Did you know SEI is considered one of the GREENEST schools in the world?

When you come to SEI’s Paonia, Colorado training facility for your hands-on lab experience, the solar PV systems you see throughout our facility are all part of the renewable energy magic that keeps our non-profit operations going!

We have approximately 28kw of Solar PV operating here at SEI and we produce approximately 40,000 kWh per year (40MWh). We recently received a check for overproduction from our utility, Delta-Montrose Electric Association (DMEA), for $745.07 at $0.075 per kWh which is approximately 10 MWh of annual overproduction!

Our annual consumption for the entire facility is around 30,000kWh per year or 30MWh which includes SEI’s and SEI Professional Services’ (SEIPS) offices. That means we are generating 125% of our annual consumption for SEI and SEIPS combined!

This accounts for all the electricity for the facility and operations, including AC in the summer, all heating in the winter (we also have solar thermal systems operating), and all the free electric vehicles charging stations we have on campus.

We are also getting ready to add an additional 10kW of Solar PV with the new carport here on campus. So when you come to SEI and get your training on all of those hands-on lab stations throughout the facility – you can feel proud that the electricity produced is helping change the world through SEI’s non-profit educational mission!

The post Did you know SEI is considered one of the GREENEST schools in the world? appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

Oren Cass’s Testimony on Climate Change Damage, Part 2 of 3

In my last post, I discussed the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass’s May 16 testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in a hearing on climate change. Cass’s overall thesis is that many “official” estimates of potential climate change damages do not adequately incorporate human adaptability, and so they grossly exaggerate the likely harms.

In my post, I reviewed Cass’s argument about ozone and PM2.5, where the alleged dangers of unchecked warming will lead to atmospheric concentrations of these pollutants by the year 2100 that are still lower than they were in the year 2000. In effect, the studies warning of the dangers of more ozone and PM2.5 did not adequately take into account the dramatic reduction in these pollutants that has occurred just in the last two decades.

In the current post, I’ll summarize another of Cass’s excellent points, which is that researchers did not incorporate the documented decline of heat mortality rates into their projections, thus grossly exaggerating deaths from global warming.

Historical Heat Mortality Rates

In a previous IER post, I blogged about Oren Cass’s policy study when it first came out. In that post, I explained how some of the alarmist studies in this literature commit the simple fallacy of assuming that northern cities will be just as vulnerable to hot days in the year 2100 (when they are—in the computer simulations—more the norm) as they are right now, when they are still rare. Yet these projections assumed that, say, people in Pittsburgh in the year 2100 would suffer eighty times the mortality rate from heat as people in Houston in the year 2000.

As I pointed out, the problem here is that the researchers involved were not taking into account the fact that a northern city would adapt to become more like a southern city, if in fact that climate really changed as the computer simulations indicated. I used an analogy going the other way, showing that Atlanta would respond much better to snowstorms if they became the norm, because the city government would buy more plows and salt the roads, while the drivers would become better in the snow.

In the present post, let me move to a different line of research that Cass also critiques. Specifically, he analyzes the study by Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone, “Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US,” Applied Economics 3, no. 4 (Oct. 2011): pp. 152–85. These authors predict a net increase of 63,000 annual deaths in the U.S. due to higher temperatures by the year 2100—this comes from 59,000 fewer cold-related deaths coupled with 123,000 more heat-related deaths.

Now the method behind the Deschênes-Greenstone calculation is better than a completely naïve approach in which a given city in the north is assumed to have the same vulnerability to an extreme heat day in the year 2100, even if such days become much more frequent by then.

However, even though the Deschênes-Greenstone study incorporates the adaptations already deployed geographically (by combining the mortality of extreme heat days across various U.S. cities), it does not adequately account for the improved adaptability we’ve observed over time (as I explain in the next section).

Things Get Better With Age

In a subsequent study a few years later (in which Deschênes and Greenstone were co-authors), the large estimates of future heat deaths were scaled back. Specifically, in Alan Barreca et al., “Adapting to Climate Change: The Remarkable Decline in the US Temperature-Mortality Relationship over the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Political Economy 124, no. 1 (Feb. 2016): pp. 105-59, the researchers found that heat mortality rates declined significantly as air conditioning and other adaptations were implemented. As Cass summarizes, the researchers found “the mortality effect [of extreme heat days] falling by half from the 1960–79 period to the 1980–2004 period.”

Once we take into account the fact that the historical mortality rates over a longer period are unnecessarily pessimistic—because they incorporate deaths during years when the U.S. had less extensive air conditioning—this obviously makes projected deaths from extreme heat in the year 2100 much lower. Again I quote from Cass’s discussion:

Applying the Deschênes-Greenstone estimate of 42.3 additional >90°F days by 2100, they estimated that climate change could cause roughly 60,000 additional deaths in 2100 at the 1960 level of air-conditioner adoption. But at the 2004 level of air-conditioner adoption, “the null hypothesis that additional 80°F–89°F and >90°F days would have no impact on mortality cannot be rejected.” Or, to put this in plain English: additional extremely hot days could mean zero additional heat deaths. (Bold added.)

Note in the above that this result is quite conservative. The actual adoption of air conditioning in the United States in the year 2100 will surely be much more extensive than it was in 2004.

Yet even though the literature contains this well-documented ability of humans to adapt to hot days, Cass shows that some of the “official” estimates of the dangers of climate change chose to ignore this element of the research when constructing the headline figures that captured the attention of the press and policymakers. Nobody wants to hear, “With more air conditioning, it’s possible that no additional deaths will occur in the year 2100 because of 43 additional extreme heat days.”

