lips shut, and Peter swallowedthickly like he was consuming the sound.

He removed one hand from his trunks (erection still throbbing),the other from his girlfriend’s body. Panting, Peter retied the string (wipinghis fingers on his bathing suit while he was at it), then the wider band of hisrobe, not taking his eyes off her. Body limp, MJ ran a hand across her face. Hewas mesmerized just watching her breathe.

“Help me up,” she said, voice thick and altered.

She pulled the robe closed and reached out her hands forhis, which Peter eagerly provided. Their eyes met with a sly shyness once theirfaces were level. After a minute, MJ rolled her eyes and grabbed Peter’s neck, bringinghim into a kiss. She sighed against his cheek when they leaned apart.

“You wanna trade places?” she asked as she lifted her head.Her hand went to his robe’s tie, giving a gentle tug.

Peter laughed, heart beating hard.

“Yeah, I really wantto, but Ned’s going to expect to see me at the pool after his facial.”

MJ frowned and her playfully disappointed eyes made him wantto stay that much more. Glancing at her watch―the only thing she wore, besidesthe robe―she shrugged.

“I have to meet Cindy for pedicures anyway.” They exchangedwistful smiles. He couldn’t make himself turn away, let alone walk to the door.“I’m good, Peter,” MJ said. “You should sneak out of here first. Lesssuspicious that way.”

He hesitated another few seconds, then stepped back with anod.

“Ok, but I’ll see you later. Promise,” he added when sheraised doubtful eyebrows.

Peter grabbed his glasses from the counter and put them on,comfortably dampening his vision. He glanced back at MJ on his way to the door.

“Seriously, dork, get out of here,” she urged. “Thoseglasses are testing my restraint.”

Face turning pink, Peter shot her a smile and crept warilyinto the hallway. He closed the door quietly behind him, glancing back andforth as he adjusted the overlapping fabric in front of his hips.

“Hope the pool’s cold,” Peter muttered, heading there forthe second time and wondering how many laps it was going to take to put himselfback in control of his own body.

Assuming that was possible.

Well, it was another hypothesis to test.

[sqeeky-creates]

Warforged Mysteries: The Reforged (Symbology Concept)

December 2018 Drawn and colored in Medibang Paint for iOS Edits done in Pixlr

Considering it has been about a little over six months since I really posted anything substantial on this site (the great Tumblr panic of December 2018 did not help in the slightest), I figured I should perhaps post at least one thing before the year wraps up.

TLDR for the Ramble Below the Cut: I have spent way too much time thinking about D&D because I haven’t actually been playing much and my hyper-fixated brain decided that I had to come up with some symbology for a virtually non-discussed Warforged deity.

Greetings to those brave enough to click the Keep Reading, let’s continue...

And in that six month time period where I really wasn’t posting, I:

joined up with my sibling’s D&D group, set in a vaguely steampunk campaign

got WAY too attached to my Warforged Fighter

got WAY too attached to their partner, a Warforged Bard (homebrew College of Divinity, hence why I later needed to find pantheon stuff) who actually hasn’t been formally introduced in the campaign yet

spent WAY too long considering Eberron lore/pantheons

didn’t actually get to play much due to schedules and spent that time thinking on headcannons

and ended up here.  Here being I have done as much internet research as I could on one of the whispered Warforged Mysteries, The Reforged, and found diddly-squat other than they are neutral-good, represent the philosophy of Warforged souls, and has. no. symbology.

Caveat, I do know there is such thing as the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron (available on D&D Beyond), but I have spent too much money already this holiday season, so I squirm a bit at the $20 price tag just to confirm/deny some tiny details.

So, what does my brain do with the prospect of a deity with no symbology when one of my Warforged characters is a bard/cleric mash-up?

It thinks up some symbology.

I got nothing else profound to say other than I feel like posting anything nowadays on Tumblr is playing chicken with the filter.  (There is an awful lot of tan in these but will they get flagged, who knows?!) :D

[mandmexpressed]

Our first foray - Part 2

Writer’s note: This story is a little more dense and is about how my wife and I worked through it, there’s but two quick mentions of sex, for those who are only interested in that. Formally stated, Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects.

