If reality of the current Internet is only 5.4% of websites are compliant, why have laws that aren’t policed? Actually they are — more fines are being issued every month.

Will you avoid a fine — or be next to be outed by your customers on social media for not caring?

Perhaps more remarkable: most non-compliant site owners don’t know they’re non-compliant until we tell them.

An Expensive Mistake 95% of Companies Are Making

This doesn’t mean 95% of companies don’t care about privacy — it means most think they’re compliant when they aren’t. 

Too many marketers believe a cookie banner = compliance. It does not. Not even close. We can show you.

A cookie banner can be like a cardboard cut-out security guard at the door while thieves climb through every window. It looks official, but the real threats walk straight in.

The current market share of cookie banners: OneTrust leads way with a 16% market share — and growing fast. But a cookie banner can be like printing an MOT certificate – pointless unless you perform the test itself and ensure safety, in this case privacy; the sector is flooded with ineffective, poorly configured banners.

What’s Collecting Data While Your Cookie Banner Isn’t Looking

And while you’re focused on cookies, everything else is still harvesting data:

• Network requests send IP addresses, referrer data, and user agent strings every time a page loads.
• Tracking pixels from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn beam back data before your banner even appears.
• Browser fingerprinting builds unique profiles from device settings, fonts, timezone.
• Client-side scripts from analytics, chat widgets, marketing tools start collecting instantly.

Your cookie banner may see none of this; may block none of this. Meanwhile, bad actors exploit these methods the way spammers dodge filters: endlessly, for their own gain.

If you don’t know what’s firing, you need to audit your website’s privacy.heoretical. It’s operational. And “we thought the banner worked” won’t impress regulators – nor customers.

When the Fines Come, They Come Hard

Privacy regulators aren’t bluffing. During the last 18 months:

• Meta: €1.2 billion (data transfers)
• Amazon: €746 million (processing violations)
• TikTok: €345 million (failing to protect minors’ data)

These weren’t companies without cookie banners. They were companies who thought they were “covered.”

Healthcare, pharma, and finance are particular targets due to industry standards. Their banners and tracking setups are under scrutiny.

The pattern is clear: cookie banners create false confidence, and false confidence creates fines. (Privacy banner would be a better term than cookie banner but that’s another post…)

Your Website Changes Daily — Your Compliance Doesn’t

Most companies audit quarterly. That’s 89 days where a single rogue script can break compliance and cost millions / leave you at brand risk. (Think we’re exaggerating? Ask us about the predicament some of our US clients find themselves in.)

Meanwhile, your cookie banner sits there, looking official, blocking the same old cookies, while new trackers slip past unnoticed.

How to Increase the 5% of Compliant Websites

Truly compliant companies don’t just manage cookies. They monitor everything:

• Catch network requests sending data without consent.
• Detect when new trackers appear.
• Spot fingerprinting and pixels.
• Automate scanning in real-time, not months later.
• Keep detailed logs, timestamps, and proof regulators can accept.

Stop Guessing, Start Knowing

Your cookie banner is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. (Original: Your cookie banner is necessary but not sufficient. It’s not enough.)

If you’re serious about avoiding fines, you need to see what’s really tracking users. In business terms: audit, monitor, act.(Original: – where the business and professional version of ‘see’ is: audit, know, be proactive, monitor.)

Because when regulators come calling, “we had a cookie banner” won’t save you.

Fines are growing in size and frequency. Today, mostly for egregious breaches — but how long until regulators make an example of companies who simply flout the rules?

And beyond fines, there’s reputational risk: being outed on social media as a brand that ignores privacy.

Are you fine with that?

The post Cressive Privacy Data – Q3 2025 appeared first on Cressive DX.

Google’s AI Overviews (AIO)—the generative summaries sometimes appearing at the top of search results—are creating new opportunities and challenges for SEO. They provide quick, synthesised answers, often citing multiple organic pages. For marketers, AIOs can potentially reduce clicks on traditional organic links while also spotlighting the websites Google trusts most.

As we cover in our analysis of the top issues facing digital marketing in 2025, we believe AIOs will cause substantial disruption to search marketing in the months and years to come.