Conclusion

In this post I summarized yet another example from Cass’s House testimony in which the alarming projections of U.S. deaths from climate change have clearly been exaggerated. The mortality rate from extreme heat fell in half from the period 1960-1979 to 1980-2004. Even if we stipulate the increased global temperatures in the computer simulations cited by government agencies, the estimates that take into account recent evidence on air conditioning show that the impact on human mortality in the U.S. could be negligible at the end of the century.

It is surely not fanciful or unscientific to say that estimates of climate change damage should look at the impact of air conditioning on historical mortality rates. And yet, as Oren Cass’s testimony shows, the most alarming projections of damage—and these figures are used in “official” documents guiding policy—ignore such basic considerations.

The post Oren Cass’s Testimony on Climate Change Damage, Part 2 of 3 appeared first on IER.

SEI launches Solar Forward: A new solar advising program for rural Colorado communities

This year, Solar Energy International (SEI) has launched a new statewide initiative for rural communities in Colorado. Read more about the program that powers rural Colorado communities into the future by starting or supporting solar markets: 

SEI is seeking communities interested in growing their local solar, renewable energy, and energy efficiency markets to participate in a new program, Solar Forward.  The Solar Forward program is a grassroots approach, relying mainly on community participation, to stimulate solar growth in a region. SEI’s Solar Forward community adviser will partner with a community group to provide tools and technical expertise to drive solar initiatives in the community.

Solar Forward empowers community groups who are interested in growing their solar markets, by providing them with a dedicated adviser to provide consulting on community solar initiatives.  The adviser will assist communities every step of the way in the program planning and implementation processes.

SEI is an industry-leading solar training facility, and the core of our mission is the belief in a world powered by renewable energy. With over 60,000 trained alumni and extensive technical curriculum, in addition to experience establishing all of these programs in our home base of Delta County, we want to keep this momentum growing and spread the success throughout the state of Colorado!

How it works:

Learn more or apply today on the Solar Forward webpage: https://www.solarenergy.org/solar-forward/

The post SEI launches Solar Forward: A new solar advising program for rural Colorado communities appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

Take a deep dive into battery technology and meet the lab yard’s first Lithium Ion battery

Solar Energy International recently added a brand new SMA Sunny Island AC-coupled system to it’s battery-based hands-on training in the Paonia, Colorado lab yard. Danny Bailey, SEI’s PV Lab manager weighs in on SEI’s first Lithium Ion battery:

The new Sunny Island AC coupled system is comprised of the following components: The primary battery based inverter is an SMA, Sunny Island SI4548 which has a 4500W output at 48Vdc. This is accompanied by a Grid-Direct SMA SunnyBoy4000TL-22-US that is connected to a 4KW CertainTeed, Apollo II BIPV solar shingle array.

The point of common coupling integrates SMA’s Smartformer, which is an autoformer that takes the 120V output of the Sunny Island and steps up the voltage to 240V and enables the Sunny Island to be compatible with the 240V output of the Sunny Boy. The Smartformer also contains a Bypass switch, as well as a load shedding contactor to regulate loads in the backed up loads panel. The system also has an automatic transfer switch to show students how to incorporate a generator into this system, as well as a backed up loads panel in order to run loads in the event of a grid failure.

The battery for this system has been provided by Blue Planet Energy. The battery, Blue Ion, is Lithium Iron Phosphate Li-FePo4, and is considered one of the safest lithium chemistries on the market today. The battery capacity is 16kWh and is comparable to a lead acid bank of 32kWh because of the capability of discharging this battery to 100% depth of discharge (traditional lead acids batteries are not recommended to go below 50% DoD). Not only does the Blue Ion pack high power density, but it is installed in a very sleek cabinet along with the BMS and a main overcurrent protection device, and takes up about half the space of a similar capacity lead acid battery bank.

 

On top of the previous attributes that the Blue Ion battery offers, there are no requirements for venting or fire suppression (some of the lithium options available today require specially engineered fire suppression systems due to there inherent fire danger), which is a huge benefit when trying to install these in a residence. A huge thanks goes out to Blue Planet Energy and our SEI instructor Kyle Bolger helping SEI get it’s first Lithium Ion Battery!

Come train on an emerging storage technology, Lithium Ion at SEI to stay on top of the latest trends in solar+storage technology.

The post Take a deep dive into battery technology and meet the lab yard’s first Lithium Ion battery appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.

In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.

And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.

Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:

This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.

When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:

1. Could no one in my situation access a list of current store inventory, or, barring that, seek out merchandise with me instead of risking the loss of a sale?
2. Could no one offer to let “corporate” know that I’m dissatisfied with a “customer service policy” that would require me to spend $225 to buy a whole case of vitamins? Why am I being treated like a warehouse instead of a person?
3. Could no one at the pharmacy see a man with a leg wound about to fall over, grab a folding chair for him, and keep him safe, instead of risking a lawsuit?

I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.

“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:

1. Inventory is known by all store staff, and my cooler can be promptly located by any employee, rather than workers appearing helpless.
2. Employees have the power to push back and insist that, because customers still expect to be able to special order merchandise, a specific store location will maintain this service rather than disappoint consumers.
3. Pharmacists can recognize that patrons are often quite ill and can immediately place some chairs near the pharmacy counter, rather than close their eyes to suffering.

“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”

Let’s ask a monk for the answer.

“He took the time...”

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.

“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.

Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.

The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.

It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:

“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”

Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?

The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.

An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.

And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...

For marketing agencies, opportunity knocks

So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,

“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”

Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.

You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.

“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”

Think again.

Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:

• The mall crisis is secretly morphing into a full-on Armageddon - Business Insider
• America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning - Bloomberg
• Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week - NBC
• 8 Companies Amazon is Killing - Investopedia
• These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - Clark.com

If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?

What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems.
What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.

Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.

Print and share some good retail tidings

Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.

At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.

While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.

Investing time

So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?