For those of you who read my story yesterday and thought to yourself, ‘this worked out too well’ I have two statements -  1) We had been over a year looking

2) You’re absolutely right, because real life pushed back

The next morning, my wife woke me up with her mouth. This is not an unusual occurrence, if she sees I have morning wood a lot of times she swoops in - she and I both have an oral fixation kink (which will come up in other stories) so it’s natural.

As she adjusted herself onto all fours I took the opportunity to run my fingers along her pussy - soaked, which was strange for this early in the morning. She was usually a little wet after sucking for a few minutes, but this was surprising.

Me (playfully) - ‘Did you wake up thinking about me and (friend’s name)?’ Her (muffled with a mouth full of cock) - ‘Mmmmhm’

I felt her pull my balls tight and start to force my cock into her throat, so I returned the favor with a finger to pull on her g-spot while I ran my thumb along her clit. She came once, pushing juices all over herself and sheets like the night before, and then started to add a stroking motion to her blowjob - I was done quick after that.

She hopped out of bed quickly and threw on her robe.

Her - ‘See you downstairs?’ Me (surprised she jumped up so quickly) - ‘Ye... Yeah. Be right there my love.’

I walked downstairs and began to make our usual coffee and breakfast spread. As I started the coffee and the burners running, I checked my phone - there was the usual business mess, and a text from my wife’s friend. 

Meanwhile, my wife stared out the kitchen window to the woods beyond.

Me (cautiously) - ‘You OK? (Friend’s name) texted me.’ Her - ‘You’re going to leave me for her, aren’t you?’ Me (very quickly and surprised) - ‘No! I would never do that!’

The question was as shocking as it was dead pan. My wife and I were the type of couple that made other people puke - we were cute, we REALLY liked each other, we loved the same things, and were each other’s best friend. 

It was the conviction in the statement that shattered me. She really believed that I might leave her, but I came to find out later from reading further about queaning and working through relationships during that time, it was normal. It was fear and doubt of the kink manifesting itself in anger.

So imagine my surprise when, after doing my research, I thought back on the next part of the conversation.

Her - ‘Don’t bullshit me. You’re way too into this.’ Me - ‘You said I was the one overthinking it. We haven’t even really talked about the actual act, I really don’t know how this is going to work.’ Her - ‘It’s simple. You meet her, you fuck her, and you take that big cock and pump her full of cum. She’ll get big and pregnant and you can keep fucking her and being happy while I’ll be alone forever.’

So let me tell you, dear reader, in that moment I’m speechless - and it doesn’t happen often. I have -ZERO- idea where to go from here. Why all of these adjectives? Why pregnant? I had never expressed interest in kids of my own and my step-children were older at this point, now grown. And why did she think I was not only going to leave her, but someone like her would be alone forever?

None of it made sense, because I was ignorant of the psychological jumps she was making. Unfortunately, I’m a nerd as well as a doofus so my first thought was to pull out the Anakin line from Star Wars - ‘Hold on, this whole operation was your idea!’

Thank God I did not say that.

Instead, I do what most people do in modern society when a situation has become awkward and tense - I pulled out my phone. And there, on the screen, was my out.

Me - ‘Look, (friend’s name) texted me and can’t tonight. Work emergency and her kid’s having car issues.’ Her - ‘Seems convenient.’ Me -’Here, look.’

I showed her the text and her mood changed, visibly. She softened and hugged me.

Her - ‘I’m sorry, I just... I just got scared. This is a lot.’ Me - ‘I totally understand, this is for the best I think. We still have more to research and more to look into.’ Her - ‘You’re right.’ Me - ‘We have some time to think about it and talk it out before she’ll be asking when we’re meeting, so I’m going to start reading more into this and what happens when it’s actually going to happen. When you’re ready, we can talk more - and if we’re not ready when she reaches out again, we’ll shut it down.’

But, I had one question.

Me - ‘Why were you so wet and ready to suck this morning?’ Her - ‘Well, you know I can’t resist. I still like the idea of you fucking her. It was just... once you finished, I kind of realized the day was going to start and then the next person you would be finishing with would be... her.’