To understand how AIOs work “in the wild,” our team analysed 4,000 search queries (2,000 each from the US and the UK). These queries covered awareness, consideration, and conversion keywords as well as question vs. non-question formats and short-tail, medium-tail, and long-tail variants. The analysis was carried out on 23rd January 2025.

Below, we share our 10 biggest takeaways.

Note: For those who want to dive into statistical significance tests (e.g., Kruskal-Wallis, Z-statistics, McNemar’s test), check out the Detailed Methodology & Stats at the end.

1. AIOs Appear for Almost Half of Searches

Across the full range of search terms, 47% triggered an AI Overview while 53% did not. In other words, you’ve got nearly a 50-50 chance of seeing an AI Overview for a given query.

As Google refines its generative approach, this rate may well increase—making it crucial to understand how (and why) AIOs surface.

2. Minimal Geographic Differences: US vs. UK

Breaking down the same dataset by location, we see a 46.63% incidence for the UK and 47.76% for the US. Given how closely these figures align, it appears that Google’s AIO rollout is similarly advanced in both markets.

If you’re ranking for queries in either region, anticipate a comparable chance of generating an AI Overview.

3. Question-Based Queries Are Far More Likely to Yield AIOs

One of the standout findings involves query intent:

Question-format keywords: ~85% show an AIO

Non-question keywords: ~43% show an AIO

If your audience tends to type “How do I…?” or “What is…?”, these types of queries are extremely likely to trigger an AIO.

4. Funnel Stage Influences AIO Appearance

We classified each query as awareness, consideration, or conversion. Here’s how often each stage displayed an AI Overview:

• Awareness: ~56% AIO incidence
• Consideration: ~23%
• Conversion: ~42%

5. Long-Tail Keywords Trigger AIOs Most Frequently

Next, we grouped queries into short-tail, medium-tail, and long-tail:

• Long-tail: ~65% include an AIO
• Medium-tail: ~49%
• Short-tail: ~34%

Specific, more detailed queries tend to invite more thorough AI Overviews—likely because Google sees a stronger need to synthesize multiple sources for these narrower topics.

6. The Nuanced Story of AIO Length

We also looked at the word count of AI Overviews based on funnel stage, keyword length, and whether it was a question or not.

Although these differences are statistically significant, the real-world impact may be relatively small. For example, consideration queries produce slightly longer overviews, but this could also be due to the complexity of the topic rather than the funnel stage itself.

In other words, AIO length is not driven exclusively by these factors—they’re just part of the picture. Content complexity and Google’s available data likely play a bigger role in shaping final word counts.

7. Nearly All AIOs Cite the Top 10 Organic Results

If you’re wondering whether organic rankings still matter when an AI is rewriting the SERP, the answer is a resounding yes. We found:

• 97.3% of AIOs cited at least one result from the top 10 organic listings.
• Only 2.7% didn’t cite any top 10 result.

8. The Two-Tier Citation Pattern: Positions 1–7 vs. 8–10

Digging deeper, we discovered a sharp divide in citation rates:

• Positions 1–7: ~83–85% citation rate
• Positions 8–10: ~56% citation rate

Our statistical tests show no meaningful difference between the top 3 positions and positions 4-7.

However, there’s a highly significant drop from positions 1–7 to positions 8–10. If you want to influence the AI Overview, aim to be within the top 7. After that point, citation rates plummet.

9. Number of Citations: More About Availability than Keyword Type

We also measured how many sources are typically cited in an AIO.

While the averages for awareness, consideration, conversion, and different keyword lengths varied (e.g., ~5–6 citations), the data suggests these slight differences don’t strongly correlate with the funnel stage or keyword type.

Instead, the number of citations appears to be driven by how much topically relevant content Google deems credible and already ranks highly. In other words, Google’s AI pulls from however many high-ranking pages it believes best serve the user query—so the richer the existing pool of quality and relevant content, the more citations you’ll see.

10 . Why Top Organic Results Are the Bedrock of AIO

One of our most compelling discoveries is also the most logical: AI Overviews essentially stand on the shoulders of Google’s ranking algorithms. Consider the following:

1. World-Class Relevance: Google has spent decades perfecting how to rank content. It’s far more efficient for them to build AI Overviews using the top-ranked pages than to re-invent the relevance engine from scratch.
2. Consistency vs. Contradiction: The AI Overview typically aligns with the consensus of top results. If an AIO were to contradict the highest-ranked sources, it would raise questions about whether the AI is incorrect or Google’s rankings are flawed. Either scenario undermines user trust.