While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:

1. C-suites need to invest time in creating a policy which a) abundantly communicates company culture, b) expresses trust in employee initiative, and c) dispenses with needless “chain of command” steps, while d) ensuring that every public facing staffer receives full and ongoing training. A recent study says 62% of new retail hires receive less than 10 hours of training. I’d call even these worrisome numbers optimistic. I worked at 5 retail jobs in my early youth. I’d estimate that I received no more than 1 hour of training at any of them.
2. Because a chain of command can’t realistically be completely dispensed with in a large organization, store managers must then be allowed the time to communicate the culture, encourage employees to use common sense, define what “common sense” does and doesn’t look like to the company, and, finally, offer essential training.
3. Employees at every level must be given the time to observe how happy or unhappy customers appear to be at their location, and they must be taught that their observations are of inestimable value to the brand. If an employee suggests a solution to a common consumer complaint, this should be recognized and rewarded.
4. Finally, customers must be given the time to air their grievances at the time of service, in-person, with accessible, responsive staff. The word “corporate” need never come into most of these conversations unless a major claim is involved. Given that it may cost as much as 7x more to replace an unhappy customer than to keep an existing one happy, employees should be empowered to do business graciously and resolve complaints, in most cases, without escalation.

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.

The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.

Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.

Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.

Reviews can read like this:

And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.

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Tracking Your Link Prospecting Using Lists in Link Explorer

Posted by Dr-Pete

I'm a lazy marketer some days — I'll admit it. I don't do a lot of manual link prospecting, because it's a ton of work, outreach, and follow-up. There are plenty of times, though, where I've got a good piece of content (well, at least I hope it's good) and I want to know if it's getting attention from specific sites, whether they're in the search industry or the broader marketing or PR world. Luckily, we've made that question a lot easier to answer in Link Explorer, so today's post is for all of you curious but occasionally lazy marketers. Hop into the tool if you want to follow along:

Open Link Explorer

(1) Track your content the lazy way

When you first visit Link Explorer, you'll see that it defaults to "root domain":

Some days, you don't want to wade through your entire domain, but just want to target a single piece of content. Just enter or paste that URL, and select "exact page" (once you start typing a full path, we'll even auto-select that option for you):

Now I can see just the link data for that page (note: screenshots have been edited for size):

Good news — my Whiteboard Friday already has a decent link profile. That's already a fair amount to sort through, and as the link profile grows, it's only going to get tougher. So, how can I pinpoint just the sites I'm interested in and track those sites over time?

(2) Make a list of link prospects

This is the one part we can't automate for you. Make a list of prospects in whatever tool you please. Here's an imaginary list I created in Excel:

Obviously, this list is on the short side, but let's say I decide to pull a few of the usual suspects from the search marketing world, plus one from the broader marketing world, and a couple of aspirational sites (I'm probably not going to get that New York Times link, but let's dream big).

(3) Create a tracking list in Link Explorer

Obviously, I could individually search for these domains in my full list of inbound links, but even with six prospects, that's going to take some time. So, let's do this the lazy way. Back in Link Explorer, look at the very bottom of the left-hand navigation and you'll see "Link Targeting Lists":

Keep scrolling — I promise it's down there. Click on it, and you'll see something like this:

On the far-right, under the main header, click on "[+] Create new list." You'll get an overlay with a three-step form like the one below. Just give your list a name, provide a target URL (the page you want to track links to), and copy-and-paste in your list of prospects. Here's an example:

Click "Save," and you should immediately get back some data.

Alas, no link from the New York Times. The blue icons show me that the prospects are currently linking to Moz.com, but not to my target page. The green icon shows me that I've already got a head-start — Search Engine Land is apparently linking to this post (thanks, Barry!).

Click on any arrow in the "Notes" column, and you can add a note to that entry, like so:

Don't forget to hit "Save." Congratulations, you've created your first list! Well, I've created your first list for you. Geez, you really are lazy.

(4) Check in to track your progress

Of course, the real magic is that the list just keeps working for you. At any time, you can return to "Link Tracking Lists" on the Link Explorer menu, and now you'll see a master list of all your lists:

Just click on the list name you're interested in, and you can see your latest-and-greatest data. We can't build the links for you, but we can at least make keeping track of them a lot easier.

Bonus video: Now in electrifying Link-o-Vision!

Ok, it's just a regular video, although it does require electricity. If you're too lazy to read (in which case, let's be honest, you probably didn't get this far), I've put this whole workflow into an enchanting collection of words and sounds for you:

I hope you'll put your newfound powers to good. Let us know how you're using Tracking Lists (or how you plan to use them) in the comments, and where you'd like to see us take them next!

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!

How Much Data Is Missing from Analytics? And Other Analytics Black Holes

Posted by Tom.Capper

If you’ve ever compared two analytics implementations on the same site, or compared your analytics with what your business is reporting in sales, you’ve probably noticed that things don’t always match up. In this post, I’ll explain why data is missing from your web analytics platforms and how large the impact could be. Some of the issues I cover are actually quite easily addressed, and have a decent impact on traffic — there’s never been an easier way to hit your quarterly targets. ;)

I’m going to focus on GA (Google Analytics), as it's the most commonly used provider, but most on-page analytics platforms have the same issues. Platforms that rely on server logs do avoid some issues but are fairly rare, so I won’t cover them in any depth.

Side note: Our test setup (multiple trackers & customized GA)

On Distilled.net, we have a standard Google Analytics property running from an HTML tag in GTM (Google Tag Manager). In addition, for the last two years, I’ve been running three extra concurrent Google Analytics implementations, designed to measure discrepancies between different configurations.

(If you’re just interested in my findings, you can skip this section, but if you want to hear more about the methodology, continue reading. Similarly, don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the detail here — the results are easier to follow.)