I could tell that the last part turned her on, but at the same time she was still visibly shaken. We continued to hug for a few more moments, then went about our day - or, at least, tried. I gave up on doing new things at work for the next few days and focused on my usual mundane stuff while researching this process.

It was during this research that I found out about the kink manifestation. Of course, I then came to realize that the other parts of that statement she made were telling of some of the things she wanted but had repressed. It’s important to note that my wife made consistent mention of feeling repressed her ‘whole life’ so I suppose I should not have been surprised.

The days seemed to fly by, but there was a tension at home. I could tell my wife harbored a long of sexual repression and a lot of resentment that she felt society had forced on her. She barely used her phone during that time, which was odd, very clearly battling herself for what she really wanted.

We had never gone 24 hours without some kind of sexual activity. We went into day three with no sex.

In thinking about what she said to me, it became more (but not fully) clear what she really wanted. I decided that night, with one day to go until the weekend, to try and open up the conversation. As I was cleaning spinach for dinner, she sat at the kitchen table.

Me (nonchalant) - ‘So, I’ve been doing research.’ Her (smirking) - ‘I’ve noticed, you’ve been preoccupied with SOMETHING.’ Me - ‘Ah, well if that’s the case, it’s important - I think - to note that your fear and anger are totally normal and we can work through that. What I was curious about was some of the other things you said.’ Her (hesitant, realizing it was out there) - ‘Like what?’ Me (confident) - ‘Well, the pregnancy fetish was surprising, to be sure. But I was unaware you had a humiliation fetish as well? That seems so unlike you.’

Looking back, I should not have been so direct. It’s my nature, and thankfully it didn’t derail the whole thing (which is still surprising), but I could tell I caught her off guard.

Her - ‘I thought we were focused on queaning.’ Me - ‘We are, but I think those two factor into what you want, long-term anyway.’

There was a long pause, the air in the room was heavy with anticipation. From my end, I let it marinate but I didn’t say anything - this was the make-or-break.

Her (exhaling) - ‘You think I’m weird, don’t you?’ Me - ‘No, not at all. In fact I think it’s beautiful and it means a lot to me that you want to share this, experience it, and have fun with it - and you want to do it with me.’ Her (flustered) - ‘But how do you make something like that happen? The kids are here every other week, work, responsibilities...’ Me (confident) - ‘We work through it, one step at a time, but it starts with actually trying the basics. I’m sure it all seems very hot and sexy now, but remember that me having sex with others will affect you. If I ever did get another woman pregnant, same thing. If another woman humiliated you, even in the heat of the moment, it would affect you. Based on what I’ve read, and what I believe to be true, we have to work through this slowly.’ Her (relaxing, and after a few seconds pause) - ‘I want you to fuck (friend’s name).’ Me - ‘Are you sure? Do you want to be involved? Do you want to be there?’ Her - ‘No, the way I always see it I’m going to do something like have my nails done, or go out with another friend for a drink, some activity outside the house, on my own, and you pay for it (she laughs).’ Me - ‘OK, I’m going to text (friend’s name) and tell her to be here at 6 p.m. tomorrow.’ Her - ‘OK, I’m ready.’

I finished dinner, but before setting the table I texted the friend.

Me (in text) - ‘Hey, we talked it out and we’re ready to try. Tomorrow, our place, 6 p.m.? Her - ‘Yay! Will she be there?’ Me - ‘No, she wants to be away but wants pics. Are you OK with that?’ Her - ‘Of course! Kids?’ Me - ‘With their dad this week.’ Her - ‘Oh wow this is going to be perfect! See you tomorrow!’ Her - ‘I’m going to wear this tomorrow to work and come right after!’ It was a picture of her in a body suit and jeans, clearly not wearing a bra. Me - ‘I can’t wait to get it off of you.’

That night as I wrapped up work, the texts started to come through with pictures of women watching other women get fucked, and threesomes with one woman pregnant.

Her (via text) - ‘Is it OK that I want this?’

I went up to the room, she was naked under the covers and the light hum of a vibrator echoed.