For brands, this means SEO fundamentals still matter—perhaps more than ever. If you can get into (and stay in) the top 7 organic positions, you stand a much higher chance of:

• Being front and centre when an AI Overview appears.
• Shaping the narrative around a topic

Conclusions & Next Steps

The bottom line is that AI Overviews rely on the top organic results for both content and credibility. While AIOs may feel like a shortcut for users, relevance and authority remain rooted in Google’s ranking algorithms. With nearly half of all queries we examined triggering an AIO, your best strategy is to:

• Continue optimizing for Page 1, especially the top 7 positions.
• Craft comprehensive, relevant content that serves user intent (particularly for question-based queries)
• Monitor funnel-stage performance and adapt content strategy for awareness vs. consideration vs. conversion.

Generative AI may shift how users consume information on the SERP, but it doesn’t replace the fundamental importance of ranking highly for competitive keywords.

Detailed Methodology & Stats

1. Data Collection & Sample
   • 4,000 queries total: 2,000 each in the US and UK. Selected as indicative of client behaviour modelled over buying funnel.
   • Queries were classified by funnel stage, keyword length, and question vs. non-question.
2. AIO Incidence & Word Count
   • We recorded whether an AIO appeared and measured its word count if it did.
   • Sub-analyses split results by region, funnel stage, question format, and keyword length.
3. Citations
   • For each AIO, we noted whether it cited organic positions 1–10, and how many total sources it included.
4. Statistical Tests
   • We employed Kruskal-Wallis for comparing median word counts across multiple groups.
   • We used Z-statistics and McNemar’s tests to compare proportions (e.g., top 3 vs. positions 4–7, 1–7 vs. 8–10).
   • Significant differences suggest we can be confident the patterns (e.g., citation rates) are not due to random chance.

The post 10 Essential Insights From Our Google AI Overviews Study appeared first on Cressive DX.

Cressive DX is at the forefront of digital marketing and 2025 brings a new wave of challenges that businesses must tackle. 2024 was a year dominated by the rise of consumer AI tools and their promise to impact all walks of life. Many of our clients have questioned how these disruptive technologies will impact their marketing functions. 

From evolving customer journeys to technological shifts, we believe staying competitive requires a strategic shift. In this article, we’re sharing the top five issues facing digital marketers in 2025 and how we’re helping our clients prepare for them.

1. The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Search

The Challenge

AI Overview (AIO) on Google has shifted how users interact with search results by providing immediate answers at the top of the SERP. While Google had a rocky start with AI Overviews, continuous optimisation has meant that AIOs are now more accurate, especially with factual answers.

This can reduce top-of-funnel or awareness clicks to websites. Businesses that drive traffic to their websites through awareness based content such as guides, how-tos, recipes, etc. would likely see a reduction in response to queries like “What’s trending in fall fashion?” for a fashion retailer or “How to make pour-over coffee” for a nice coffee roaster.

We present key insights from a 4,000 keyword experiment we conducted on AIOs here.

Why It Matters

• Altered Funnel Performance: AIO can highlight your site mid-funnel but you may have to work harder (and invest more) to attract top-of-funnel prospects. This impacts your marketing ROI and revenue growth.
• Reduced Organic Traffic and Leads: AIO may overshadow your traditional listings, leading to fewer awareness-stage clicks and potentially reducing your sales pipeline.
• Lost Visibility at Critical Stages: If your site isn’t cited by AIO, you risk being absent from early consideration. This can lower brand awareness and limit future conversions.

How you can adapt to AI Overviews

• Refine content strategy: Write comprehensive, machine-readable explanations. Structure text like Q&A formats or step-by-step guides so AIO can easily parse and cite.
• Optimize for AIO: Similar to Featured Snippet optimization, use concise, highlight-ready segments alongside schema markup.
• Track AIO performance: Monitor how often your content surfaces in AI Overviews, adapting content and SEO tactics accordingly. Governance precedes performance here.
• Assess multi-stage funnel: Measure where users come from (AIO vs. organic listing vs. other channels) and how they move down the funnel.