Two of these extra implementations — one in Google Tag Manager and one on page — run locally hosted, renamed copies of the Google Analytics JavaScript file (e.g. www.distilled.net/static/js/au3.js, instead of www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js) to make them harder to spot for ad blockers. I also used renamed JavaScript functions (“tcap” and “Buffoon,” rather than the standard “ga”) and renamed trackers (“FredTheUnblockable” and “AlbertTheImmutable”) to avoid having duplicate trackers (which can often cause issues).

This was originally inspired by 2016-era best practice on how to get your Google Analytics setup past ad blockers. I can’t find the original article now, but you can see a very similar one from 2017 here.

Lastly, we have (“DianaTheIndefatigable”), which just has a renamed tracker, but uses the standard code otherwise and is implemented on-page. This is to complete the set of all combinations of modified and unmodified GTM and on-page trackers.

Two of Distilled’s modified on-page trackers, as seen on https://www.distilled.net/

Overall, this table summarizes our setups:

Tracker	Renamed function?	GTM or on-page?	Locally hosted JavaScript file?
Default	No	GTM HTML tag	No
FredTheUnblockable	Yes - “tcap”	GTM HTML tag	Yes
AlbertTheImmutable	Yes - “buffoon”	On page	Yes
DianaTheIndefatigable	No	On page	No

I tested their functionality in various browser/ad-block environments by watching for the pageviews appearing in browser developer tools:

Reason 1: Ad Blockers

Ad blockers, primarily as browser extensions, have been growing in popularity for some time now. Primarily this has been to do with users looking for better performance and UX on ad-laden sites, but in recent years an increased emphasis on privacy has also crept in, hence the possibility of analytics blocking.

Effect of ad blockers

Some ad blockers block web analytics platforms by default, others can be configured to do so. I tested Distilled’s site with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, two of the most popular ad-blocking desktop browser addons, but it’s worth noting that ad blockers are increasingly prevalent on smartphones, too.

Here’s how Distilled’s setups fared:

(All numbers shown are from April 2018)

Setup	Vs. Adblock	Vs. Adblock with “EasyPrivacy” enabled	Vs. uBlock Origin
GTM	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page	Pass	Fail	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Fail	Fail

Seems like those tweaked setups didn’t do much!

Lost data due to ad blockers: ~10%

Ad blocker usage can be in the 15–25% range depending on region, but many of these installs will be default setups of AdBlock Plus, which as we’ve seen above, does not block tracking. Estimates of AdBlock Plus’s market share among ad blockers vary from 50–70%, with more recent reports tending more towards the former. So, if we assume that at most 50% of installed ad blockers block analytics, that leaves your exposure at around 10%.

Reason 2: Browser “do not track”

This is another privacy motivated feature, this time of browsers themselves. You can enable it in the settings of most current browsers. It’s not compulsory for sites or platforms to obey the “do not track” request, but Firefox offers a stronger feature under the same set of options, which I decided to test as well.

Effect of “do not track”

Most browsers now offer the option to send a “Do not track” message. I tested the latest releases of Firefox & Chrome for Windows 10.

Setup	Chrome “do not track”	Firefox “do not track”	Firefox “tracking protection”
GTM	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page	Pass	Pass	Fail
GTM + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail
On page + renamed script & function	Pass	Pass	Fail

Again, it doesn’t seem that the tweaked setups are doing much work for us here.

Lost data due to “do not track”: <1%

Only Firefox Quantum’s “Tracking Protection,” introduced in February, had any effect on our trackers. Firefox has a 5% market share, but Tracking Protection is not enabled by default. The launch of this feature had no effect on the trend for Firefox traffic on Distilled.net.

Reason 3: Filters

It’s a bit of an obvious one, but filters you’ve set up in your analytics might intentionally or unintentionally reduce your reported traffic levels.

For example, a filter excluding certain niche screen resolutions that you believe to be mostly bots, or internal traffic, will obviously cause your setup to underreport slightly.

Lost data due to filters: ???

Impact is hard to estimate, as setup will obviously vary on a site-by site-basis. I do recommend having a duplicate, unfiltered “master” view in case you realize too late you’ve lost something you didn’t intend to.

Reason 4: GTM vs. on-page vs. misplaced on-page

Google Tag Manager has become an increasingly popular way of implementing analytics in recent years, due to its increased flexibility and the ease of making changes. However, I’ve long noticed that it can tend to underreport vs. on-page setups.

I was also curious about what would happen if you didn’t follow Google’s guidelines in setting up on-page code.

By combining my numbers with numbers from my colleague Dom Woodman’s site (you’re welcome for the link, Dom), which happens to use a Drupal analytics add-on as well as GTM, I was able to see the difference between Google Tag Manager and misplaced on-page code (right at the bottom of the <body> tag) I then weighted this against my own Google Tag Manager data to get an overall picture of all 5 setups.

Effect of GTM and misplaced on-page code

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Chrome	100.00%	98.75%	100.77%	99.80%	94.75%
Safari	100.00%	99.42%	100.55%	102.08%	82.69%
Firefox	100.00%	99.71%	101.16%	101.45%	90.68%
Internet Explorer	100.00%	80.06%	112.31%	113.37%	77.18%

There are a few main takeaways here:

• On-page code generally reports more traffic than GTM
• Modified code is generally within a margin of error, apart from modified GTM code on Internet Explorer (see note below)
• Misplaced analytics code will cost you up to a third of your traffic vs. properly implemented on-page code, depending on browser (!)
• The customized setups, which are designed to get more traffic by evading ad blockers, are doing nothing of the sort.

It’s worth noting also that the customized implementations actually got less traffic than the standard ones. For the on-page code, this is within the margin of error, but for Google Tag Manager, there’s another reason — because I used unfiltered profiles for the comparison, there’s a lot of bot spam in the main profile, which primarily masquerades as Internet Explorer. Our main profile is by far the most spammed, and also acting as the baseline here, so the difference between on-page code and Google Tag Manager is probably somewhat larger than what I’m reporting.

