Vocabulary is more important than taste.
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Pretty clear emerging growth strategy on social is “employees as fleet.”
Saw it on LinkedIn first. Where every announcement from certain brands hits my feed.
And you click the comments and of the 32 comments, 28 are from employees, 2 are from their VCs, 1 is from a connected stakeholder I can’t place and 1 is from a customer.
It’s pretty easy to do this. Maybe the closest thing to a large scale arbitrage you could run right now.
Saw it on LinkedIn first. Where every announcement from certain brands hits my feed.
And you click the comments and of the 32 comments, 28 are from employees, 2 are from their VCs, 1 is from a connected stakeholder I can’t place and 1 is from a customer.
It’s pretty easy to do this. Maybe the closest thing to a large scale arbitrage you could run right now.
Strategy and measurement for teams struggling to talk organic traffic
While everything comes down to pipe and revenue, leaders often want to see the leading indicators.
When you show organic in decline it’s a tough story.
So what you do is group your pages and keywords by branded/unbranded, intent, etc and calculate two trend lines.
Changes in search volume
Changes in CTR
And from there you calc “net headwind” and then you trend that over however much data you have to get a sense of the slope. And with that line you can somewhat reasonably forecast what you expect the headwind to be like over the next 6-12 months etc.
Maybe you say something like “if we do nothing organic is down 25% next year.”
And then you just write that traffic off.
And then you do the thing marketing and advertising is always about. Incrementality.
The 25% is gone. Then analyze the way to invest on top of it.
Was your seo program historically more than 2x as efficient as comparable demand programs? Perhaps it is still the most productive use an incremental dollar. Just on the value if seo not even counting aeo.
The infinite compounding traffic days are over. But paid never had any of those characteristics. Organic still has some of those characteristics even if they are diminished, lower ceiling and lower lifetime value.
The math may or may not work or make sense.
But if you approach organic as one big blob that’s in decline you won’t reason about it correctly.
If you approach it by saying “existing portfolio has 25% headwind, what do we build knowing that” you can arrive somewhere maybe a little bit different.
Part of why thinking about this in a nuanced way is so important is that search was an enormous channel.
You can’t replace Giambi. But you might be able to recreate him in the aggregate.
The hard part about that is building up new channels and programs takes time.
So sometimes the smart thing to do is to blunt/manage the headwinds as much as possible to give yourself time.
A 30% annual headwind is brutal but lots of folks were growing 30% before this.
If you could pull off 3 years of 30% net growth (traffic + cro) you bought yourself three years of being actually flat to build up new parts of your demand engine. That timeline will look different depending how big you are and how central search was to your gtm.
But time is valuable.
A dollar spent on seo today does not return what it once did. But the returns are greater than zero.
The math is obviously different than it was before. You need to know it.
But spending $$$ to get net 15% performance reads as one thing (big organic blob).
Spending $$$ to get 10% incremental performance over forecasted baseline is a different thing (not a blob).
While everything comes down to pipe and revenue, leaders often want to see the leading indicators.
When you show organic in decline it’s a tough story.
So what you do is group your pages and keywords by branded/unbranded, intent, etc and calculate two trend lines.
Changes in search volume
Changes in CTR
And from there you calc “net headwind” and then you trend that over however much data you have to get a sense of the slope. And with that line you can somewhat reasonably forecast what you expect the headwind to be like over the next 6-12 months etc.
Maybe you say something like “if we do nothing organic is down 25% next year.”
And then you just write that traffic off.
And then you do the thing marketing and advertising is always about. Incrementality.
The 25% is gone. Then analyze the way to invest on top of it.
Was your seo program historically more than 2x as efficient as comparable demand programs? Perhaps it is still the most productive use an incremental dollar. Just on the value if seo not even counting aeo.
The infinite compounding traffic days are over. But paid never had any of those characteristics. Organic still has some of those characteristics even if they are diminished, lower ceiling and lower lifetime value.
The math may or may not work or make sense.
But if you approach organic as one big blob that’s in decline you won’t reason about it correctly.
If you approach it by saying “existing portfolio has 25% headwind, what do we build knowing that” you can arrive somewhere maybe a little bit different.
Part of why thinking about this in a nuanced way is so important is that search was an enormous channel.
You can’t replace Giambi. But you might be able to recreate him in the aggregate.
The hard part about that is building up new channels and programs takes time.
So sometimes the smart thing to do is to blunt/manage the headwinds as much as possible to give yourself time.
A 30% annual headwind is brutal but lots of folks were growing 30% before this.
If you could pull off 3 years of 30% net growth (traffic + cro) you bought yourself three years of being actually flat to build up new parts of your demand engine. That timeline will look different depending how big you are and how central search was to your gtm.
But time is valuable.
A dollar spent on seo today does not return what it once did. But the returns are greater than zero.
The math is obviously different than it was before. You need to know it.
But spending $$$ to get net 15% performance reads as one thing (big organic blob).
Spending $$$ to get 10% incremental performance over forecasted baseline is a different thing (not a blob).
I fell into a trap on design twitter where my feed devolved into an infinite abyss of sidebars and dashboards.
We should pass laws that you can only buy SaaS one day a year and we have SaaS election day you are just on the edge of your seat watching exit polls for crm in smb in Wisconsin.
Is “agentic” having the impact we thought Anderson?
Is “agentic” having the impact we thought Anderson?