A tool like DX Spotlight will help you keep track of your organic and overall search performance as well as your ownership of AI Overviews with respect to competitors.

2. Attribution in a Non-Linear Funnel

The Challenge

Modern buyer journeys zigzag across multiple platforms—Reddit, Spotify, social media, and more—making it difficult to isolate which channel truly drives conversions. Not understanding the ‘Place’ component of the marketing mix is a key fundamental issue to address.

This challenge is especially pronounced for B2C brands, where consumers might see an influencer’s Instagram reel, hear a mention on a podcast, and finally run a branded Google search before buying. Without robust cross-channel tracking, it’s easy to attribute the sale solely to organic search, ignoring the earlier touchpoints.

Why It Matters

• Inconsistent Brand Management: Fragmented insights make it harder to ensure consistent branding and messaging, which dilute brand equity and weaken customer trust.
• Inefficient Budget Allocation: Incomplete attribution can lead to overspending on underperforming channels or neglecting high-impact ones, directly affecting marketing ROI.
• Missed Revenue Opportunities: When conversion paths remain hidden, you risk underinvesting in key platforms where customers actually convert, leading to lost sales.

How you can manage the non-linearity

• Cross-platform tracking: Tag all campaigns, set up platform pixels (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest), and centralize data to see cohesive user journeys.
• Adjust KPIs: Create metrics aligned to each platform’s user intent and funnel stage.
• Automate data capture: Use AI-driven analytics and workflow tools to gather, analyse, and visualize data from multiple sources.
• Channel-specific content: Tailor content for each channel (e.g., short Q&As for Reddit, audio-friendly content for podcasts, etc.).

3. The Bot Crisis in Analytics

The Challenge

Bot traffic is growing ever more sophisticated, often accounting for a significant amount of traffic. Cressive’s own research matches this report by Thales, putting bot traffic close to to 50%.

Brand and presence websites can encounter large spikes in traffic metrics as well as behavioural events such as scrolls and pageviews. Some sectors are particularly susceptible. Ecommerce, travel, hospitality sector businesses may see bots testing booking engines or filling forms, distorting performance metrics across various geographic domains.  

In both scenarios, analytics become skewed, ROI calculations suffer, and marketing decisions risk being guided by false signals.

Why it Matters

• Inaccurate KPIs and Poor Decision-Making: Contaminated data can misdirect marketing strategies, causing wasted spend on irrelevant audiences.
  
• Unclear ROI: Bot-driven conversions inflate results, masking the true performance of campaigns and causing you to over- or underspend in certain channels.
  
• Potential Security Risks: Malicious bots may exploit vulnerabilities, risking brand damage, revenue loss, or additional mitigation costs.

How you can ‘Rehumanize’ Web Analytics

• Firewalls and filters: First-line defences (bot-blocking, IP filtering) offer partial solutions but can’t block all advanced bots. They can be expensive and ineffective.
  
• Enhanced GA4 filtering: Implement custom segments, IP exclusions, and detect suspicious patterns (e.g., unusual bounce rates, improbable geolocation clusters). It’s time consuming and ineffective playing whack-a-mole with exclusions.
  
• AI-based detection: Tools like DX Spotlight which uses AI to identify non-human activity on your websites, effectively ‘rehumanizing’ analytics to enable confident decision-making. We cover humanize in detail in our detailed blog article.

See DX Spotlight Humanize in action below:

4. Cookie Consent Compliance

The Challenge

Stringent data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) require explicit user consent for tracking, leading many visitors to opt out. Striking a balance between legal compliance and retaining actionable analytics is an ongoing struggle for digital marketers of all sizes. 

For instance, an e-commerce site, which relies heavily on a single website for all sales and marketing, might lose visibility into half of its user base when those visitors decline cookies.

However, the problem is far more complex for many of our clients, which are multi-site organizations operating across multiple regions. Due to different compliance requirements across regions, these organizations have to implement several variations of consent banners, resulting in a fragmented compliance picture with inconsistent data outcomes.

Why it Matters

• Reduced Data for Analysis: If a significant number of users opt out, your analytics may provide an incomplete picture, leading to suboptimal campaign strategies and wasted budget.
  
• Hindered User Experience: Poorly managed consent banners can frustrate visitors, causing them to abandon your site, directly affecting sales and customer loyalty.
  