I started to get undressed and she pushed the covers back. She was glowing, her pussy soaked, her nipples tight. I came to her side of the bed and began to fondle one of her tits while I slipped two fingers inside her.

She exhaled and started breathing heavily. She took me in her mouth, her head bobbing as I fondled her tits and tweaked her nipples. I felt her start to rock her hips as she was about to cum with my fingers inside her, and it felt amazing for her to exhale rapidly and moan with my cock in her mouth as she orgasmed.

I climbed into bed and bent her over, stuffing my cock into her waiting pussy. The feeling was amazing, she was soaked, and the sounds were even better. She was already there, I forced her to lift her hips as I pulled her hair back and shoved my cock in as far as it would go.

She cried out, but I eased her.

Me - ‘Stay there baby, your pussy feels so good. Do you want me to fuck her like this tomorrow?’ Her - ‘Mmmmhm.’ Me - ‘Do you think her pussy will be good?’ Her - ‘Yes daddy.’ Me (leaning in close) - ‘Better than yours?’

It was a gamble, I knew, but to my shock she came - hard. She pulled off and curled up, clearly in a vulnerable state. I laid next to her, took her hand in mine.

Me - ‘I love you very much, I just wanted to see how it went.’ Her (quivering) - ‘I liked it, and I’m surprised I liked it.’ Me - ‘I know, it’s OK.’

She took my cock and slid it back in.

Her - ‘Slow, please.’ Me - ‘Of course.’

I eased in and out of her for a few minutes, telling her how beautiful she was and how much I loved her. Eventually I came inside her, and then fell asleep.

Part 3 tomorrow!

[rpbetter]

hey! ive got a question! is it acceptable or problematic to rp a biracial character with a face of which you don't know if theyre actually biracial/partially white? like, I'd like to play an Indo Dutch character faced by marcel fritz, an indonesian model with an assumably german name origin, but with no noted relationship to any european ethnicity..

Hey there, thank you for your question!

I want to say, before anything else, that much of this advice is opinion based. It’s my opinion, formed by my experiences. The basis of what we consider acceptable or problematic is often thus influenced, even when there is an underlying hard yes/no possible. Furthermore, that you’ve both taken the time to consider this matter and reach out to someone tells me that you’re already infinitely more on the side of acceptable here than most people. A hell of a lot of RPers (and published authors, screenwriters, etc.) don’t bother to worry about these things, so thank you for being concerned!

As to your initial question, “is it acceptable or problematic to rp a biracial character with a face of which you don't know if theyre actually biracial/partially white?” I feel like this isn’t inherently problematic. Before anyone kills me, I say that because it’s reality-reflective. Human genetics are weird as hell. It’s often difficult to tell someone’s detailed ethnicity with full accuracy just by looking at them, especially if their genetic heritage isn’t one that presents in a way that is widely recognized, thus obvious. A person can be biracial and present as entirely white, as the race of their non-white parent, or in myriad combinations in between.

So, on a very basic level? There’s nothing problematic about the way this character looks.

What can make it problematic is the handling of the situation, which you explain in more detail, “I'd like to play an Indo Dutch character faced by marcel fritz, an indonesian model with an assumably german name origin, but with no noted relationship to any european ethnicity..”

In order to answer this better, I looked up the model, Marcel Fritz, and also double checked the surname origin. I wanted to see Marcel because where we get into potentially problematic areas with casting muses who are diverse in race is pretty apparent immediately in whitewashing. While there isn’t a load of information anywhere about him, he does legitimately fit your desired parameters without being whitewashed. He doesn’t look like a white European dude with some cliché “exotic” features as a selling point, is what I’m saying. That’s good, that’s very acceptable!

Now, as I said, I also couldn’t find much on his actual history. Marcel is most often a French name, and you’re right that Fritz is German in origin. The Dutch language isn’t one of my strong points, but it does seem to have a lot similarity, use, and transferable word instance with both German and French. (Reasonably.) I think it’s very likely, given the Dutch history with what is now Indonesia, that the model has some Dutch ancestry. Regardless, he doesn’t show any extreme reflections of any manner of what we’d think of as white European appearance. I don’t think it’s going to matter much if, three years from now, you find out that the model is, let’s say, German...it’s believable, both visually and in real-life history, that your muse isn’t.