I also split the data by mobile, out of curiosity:

Traffic as a percentage of baseline (standard Google Tag Manager implementation):

	Google Tag Manager	Modified & Google Tag Manager	On-Page Code In <head>	Modified & On-Page Code In <head>	On-Page Code Misplaced In <Body>
Desktop	100.00%	98.31%	100.97%	100.89%	93.47%
Mobile	100.00%	97.00%	103.78%	100.42%	89.87%
Tablet	100.00%	97.68%	104.20%	102.43%	88.13%

The further takeaway here seems to be that mobile browsers, like Internet Explorer, can struggle with Google Tag Manager.

Lost data due to GTM: 1–5%

Google Tag Manager seems to cost you a varying amount depending on what make-up of browsers and devices use your site. On Distilled.net, the difference is around 1.7%; however, we have an unusually desktop-heavy and tech-savvy audience (not much Internet Explorer!). Depending on vertical, this could easily swell to the 5% range.

Lost data due to misplaced on-page code: ~10%

On Teflsearch.com, the impact of misplaced on-page code was around 7.5%, vs Google Tag Manager. Keeping in mind that Google Tag Manager itself underreports, the total loss could easily be in the 10% range.

Bonus round: Missing data from channels

I’ve focused above on areas where you might be missing data altogether. However, there are also lots of ways in which data can be misrepresented, or detail can be missing. I’ll cover these more briefly, but the main issues are dark traffic and attribution.

Dark traffic

Dark traffic is direct traffic that didn’t really come via direct — which is generally becoming more and more common. Typical causes are:

• Untagged campaigns in email
• Untagged campaigns in apps (especially Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Misrepresented organic
• Data sent from botched tracking implementations (which can also appear as self-referrals)

It’s also worth noting the trend towards genuinely direct traffic that would historically have been organic. For example, due to increasingly sophisticated browser autocompletes, cross-device history, and so on, people end up “typing” a URL that they’d have searched for historically.

Attribution

I’ve written about this in more detail here, but in general, a session in Google Analytics (and any other platform) is a fairly arbitrary construct — you might think it’s obvious how a group of hits should be grouped into one or more sessions, but in fact, the process relies on a number of fairly questionable assumptions. In particular, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics generally attributes direct traffic (including dark traffic) to the previous non-direct source, if one exists.

Discussion

I was quite surprised by some of my own findings when researching this post, but I’m sure I didn’t get everything. Can you think of any other ways in which data can end up missing from analytics?

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India Gets Closer to Electrification, but Many Still Without Power

India is getting closer to Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s goal of electrifying every village, but many villagers are still without power. The Indian government defines a village to be “electrified” if its public places such as schools and medical centers and 10 percent of its households are connected to the national grid. This leaves many homes (over 30 million) without power still. A recent assessment has shown that less than 8 percent of the newly electrified villages had all homes electrified. Lack of electrification hinders economic growth, health care, sanitation, and education. With electrical connections, households can get access to conveniences Americans take for granted–refrigerators for food storage, televisions, computers, and washing machines–and shops can stay open later at night.  India’s economic advancement and the advancement of its people depend on electricity availability and reliability.

Modi’s administration is reporting that it is close to accomplishing the prime minister’s goal since most of the over 18,000 villages without power now have some access to it. But access alone is insufficient; the people must have an adequate and reliable supply of power. The Indian government’s definition of “electrified” essentially means that wires exist between power plants and villages, but not all households are connected and insufficient electrons may be flowing through those wires.

Source: Bloomberg

India instituted a $2.5 billion program to provide power connections to almost every household by the end of March 2019, which will be close to when Modi’s term expires. According to Bloomberg, India has electrified about 13 percent of the nearly 36.8 million homes recently identified as needing power. Another source indicates about 30.6 million rural households still need to receive a power connection. To meet Modi’s goal by its deadline, India will have to more than triple its monthly pace of electrification.

In January, the power ministry estimated that 28 gigawatts of electrical capacity would be required to connect all homes to the power grid. Currently, India’s power plants cannot find buyers for all the electricity that they can produce. Almost 75 gigawatts of India’s power plants are under financial stress due to under-utilized capacity, fuel shortages, and overdue payments from distribution companies.

But to keep up with the increasing demand for electricity, India must add about 15 gigawatts of generating capacity annually for the next 30 years. Most of the country’s electricity (two-thirds) is supplied by coal-fired plants and more such plants are likely to be built. India has the fifth largest coal reserves in the world at 94.8 billion metric tons, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and its technically recoverable coal resources are more than triple that number. India plans to double its coal production by 2020, making it the second largest producer of coal in the world, behind China.

Progress Toward Electrification

Since 2000, India has made major progress toward electrification. Electricity reached 82 percent of the population in 2016—almost double its share in 2000 when it was 43-percent electrified. Despite the progress, of the roughly one-fifth of the world’s population without electricity that year, about 239 million of those people were in India.

World’s second-most-populous nation has the most people lacking access to electricity

Source: International Energy Agency; World Bank (Note: As of 2014)

The homes that remain without electricity are spread widely across regions of the country, but most densely in the populous northeast. Uttar Pradesh, a large north Indian state, accounts for 42 percent of the nation’s households without electricity access, according to government data.

Source: Bloomberg

India’s electricity supply is controlled and maintained by its state governments, which use cheap power as a political tool, often at a financial loss. As of March 2015, state distribution companies had accumulated debts of almost 4.1 trillion rupees ($61.7 billion). The distributors, known as discoms, handle their losses by limiting power supplies to heavily-subsidized consumers in rural areas and selling more expensive electricity to industrial consumers.