• Legal and Financial Exposure: Fines can reach up to 4% of global revenue for serious compliance breaches, which can cripple marketing budgets and harm your reputation.

Possible Solutions

• First-party data strategies: Encourage logins (e.g., membership, loyalty programs), so users willingly share data for personalized experiences.
  
• Enhanced analytics for opted-in users: Focus on higher-quality data subsets. Expand understanding with server logs or name server data.
  
• User-centric design: Make cookie pop-ups transparent and user-friendly, explaining the benefits of consenting to non-essential cookies (e.g., better product recommendations)
  
• Automated compliance governance: A tool like DX Spotlight helps monitor consent management, ensuring you stay compliant while gathering relevant insights.

5 Migration/site changes such as CMS change

The Challenge

Overhauling a website—whether merging domains for a global manufacturing conglomerate or switching the CMS for a boutique travel agency—carries high risk. Migrations that overlook SEO best practices can trigger indexing issues, broken redirects, and duplicate content. 

Even for a single-site business, minor missteps in URL structures or metadata can result in immediate visibility loss, jeopardizing revenue until SEO and technical fixes are implemented.

In a larger organization with multiple sites, the complexity multiplies thereby increasing risk. It’s therefore more likely to miss critical details that cause traffic drops across entire regions.

Why It Matters

• Immediate Traffic and Revenue Loss: A poorly planned migration can lead to a steep drop in organic visibility, directly impacting e-commerce sales or lead generation.
  
• Extended Recovery Period: If rankings plummet, it can take months to reclaim your position, leading to prolonged dips in revenue and higher make-good costs.
  
• Stifled Future Growth: Choosing the wrong platform or neglecting SEO considerations can hamper your ability to scale, wasting ongoing marketing spend and undermining long-term business objectives.

How to Migrate Better

• Integrate SEO from Day One:
  • DO involve SEO teams early to map old URLs, plan redirects, and avoid “SEO afterthought” scenarios.
  • DO NOT assume a new CMS is fully optimized out of the box.
    
• Adopt a Marketing- and Customer-Centric Approach: DO recognize that migrations affect user experience, brand perception, and revenue—not just back-end systems.
  
• Establish a Comprehensive Data Baseline: DO benchmark key metrics (rankings, traffic, conversions) before making changes so you can accurately measure post-migration results.
  
• Plan for Ongoing Measurement and Auditing: DO automate rank tracking and on-page audits before, during, and after launch to quickly catch and address any issues.
  
• Contact Cressive DX and discuss your options: info@cressive.com

Detailed Methodology & Stats

1. Data Collection & Sample
   • 4,000 queries total: 2,000 each in the US and UK.
   • Queries were classified by funnel stage, keyword length, and question vs. non-question.
2. AIO Incidence & Word Count
   • We recorded whether an AIO appeared and measured its word count if it did.
   • Sub-analyses split results by region, funnel stage, question format, and keyword length.
3. Citations
   • For each AIO, we noted whether it cited organic positions 1–10, and how many total sources it included.
4. Statistical Tests
   • We employed Kruskal-Wallis for comparing median word counts across multiple groups.
   • We used Z-statistics and McNemar’s tests to compare proportions (e.g., top 3 vs. positions 4–7, 1–7 vs. 8–10).
   • Significant differences suggest we can be confident the patterns (e.g., citation rates) are not due to random chance.

The post 5 Top Issues Facing Digital Marketing and SEO in 2025 appeared first on Cressive DX.

Intro read, 5min

Share of Search (SoS) is the poster child of digital marketing metrics. Many experienced marketeers rightly sing the praises of SoS as an ingredient of digital marketing, Mark Ritson vocal amongst others. The value of SoS as a predictor of future market share is increasingly accepted, due to the fine recent work of Les Binet.

This value, and model of causation, is commonly understood in the digital age: in the way Google can predict election results from search activity, SoS (and higher search visibility to consumers searching online) can lead to higher market performance over time.

The data behind this argument is in two parts. Firstly, SoS calculated now. Secondly the change in market share measured later. The latter ROI can be assessed when the results are known, but how can such investment in the metrics be justified before, in the present?

As a long term marketing strategy SoS has CMOs licking their lips for future outcomes, but what about results now, for the next quarter, to justify SoS? How does a CMO sell the idea of SoS to the Board to get started?