So, again, you have thought about this, you have done some research, and you haven’t grossly physically whitewashed the muse for the sake of giving them some kind of sex-appeal while remaining, you know, white. You’re doing great so far!

What you need to do to keep doing great is to make sure you’re being respectful and realistic about the muse’s culture, experiences, and so on. Refraining from whitewashing them culturally where you’re already not doing so in appearance.

I, obviously, don’t know if you created this muse because you are from the same background, or one similar, but if you’re not, this is extremely important. It’s one thing for me to point out adherent stereotypes that have points of accuracy with my own race while portraying a character, it’s a whole other, legitimately problematic as fuck, thing to do it with a character who isn’t my race. Even if there are similarities to my racial or cultural experience, it’s important to responsibly portray the things outside of my viewpoint and to be aware of them. You feel what I’m saying?

I also don’t know what sort of muse you’re making, and that’s definitely important. A muse that is never going to set foot in our reality is going to have different experiences. It’s still important to be aware of potential stereotyping in your plots, language, and overall representation.

I call this “don’t make all your villains black, even if the characters are all cyborgs in space” when trying to explain it. It means that while a totally fantastical setting may never have generated the same stereotypes and racism  and so on as it did in real-life history, we’re interacting with the content as people with those realities. So, you’ve created a fantasy world set in a fictional space saga, you set it up where there’s representation of different races of humans, but didn’t set up as though they have a real problem with racism between humans. That’s great and viable. But...if you, the creator, are still making every one of your villains black men, that’s bad shit.

No matter how unreal the circumstances, be mindful of the reality of the people you’ll interact with and how your muse presents to them. Fantasy, supernatural, post-apocalyptic, whatever narratives and their muses may be lacking our identical experiences with racism, but that doesn’t mean your audience (in this case, the RPC and your writing partners) isn’t going to see it like an offensive neon sign. Make sure you’re not doing that!

And if this muse is going to be played in our reality, or a close derivative thereof, it’s your responsibility to be accurate and respectful. Bad representation is worse than no representation.

To avoid that, keep researching, and don’t stop at just dry history and info; check out real people’s perspectives on blogs and platforms like tiktok, instagram, and youtube. It’s important to have a range of real-life experiences from real-life people similar to your muse. I know it may be tempting, especially if you are white, to engage only with cultural tragedy and negative experiences as a point of realism. Those things are important, but fixating on them erases positive culture and history from the experience.

For example, you say you want the muse to be Indonesian and Dutch. You can ask yourself questions and build on them, like: did he grow up in Indonesia, and if so, what real aspects of this heritage did he experience/learn? From whom? What was a visit to his Dutch-heritage grandma’s house like vs a visit to his Indonesian grandma’s house? Can you list three things that are not well-known outside of Indonesia that are of significance to your muse? If he came to another country, what were the biggest cultural shifts he experienced that had nothing to do with his physical appearance?

By answering these kinds of questions, and those that will naturally come after them, you’re developing a more genuine portrayal. It’s a good way to stay fully in the lane of “acceptable” instead of becoming problematic, including giving others a cliché, offensive, hollow “representation muse.”

It’s always tricky, as I said in the first paragraph, these things can be seen as problematic if someone really wants them to be, as beyond the foundation of legit problems we have different viewpoints, emotions, and experiences. There are people in the RPC who, at the same time they demand more diversity, are hostile to anyone writing a muse who isn’t identical to their own culture, race, or gender experience. You are likely to run into them, it’s an unfortunate part of writing diverse muses. So long as you are approaching it with the genuine desire to not be offensive, doing the research, remaining mindful of how you’re using your muse in different writing situations, and keep being willing to learn more, ask more, listen more...you’re alright.

Hang in there, be respectful and accurate, and thank you for choosing a different muse-type and being interested in doing the right thing, you’re awesome for that!

As a last note here, I know I said “respectful” several times, but I think people may get something...less intense, maybe, out of that. This is a sensitive issue, there are so many things to be respectful of.