Conclusion

In the Western world, and particularly in the United States, reliable and affordable electricity are taken for granted—so much so that experimenting with the existing system is being promoted by politicians and special interests. India, on the other hand, has been making the delivery of electricity to its population a priority, but over 30 million homes and over 200 million people are still without power. Besides getting wires to all homes, the Indian government must supply electrons over those wires and those electrons need to be sustainable and affordable. Thus, India is building power plants, including coal-fired power plants. India needs to make other adjustments as well to its generating sector. State-owned distribution companies are in debt, not all capacity is being fully utilized, and there are fuel supply problems, among other issues that need to be fixed for sustainable and affordable supply.

The post India Gets Closer to Electrification, but Many Still Without Power appeared first on IER.

How Do You Set Smart SEO Goals for Your Team/Agency/Project? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best fit for your organization? It's incredibly important that they tie into both your company goals and your marketing goals, as well as provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to set the right SEO goals for your team and shares two examples of how different businesses might go about doing just that.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about SEO goals, how to set smart ones, how to measure your progress against them, how to amplify those goals to the rest of your organization so that people really buy in to SEO.

This is a big challenge. So many folks that I've talked to in the field have basically said, "I'm not sure exactly how to set goals for our SEO team that are the right ones." I think that there's a particularly pernicious problem once Google took away the keyword-level data for SEO referrals.

So, from paid search, you can see this click was on this keyword and sent traffic to this page and then here's how it performed after that. In organic search, you can no longer do that. You haven't been able to do it for a few years now. Because of that removal, proving the return on investment for SEO has been really challenging. We'll talk in a future Whiteboard Friday about proving ROI. But let's focus here on how you get some smart SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain intelligently to the goals of the business, the organization.

Where to start:

So the first thing, the first problem that I see is that a lot of folks start here, which seems like a reasonable idea, but is actually a terrible idea. Don't start with your SEO goals. When your SEO team gets together or when you get together with your consultants, your agency, don't start with what the SEO goals should be.

• Start with the company goals. This is what our company is trying to accomplish this quarter or this year or this month.
• Marketing goals. Go from there to here's how marketing is going to contribute to those company goals. So if the company has a goal of increasing sales, marketing's job is what? Is marketing's job improving the conversion funnel? Is it getting more traffic to the top of the funnel? Is it bringing back more traffic that's already been to the site but needs to be re-earned? Those marketing goals should be tied directly to the company goals so that anyone and everyone in the organization can clearly see, "Here's why marketing is doing what they're doing."
• SEO goals. Next, here's how SEO contributes to those marketing goals. So if the goal is around, as we mentioned, growing traffic to the top of the funnel, for example, SEO could be very broad in their targeting. If it's bringing people back, you've got to get much more narrow in your keyword targeting.
• Specific metrics to measure and improve. From those SEO goals, you can get the outcome of specific metrics to measure and improve.

Measurable goal metrics

So that list is kind of right here. It's not very long. There are not that many things in the SEO world that we can truly measure directly. So measurable goal metrics might be things like...

1. Rankings. Which we can measure in three ways. We can measure them globally, nationally, or locally. You can choose to set those up.

2. Organic search visits. So this would be just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.

3. You can also separate that into branded search versus non-branded search. But it's much more challenging than it is with paid, because we don't have the keyword data. Thus, we have to use an implied or inferred model, where essentially we say, "These pages are likely to be receiving branded search traffic, versus these pages that are likely to be receiving non-branded search traffic."

A good example is the homepage of most brands is most likely to get primarily branded search traffic, whereas resource pages, blog pages, content marketing style pages, those are mostly going to get unbranded. So you can weight those appropriately as you see fit.

Tracking your rankings is crucially important, because that way you can see which pages show up for branded queries versus which pages show up for unbranded queries, and then you can build pretty darn good models of branded search versus non-branded search visits based on which landing pages are going to get traffic.

4. SERP ownership. So ideas around your reputation in the search results. So this is essentially looking at the page of search results that comes up for a given query and what results are in there. There might be things you don't like and don't want and things you really do want, and the success and failure can be measured directly through the rankings in the SERP.

5. Search volume. So for folks who are trying to improve their brand's affinity and reputation on the web and trying to grow the quantity of branded search, which is a good metric, you can look at that through things like Google Trends or through a Google AdWords campaign or through something like Moz's Keyword Explorer.

6. Links and link metrics. So you could look at the growth or shrinkage of links over time. You can measure that through things like the number of linking root domains, the total number of links. Authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed.

7. Referral traffic. And last, but not least, most SEO campaigns, especially those that focus on links or improving rankings, are going to also send referral traffic from the links that are built. So you can watch referral traffic and what those referrers are and whether they came from pages where you built links with SEO intent.

So taking all of these metrics, these should be applied to the SEO goals that you choose that match up with your marketing and company goals. I wanted to try and illustrate this, not just explain it, but illustrate it through two examples that are very different in what they're measuring.

Example one

So, first off, Taft Boots, they've been advertising like crazy to me on Instagram. Apparently, I must need new boots.

• Grow online sales. Let's say that their big company goal for 2018 is "grow online sales to core U.S. customers, so the demographics and psychographics they're already reaching, by 30%."
• Increase top of funnel website traffic by 50%. So marketing says, "All right, you know what? There's a bunch of ways to do that, but we think that our best opportunity to do that is to grow top of funnel, because we can see how top of funnel turns into sales over time, and we're going to target a number of 50% growth." This is awesome. This can turn into very measurable, actionable SEO goals.
• Grow organic search visits 70%. We can say, "Okay, we know that search is going to contribute an outsized quantity of this 50% growth. So what we want to do is take search traffic up by 70%. How are we going to do that? We have four different plans.
  • A. We're going to increase our blog content, quality and quantity.
  • B. We're going to create new product pages that are more detailed, that are better optimized, that target good searches.
  • C. We're going to create a new resources section with some big content pieces.
  • D. We're going to improve our link profile and Domain Authority."