Here I’ll help explain another business case for digital share of search as a leading KPI in your digital marketing arsenal (leaving the wider conversation of the longer term value, as well as the definition and methods of how to calculate SoS, etc, to other articles).

First, “Where’s the beef?”

As Wendy’s asked in the US and Canada in 1984. (CMOs are hungry, they want fast food.)

SoS has benefits by virtue of the process of calculation itself. It’s valuable to add this to the growing wealth of knowledge in this subject area as the data increases over time. This is based on our own firsthand experience and research in providing Share of Search (SoS), and Share of Voice (SOV), reporting.

Business case in the short term

One of our clients saw consistent value from the operational use of SOS. The data insights from our global digital reporting toolkit recommended a greater focus on SEO factors in one of their regions, and in the 1.5 years period since this focus shift their share of search rose from 5.3% to 7.9%: a 50% improvement. Completely measurable, now, before we talk share.

So how did SEO improve SoS?

SEO benefits from Share of Search

SEO analysis and scrutiny in the short-term force assessment and, importantly, pragmatic prioritisation of the SEO factors that comprise the customer-oriented calculation of SoS.

When considering the scope of target keyword search terms, the number needs to be large enough to resemble the entire market you operate in – where your customer is – but not be too large and bog down analysis. What is the optimal number? An empirical answer is 250-1000 keywords to best define a market sector with reliable statistical significance (dependent on the sector and its nature). Keyword sets larger than prove unwieldy and diminishing returns start (at this point you’re into PPC territory of numbers of keywords. Smaller than this struggles to define the market; in our experience more than 40 terms are needed, which is a fundamental restriction of the Google Trends method of calculation.

A robust and focused definition of the keyword data set better considers the target market and audience definition, and leads to better search strategy.

Next, the value of each keyword is relative in SoS and assessed by monthly search volume, provided by your chosen keyword research tool, Google for instance, to prioritise target terms according to user demand, and qualifies them to your target audience. Ranking matters, but ranking for the most important terms matters more.

SEOs will be familiar with this value above and beyond pure ranking position when they also take click through rate (CTR) into account, and not just ranking position per se. Share of Search forces this qualification to the benefit of the digital marketing process.

Relative position is demanded by SoS. Calculation of your competitors’ SoS is built in – you more often than not find competitors you didn’t know you had in search. The whole sector is measured, using every search result, and this provides valuable competitor intelligence. This is often forgotten within typical SEO reporting tools and not provided by default, Opportunities can be missed if you don’t take a holistic market view.

Consideration of SoS helps define the whole search market. Both organic (/natural) and paid search rankings ideally need inclusion and analysis, with the necessary detailed analysis of both. We’re find untapped value in their overlap, revealing otherwise hidden benefits to search marketing. The market can be scoped wider even to encompass eCommerce (Amazon for instance) in addition to search engines and the same SoS calculated and similar SEO benefits gained. (The details of these covered in another article.)

Ultimately within this wider search context brand visibility – through an SoS lens – verges into the discipline of brand governance, in which SoS is an important metric. This governance of digital is activity another benefit to brand marketing and SEO.

These benefits – macro and micro – can be delivered by a cost-effective repeatable scalable reporting process: a corporate Share of Search solution. They are in addition to the long-term impact on future share of market predicted by SoS.

Why wait until the long term? SoS can benefit your marketing now. So how can CMOs convince the board to invest, now?

Selling Share of Search to the Board

SEOs know the value of the constituent parts of SoS, but what about CMOs? What business benefits resonate with them and help them sell convince their audience the Board?

• Share of search spotlights opportunities where to improve brand visibility and increase awareness of a brand to consumers, whose use of online is now paramount for a brand;

• Weaknesses, absolute and relative to competitors, can be identified and provide a list of what to fix when CMOs delegate search objectives downwards to their Heads of Digital;

• CMOs can more easily inform Search Strategy and direct organisational abilities to chart a correct course over the long term for market share impacts;

• Tracking consumer demand, gaining insights and reporting on progress. CMOs can show business impacts using SOS reports as an organisational capability, in a way not possible with just SEO data.