I mean things like, be mindful that in many cultures there are unspoken “rules.” Outsiders are not to speak certain languages or words, know some mythology, customs, or interact with other aspects of the culture. Please, be respectful of these things! This isn’t finding cool inside knowledge for your muse, you need to leave things like that alone when you encounter them. It’s fine to research and know they exist by way of that and stop there, it’s fine to allude to the fact that your muse isn’t going to share some knowledge with anyone, but it’s not at all fine for you to expose and use it.

These things often seem ridiculous to outside parties, people who are looking into the window of a culture that’s tinted by being raised in an industrialized, wealthy, or science-oriented culture. That’s inappropriate, and yes, problematic! If you start to feel like this, remind yourself of how things like the varied brutalities of colonialism were justified for so long; that these people were all ignorant savages. Don’t be like that.

Furthermore, if you are of the same ethnicity, if this is your experience, you really do have slightly different rules. Using the above example, let’s say that in a mun and muse shared ethnic experience, the muse has an aunt who is Very Superstitious. That’s difficult for the muse, who had a vastly different cultural experience as a Millennial or Gen Z person, but also loves their aunt. It’s alright to approach the reality of the muse viewing the things she speaks of as stories, where she views it as hard truth. However, this easily falls into an offensive category of tropes when written by someone white who is just going for...well, those tropes of generational disparity represented through Cool Weird Religious Beliefs.

That sort of shit is what you need to be mindful of avoiding when being genuinely respectful. Not everything is open and usable to everyone, and it is someone’s actual life experience and heritage you’re using.

[tradevendors]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There’s a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There’s obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this – namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.“ – Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

…was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it’s really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google’s incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google’s share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook’s is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[isearchgoood]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

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[lawrenceseitz22]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2FfSxqE via IFTTT

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The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2oaoI3N via SW Unlimited

[buildcredit0]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[businesscredit3posts]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There’s a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There’s obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this – namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

…was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it’s really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google’s incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google’s share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook’s is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

[unsecured0]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There’s a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There’s obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.“ - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

…was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it’s really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google’s incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google’s share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook’s is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

[whitelabelseoreseller]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[wickedbananas]

The Biggest Mistake Digital Marketers Ever Made: Claiming to Measure Everything

Posted by willcritchlow

Digital marketing is measurable.

It’s probably the single most common claim everyone hears about digital, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conference speakers talk about it (heck, I’ve even done it myself).

I mean, look at those offline dinosaurs, the argument goes. They all know that half their spend is wasted — they just don’t know which half.

Maybe the joke’s on us digital marketers though, who garnered only 41% of global ad spend even in 2017 after years of strong growth.

Unfortunately, while we were geeking out about attribution models and cross-device tracking, we were accidentally triggering a common human cognitive bias that kept us anchored on small amounts, leaving buckets of money on the table and fundamentally reducing our impact and access to the C-suite.

And what’s worse is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s a critical part of what makes digital marketing great. The simplest way to see this is to realize that, for most of us, I very much doubt that if you removed all our measurement ability we’d reduce our digital marketing investment to nothing.

In truth, of course, we’re nowhere close to measuring all the benefits of most of the things we do. We certainly track the last clicks, and we’re not bad at tracking any clicks on the path to conversion on the same device, but we generally suck at capturing:

Anything that happens on a different device

Brand awareness impacts that lead to much later improvements in conversion rate, average order value, or lifetime value

Benefits of visibility or impressions that aren’t clicked

Brand affinity generally

The cognitive bias that leads us astray

All of this means that the returns we report on tend to be just the most direct returns. This should be fine — it’s just a floor on the true value (“this activity has generated at least this much value for the brand”) — but the “anchoring” cognitive bias means that it messes with our minds and our clients’ minds. Anchoring is the process whereby we fixate on the first number we hear and subsequently estimate unknowns closer to the anchoring number than we should. Famous experiments have shown that even showing people a totally random number can drag their subsequent estimates up or down.