Now, you might say, "Wait a minute. Rand, this is a pretty common SEO methodology here." Yes, but many times this is not directly tied to the marketing goals, which is not directly tied to the business goals. If you want to have success as an SEO, you want to convince people to keep investing in you, you want to keep having that job or that consulting gig, you've got to connect these up.

From these, we can then say, "Okay, for each one, how do we measure it?" Well...

• A. Quantity of content and search visits/piece. Blog content can be measured through the quantity of content we produce, the search visits that each of those pieces produce, and what the distribution and averages are.
• B. Rankings and organic traffic. Is a great way to measure product pages and whether we're hitting our goals there.
• C. Link growth, rankings, and traffic. That's a great way to measure the new resources section.
• D. Linking root domains plus the DA distribution and maybe Spam Score distribution. That's a great way to measure whether we're improving our link profile.

All of these, this big-picture goal is going to be measured by the contribution of search visits to essentially non-homepage and non-branded pages that contribute to the conversion funnel. So we have a methodology to create a smart goal and system here.

Example two

Another example, totally different, but let's try it out because I think that many folks have trouble connecting non-e-commerce pages, non-product stuff. So we're going to use Book-It Theatre. They're a theater group here in the Seattle area. They use the area beneath Seattle Center House as their space. They basically will take popular books and literature and convert them into plays. They'll adapt them into screenplays and then put on performances. It's quite good. We've been to a few shows, Geraldine and I have, and we really like them.

So their goal — I'm making this up, I don't actually know if this is their goal — but let's say they want to...

• Attract theater goers from outside the Seattle area. So they're looking to hit tourists and critics, people who are not just locals, because they want to expand their brand.
• Reach audiences in 4 key geographies — LA, Portland, Vancouver, Minneapolis. So they decide, "You know what? Marketing can contribute to this in four key geographies, and that's where we're going to focus a bunch of efforts — PR efforts, outreach efforts, offline media, and SEO. The four key geographies are Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, and Minneapolis. We think these are good theater-going towns where we can attract the right audiences."

So what are we going to do as SEOs? Well, as SEOs, we better figure out what's going to match up to this.

• Drive traffic from these regions to Book-It Theatre's pages and to reviews of our show. So it's not just content on our site. We want to drive people to other critics and press that's reviewed us.
  • A. So we're going to create some geo landing pages, maybe some special offers for people from each of these cities.
  • B. We're going to identify third-party reviews and hopefully get critics who will write reviews, and we're going to ID those and try and drive traffic to them.
  • C. We're going to do the same with blog posts and informal critics.
  • D. We're going to build some content pages around the books that we're adapting, hoping to drive traffic, that's interested in those books, from all over the United States to our pages and hopefully to our show.

So there are ways to measure each of these.

• A. Localized rankings in Moz Pro or a bunch of other rank tracking tools. You can set up geo-specific localized rankings. "I want to track rankings in Vancouver, British Columbia. I want to track rankings from Los Angeles, California." Those might look different than the ones you see here in Seattle, Washington.
• B. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party reviews. We won't be able to track the visits that those pages receive, but if they mention Book-It Theatre and link to us, we can see, oh yes, look, the Minneapolis Journal wrote about us and they linked to us, and we can see what the reviews are from there.
• C. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party blog posts.
• D. Local and national ranking, organic visits. For these Book-It content pages, of course, we can track our local and national rankings and the organic visits.

Each of these, and as a whole, the contribution of search visits from non-Seattle regions, so we can remove Seattle or Washington State in our analytics and we can see: How much traffic did we get from there? Was it more than last year? What's it contributing to the ticket sales conversion funnel?

You can see how, if you build these smart goals and you measure them correctly and you align them with what the company and the marketing team is trying to do, you can build something really special. You can get great involvement from the rest of your teams, and you can show the value of SEO even to people who might not believe in it already.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Oren Cass’s Testimony of Climate Change Damage, Part 1 of 3

Oren Cass, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the most informative analysts in the climate change policy debate. I love Cass’s work because he methodically investigates the various research studies being cited in a dispute in order to clearly explain to his readers where the headline results are coming from.

An excellent case in point is Cass’s May 16 testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in a hearing on climate change. Cass showed why some of the alarming warnings of impending climate catastrophe grossly understate the ability of humans to adapt, meaning that policymakers and the public should realize that the situation is not as dire as they have been led to believe. Cass achieves this result not through ideological assertions but merely by unpacking exactly how some of these leading studies derived their estimates of climate change damage. Once you understand where the numbers come from, you agree with Cass that these particular studies really don’t tell us very much.

Because Cass’s full testimony contains so much valuable information, I will spend three blog posts covering some of its best material.

Cass Isn’t Questioning the Science

Before diving into his critique of some recent estimates of impending climate change damage, Cass offered the following caveat to the House Committee:

Let me pause here to clarify that this issue does not concern climate science. I believe that mainstream climate science, particularly as summarized by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provides the best available assessment of the changes to our physical environment that a given level of greenhouse-gas emissions will cause and that policymakers should use it as the starting point for their own work. But we depart the world of climate science for that of climate economics when we turn to the question of how those changes will affect human society via their influence on public health or infrastructure or the economy. [Bold added.]

This is a point worth emphasizing. These days on the internet, you can’t question the case for climate alarmism more than two minutes before someone says, “Give me a break, the science is settled; there’s a 97 percent consensus among experts in the field that humans are responsible for climate change. More CO₂ causes the earth to get warmer. This is basic chemistry. Deal with it.”

Now for one thing, even that “97 percent consensus” figure is dubious, as David Friedman and others have pointed out, because it classifies authors using a very broad umbrella, such that “skeptics” like Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen would fall under “the consensus.”