The ‘C’ level and Board love the idea of a long-term systemic process to drive market share where it can be derived from controllable digital marketing activities. Good CMOs plan long term, but all CMOs need benefits in the short term. They need to show results in order to help the Board to sanction initiatives and keep faith for the long term.

SoS in this equation is an upstream factor relative to the resulting share of market. However, SoS itself is a downstream factor – and as such uncontrollable – when compared to the search activities (upstream search activities and tasks) of SEO: including technical improvement, better content, website standing, backed by the necessary reporting.

Understanding this shorter term value helps CMOs ‘sell’ SoS internally.

They get the double whammy of SoS value now from SEO benefits, and value later from correlated market share: jam today AND jam tomorrow.

ROI from Share of Search

With SoS considered a complex ‘top of the tree’ KPI, its calculation needs to be worth the effort. Modern solutions of automation and presentation make it fast and cost effective.

CMOs left to ponder where to get started can ask their Heads of Digital to commission the correct technology to drive the process, to harness SEO, and to produce SoS as a KPI for their brands. Indeed most organisations are probably already managing many SEO parts of the SoS calculation, but falling short of capitalising on the benefits of SoS as a metric itself.

Organisations can make SoS reporting and benefits a reality by articulating, and appreciating, where to gain value from using SoS as a KPI, and by harnessing the associated SEO processes behind it.

Richard

If this was helpful please share it, or reply to me, I’d like to hear. All my thoughts are shared with a ‘no content for content sake’ pledge. Read more digital marketing articles from me, the Chief Talker at Cressive DX.

The post Share of Search value in the short term for CMOs appeared first on Cressive DX.

Any Client, using a Request For Proposal (RFP) process to find and procure services, will benefit from understanding the problems with RFPs and how to mitigate them. Getting good service is all about finding the right match, and Suppliers too need to heed the warning signs in RFPs when things aren’t right – and when it’s best to avoid clients. Whether you are Client- or Supplier-side of a RFP, learn from the mistakes of FIFA’s (The Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Football World Cup bidding process for 2018 and 2022. Read on, there’s no need to scratch your head.

As the Director of Services for a professional (online marketing) services firm, I regularly receive and respond to RFPs: a structured procurement process run by a customer, to compare the relative benefits and risks of suppliers’ proposals as to how they can meet the customer’s requirements. The RFP allows for a Supplier to address a Client’s set of requirements, at a stated cost, and highlight features of their offering (beyond that in an Invitation To Tender, ITT).

RFP Lessons for Clients

(Having worked ‘Client-side’ for many years too) I can stress first the importance of simple scoring of individual criteria (in terms of ‘met/not met/exceeded’). Evaluation can get very complex very quickly otherwise. As the Client you can solicit the best responses by being very clear also on the weighting of criteria (e.g. ‘offering 50%’, ‘provider 20%’, ‘price 30%’). The more accountable you are as an organisation, to management and shareholders, the important this is to justify your evaluation of rival bids and ultimate selection – obvious, right?

Not so to FIFA in concluding their RFP for the 2018 and 2022 Football World Cups. FIFA can, and should, be criticised for a lack of transparency and ensuing mystery over its requirements. England’s World Cup bid was declared as best technical, economic, and social bid, backed by a knock-out presentation, delivered by senior level commitment. But they didn’t win. So what other factors were there? What requirements were asked for, but not met? As the Client if you are not clear on this, you won’t be clear on who is the best provider.

If there are other politically motivated, and other unstated, ‘desires’ then don’t use a RFP process. FIFA will be an all time classic example of this. It is their prerogative (with insufficient accountability unfortunately), but let’s all hope FIFA get what they really want – whatever that is.

So ‘RFP for RFP sake’ is costly and inefficient for Clients, and if it is merely for public show you then you might end up showing the public you’re best avoided. The selections of Russia and Qatar, for 2018 and 2022 respectively, the two bids with the largest budgets and the lowest marks in FIFA’s technical assessment raises serious questions over FIFA’s processes. The unnatural dependency of the 2 events led to even more bargaining politics, and more decisions of non-substance.

Your RFP will not be a one-off (a “game of two-halves”?), so be careful not to taint any future bid process, or scar any potential future bidders – why would England bother to bid again if the “best bid” fails? For the generally recognised best bid to go out in the first round of FIFA voting was a waste of everyone’s time and money: wildly inefficient, and even insulting. England’s narrow avoidance of “nil-point” puts FIFA in same class as the annual joke that is the Eurovision song contest.