So even if the true value of our activity was 10x the measured value, we’d be stuck on estimating the true value as very close to the single concrete, exact number we heard along the way.

This tends to result in the measured value being seen as a ceiling on the true value. Other biases like the availability heuristic (which results in us overstating the likelihood of things that are easy to remember) tend to mean that we tend to want to factor in obvious ways that the direct value measurement could be overstating things, and leave to one side all the unmeasured extra value.

The mistake became a really big one because fortunately/unfortunately, the measured return in digital has often been enough to justify at least a reasonable level of the activity. If it hadn’t been (think the vanishingly small number of people who see a billboard and immediately buy a car within the next week when they weren’t otherwise going to do so) we’d have been forced to talk more about the other benefits. But we weren’t. So we lazily talked about the measured value, and about the measurability as a benefit and a differentiator.

The threats of relying on exact measurement

Not only do we leave a whole load of credit (read: cash) on the table, but it also leads to threats to measurability being seen as existential threats to digital marketing activity as a whole. We know that there are growing threats to measuring accurately, including regulatory, technological, and user-behavior shifts:

GDPR and other privacy regulations are limiting what we are allowed to do (and, as platforms catch up, what we can do)

Privacy features are being included in more products, added on by savvy consumers, or simply being set to be on by default more often, with even the biggest company in the world touting privacy as a core differentiator

Users continue to increase the extent to which they research and buy across multiple devices

Compared to early in Google’s rise, the lack of keyword-level analytics data and the rise of (not provided) means that we have far less visibility into the details than we used to when the narrative of measurability was being written

Now, imagine that the combination of these trends meant that you lost 100% of your analytics and data. Would it mean that your leads stopped? Would you immediately turn your website off? Stop marketing?

I suggest that the answer to all of that is “no.” There's a ton of value to digital marketing beyond the ability to track specific interactions.

We’re obviously not going to see our measurable insights disappear to zero, but for all the reasons I outlined above, it’s worth thinking about all the ways that our activities add value, how that value manifests, and some ways of proving it exists even if you can’t measure it.

How should we talk about value?

There are two pieces to the brand value puzzle:

Figuring out the value of increasing brand awareness or affinity

Understanding how our digital activities are changing said awareness or affinity

There's obviously a lot of research into brand valuations generally, and while it’s outside the scope of this piece to think about total brand value, it’s worth noting that some methodologies place as much as 75% of the enterprise value of even some large companies in the value of their brands:

Image source

My colleague Tom Capper has written about a variety of ways to measure changes in brand awareness, which attacks a good chunk of the second challenge. But challenge #1 remains: how do we figure out what it’s worth to carry out some marketing activity that changes brand awareness or affinity?

In a recent post, I discussed different ways of building marketing models and one of the methodologies I described might be useful for this - namely so-called “top-down” modelling which I defined as being about percentages and trends (as opposed to raw numbers and units of production).

The top-down approach

I’ve come up with two possible ways of modelling brand value in a transactional sense:

1. The Sherlock approach

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

The outline would be to take the total new revenue acquired in a period. Subtract from this any elements that can be attributed to specific acquisition channels; whatever remains must be brand. If this is in any way stable or predictable over multiple periods, you can use it as a baseline value from which to apply the methodologies outlined above for measuring changes in brand awareness and affinity.

2. Aggressive attribution

If you run normal first-touch attribution reports, the limitations of measurement (clearing cookies, multiple devices etc) mean that you will show first-touch revenue that seems somewhat implausible (e.g. email; email surely can’t be a first-touch source — how did they get on your email list in the first place?):

Click for a larger version

In this screenshot we see that although first-touch dramatically reduces the influence of direct, for instance, it still accounts for more than 15% of new revenue.

The aggressive attribution model takes total revenue and splits it between the acquisition channels (unbranded search, paid social, referral). A first pass on this would simply split it in the relative proportion to the size of each of those channels, effectively normalizing them, though you could build more sophisticated models.

Note that there is no way of perfectly identifying branded/unbranded organic search since (not provided) and so you’ll have to use a proxy like homepage search vs. non-homepage search.