The longer the RFP the longer the time it takes – how fast do you want results? But more importantly serve yourself better by sending the right signals. Even if you are accountable to only yourselves, you are making choices about your own subsequent performance. Be objective.

A Client won’t always know what they need, and it might be different from what they think they want. In my experience, the better matches have come through informal approaches, where it has been made clear we are compared informally, and where the online marketing manager has sufficient expertise and experience to take this into account. Ask your peers: the same professional services have been sought and found before, so why let your RFP reinvent the wheel.

Oh, and if a Supplier’s senior management show up and/or the project team, take this as a good sign of a Supplier’s commitment to the project.

Lastly, structured comparisons of vendors allows you to learn an awful lot about the subject and form an eclectic approach. You may not get the best proposal out of vendors by taking this approach.

RFP Lessons for Suppliers

As Suppliers, be wary of this: show enough to get the business, but don’t give too much away; it will benefit your ‘lost client’ directly and their alternate provider indirectly. To this end, as a supplier you may have more success from responses that address the specifics, but ALSO change the rules and answer different questions – the art of the dialogue is having the confidence to do this, and still explaining who you are, what you offer, and the way you work – and that you are charging a cost-effective price.

Once part of the RFP process you will get a sense of how objective it is. Be sure to take into account facts about the Client’s judgment, and any precedent of irrational decisions in face of simple evidence. FIFA’s denial of the need for goal line technology being a good example. Judge where you are in the process: difficult if the profound lack of influence over the selectors isn’t helped because they lied to you, as by FIFA to the England bid team – use this to your advantage, to better understand the customer. Do you want to work with them?

With FIFA, the writing was on the wall: repeated news articles regarding proven, and alleged, corruption by FIFA officials. If the bad press about members wasn’t true, then logic says they would have nothing to hide, and ignore it, as professionals. Instead FIFA have given more credence to the questioning light of the media, by turning their backs on it – and may well find it looking over their shoulder with more scrutiny in the future.

So as a Supplier expect there to be other factors not specified in the RFP. Usually it is the people side of it – good old fashioned ‘who knows who’.

Lessons for FIFA?

As an Englishman yes I am very disappointed the English bid was not chosen, but don’t believe I am being a sore loser. An objective assessment of the facts, if one was available, might show that the process wasn’t a nonsense from a Suppliers perspective – and the selection of Qatar for 2022 shouldn’t be a surprise from everyone elses.

Even Barack Obama has been left wondering how Qatar would be chosen over the US.

FIFA adopted an inefficient process, but it has to follow a RFP. Though, to then choose options of lower quality, because they think they are helping spread and grow the sport, is either visionary or inept. At best their decisions are charitable and not worried about commercial maximisation – well, of the sport at least. Both FIFA and RFPs will be here for a long time yet, but arm yourself with these lessons and know how to be the best of out them – well, at least RFPs.

The lessons here for those on both sides of an RFP are know (1) how the RFP can alter and determine what you get offered, (2) expect what the RFP can’t or doesn’t state, and (3) what you are getting yourself into, and whether you want to.

Be careful not to score any own goals.

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There are authority sites you want to get links from. There are authority sites that, even if you can’t get the dreamed-of link, you should watch and monitor very carefully, and learn from. Here’s an example of both.

In a change to the ‘normal’ BBC new page format of:

{title, image, bold intro para, text (no links), bold subheaders, side links}

This is a new format page with in-copy links too. Making the news page:

{title, image, bold intro line, text (with links, i.e. in-copy links), no subheaders, side links}

The embedded links were to other related BBC news stories only (so calm your link-ninjas down). The page template then being more like the self-confessed ‘blog’ sections of the BBC (whose in-copy links do often go ‘outside the BBC’ to other sites).

The only examples of this ‘non-standard’ BBC news page (I’ve found) are in the Middle East section, so it could just be a renegade regional journalist that hasn’t read the internally published guidelines.

Whatever the driver, this illustrates cracks in the wall with the increasing pressure between’ traditional journalism’ and ‘citizen journalism’, and how main-stream journalism adapts to online.

Let us know examples you find.

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