But fundamentally, the argument here would be that any revenue coming from a “first touch” of:

Branded search

Direct

Organic social

Email

...was actually acquired previously via one of the acquisition channels and so we attempt to attribute it to those channels.

Even this under-represents brand value

Both of those methodologies are pretty aggressive — but they might still under-represent brand value. Here are two additional mechanics where brand drives organic search volume in ways I haven’t figured out how to measure yet:

Trusting Amazon to rank

I like reading on the Kindle. If I hear of a book I’d like to read, I’ll often Google the name of the book on its own and trust that Amazon will rank first or second so I can get to the Kindle page to buy it. This is effectively a branded search for Amazon (and if it doesn’t rank, I’ll likely follow up with a [book name amazon] search or head on over to Amazon to search there directly).

But because all I’ve appeared to do is search [book name] on Google and then click through to Amazon, there is nothing to differentiate this from an unbranded search.

Spotting brands you trust in the SERPs

I imagine we all have anecdotal experience of doing this: you do a search and you spot a website you know and trust (or where you have an account) ranking somewhere other than #1 and click on it regardless of position.

One time that I can specifically recall noticing this tendency growing in myself was when I started doing tons more baby-related searches after my first child was born. Up until that point, I had effectively zero brand affinity with anyone in the space, but I quickly grew to rate the content put out by babycentre (babycenter in the US) and I found myself often clicking on their result in position 3 or 4 even when I hadn’t set out to look for them, e.g. in results like this one:

It was fascinating to me to observe this behavior in myself because I had no real interaction with babycentre outside of search, and yet, by consistently ranking well across tons of long-tail queries and providing consistently good content and user experience I came to know and trust them and click on them even when they were outranked. I find this to be a great example because it is entirely self-contained within organic search. They built a brand effect through organic search and reaped the reward in increased organic search.

I have essentially no ideas on how to measure either of these effects. If you have any bright ideas, do let me know in the comments.

Budgets will come under pressure

My belief is that total digital budgets will continue to grow (especially as TV continues to fragment), but I also believe that individual budgets are going to come under scrutiny and pressure making this kind of thinking increasingly important.

We know that there is going to be pressure on referral traffic from Facebook following the recent news feed announcements, but there is also pressure on trust in Google:

Before the recent news feed changes, slightly misleading stories had implied that Google had lost the top spot as the largest referrer of traffic (whereas in fact this was only briefly true in media)

The growth of the mobile-first card view and richer and richer SERPs has led to declines in outbound CTR in some areas

The increasingly black-box nature of Google’s algorithm and an increasing use of ML make the algorithm increasingly impenetrable and mean that we are having to do more testing on individual sites to understand what works

While I believe that the opportunity is large and still growing (see, for example, this slide showing Google growing as a referrer of traffic even as CTR has declined in some areas), it’s clear that the narrative is going to lead to more challenging conversations and budgets under increased scrutiny.

Can you justify your SEO investment?

What do you say when your CMO asks what you’re getting for your SEO investment?

What do you say when she asks whether the organic search opportunity is tapped out?

I’ll probably explore the answers to both these questions more in another post, but suffice it to say that I do a lot of thinking about these kinds of questions.

The first is why we have built our split-testing platform to make organic SEO investments measurable, quantifiable and accountable.

The second is why I think it’s super important to remember the big picture while the media is running around with hair on fire. Media companies saw Facebook overtake Google as a traffic channel (and then are likely seeing that reverse right now), but most of the web has Google as the largest and growing source of traffic and value.

The reality (from clickstream data) is that it's really easy to forget how long the long-tail is and how sparse search features and ads are on the extreme long-tail:

Only 3–4% of all searches result in a click on an ad, for example. Google's incredible (and still growing) business is based on a small subset of commercial searches

Google's share of all outbound referral traffic across the web is growing (and Facebook's is shrinking as they increasingly wall off their garden)

The opportunity is for smart brands to capitalize on a growing opportunity while their competitors sink time and money into a social space that is increasingly all about Facebook, and increasingly pay-to-play.

What do you think? Are you having these hard conversations with leadership? How are you measuring your digital brand’s value?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2ogKv9e via IFTTT