But that’s not the main point here. What Oren Cass is pointing out is that the physical science relationship between human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and the global climate is only the first link in the argument. In order to make the case for political intervention, it must also be demonstrated that (a) these physical relationships will harm human welfare and (b) these harms can be mitigated by government policy, using cures that are better than the disease.

These latter points are not the areas directly studied by climate science per se, but instead fall under the jurisdiction of economists. Of course, the economic considerations must be informed by the climate science, but the disciplines are not identical. It is entirely possible that a study warning of large climate change damages is based on very accurate physical science, but suffers from a basic methodological flaw that an outside analyst such as Oren Cass can illuminate.

Cass’s Testimony in a Nutshell: We Can’t Ignore Adaptation

To anticipate the theme of his testimony, Cass sums up like so:

The assumptions that we make about how human society will adapt to climate change are central to our understanding of the challenges that the phenomenon presents and the costs that it will impose. Relative to most problems that we encounter in public policy, climate change is a gradual process; its most dangerous effects will appear on decades- and even centuries long timescales. Yet analysts frequently analyze these effects as if they will happen now, without accounting for how our economy, society, and technology are likely to evolve independent of climate change and—especially—in response to climate change. Analyses that do not properly account for adaptation describe an alternative universe that does not exist; the estimates they produce are not plausible forecasts of future costs and should not be credited by policymakers. [Bold added.]

Some readers may feel inadequate to critically assess something as “official” as a formal study of the effects of climate change through the end of the century. And yet, just wait until you see the problems Cass exposes. It doesn’t take an expert to realize that these particular studies are heavily biased on the side of alarmism, because they grossly understate the ability of humans to adapt to a changing climate.

Will Ozone and Particulate Matter Cause Nearly a Trillion Dollars in Deaths Annually by 2100?

For the final component of this introductory post, let me summarize Cass’s critique of the way EPA used a 2015 study[i] to conclude that increased temperatures (from global warming) will cause higher mortality rates through the mechanism of increased concentrations of ground ozone (aka “smog”) and particulate matter (PM) (released into the atmosphere because of the hotter climate). Relative to a scenario with aggressive climate change mitigation policies, EPA estimated that business-as-usual would cause an excess 57,000 deaths annually by the year 2100, which carries a yearly cost of $930 billion. This is a staggering number, and to reiterate, this figure derives merely from the extra deaths ostensibly caused by warmer temperatures leading to increased conventional air pollution.

Yet Cass puts this result in context when he explains:

The paper estimated that unchecked climate change would increase ozone levels by 2.6 parts per billion and particulate-matter levels by 1.2 µg m⁻³, over the alternative scenario. But those concentrations have fallen since 2000, from 82 and 13.4, respectively. In 2009 alone, particulate matter fell by an amount almost equal to the increase that climate change would cause over the century. In most of the years from 2000 to 2015, ozone levels fluctuated by more than the climate-induced effect over a century. Put another way, the forecasted effect of climate change on air pollution is to return atmospheric quality from 2015 to 2011 levels. [Bold added.]

Cass illustrates this result with the following diagram:

 

Now to be sure, Cass’s Figure 2 doesn’t definitively rule out the possibility that increased smog and PM concentrations will have detrimental effects. But Cass’s point is that the model implicitly ignores the underlying processes that were leading these pollutants to rapidly fall, even over a relatively short 15-year period from 2000 – 2015. As with most arenas, what will probably happen is that progress will continue on these fronts as well, because the studies narrowly focusing on the factors that increase smog and PM are ignoring the factors that will decrease them.

Conclusion

In this opening blog post, I have laid out the framework of Oren Cass’s recent congressional testimony on adaptation and the costs of climate change. Cass is not challenging the actual science, but instead is showing how dubious are the projections that extrapolate from objective data into speculative warnings about the distant future.

For example, Cass showed that a recent EPA estimate of the costs of climate change via traditional air pollution was likely grossly overblown, because it ignored the stellar improvements in just 15 years. And this is no small item: The EPA’s estimate of excess mortality from smog and particulate matter (PM) worked out to a whopping $930 billion by 2100, out of total reported climate change damages of $1,391 billion. In other words, for those readers who understood the problems depicted in Figure 2, you must now consider that that calculation comprised about two-thirds of the EPA’s total estimate impact of unchecked climate change damage.

To challenge the alarmist case for aggressive government action in the name of climate change isn’t to deny science. As the work of Oren Cass demonstrates, one can often raise serious objections to “official” projections merely by reading the reports and seeing where their numbers come from.

Oren Cass’s testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology can be viewed here:

---

[i] The study is Fernando Garcia-Menendez et al., “U.S. Air Quality and Health Benefits from Avoided Climate Change Under Greenhouse Gas Mitigation,” Environmental Science & Technology 49 (June 2015).

The post Oren Cass’s Testimony of Climate Change Damage, Part 1 of 3 appeared first on IER.

The MozCon 2018 Final Agenda

Posted by Trevor-Klein

MozCon 2018 is just around the corner — just over six weeks away — and we're excited to share the final agenda with you today. There are some familiar faces, and some who'll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.

We're also thrilled to announce this year's winning pitches for our six MozCon Community Speaker slots! If you're not familiar, each year we hold several shorter speaking slots, asking you all to submit your best pitches for what you'd like to teach everyone at MozCon. The winners — all members of the Moz Community — are invited to the conference alongside all our other speakers, and are always some of the most impressive folks on the stage. Check out the details of their talks below, and congratulations to this year's roster!

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The Agenda

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Monday, July 9

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8:30–9:30 am

Breakfast and registration

Doors to the conference will open at 8:00 for those looking to avoid registration lines and grab a cup of coffee (or two) before breakfast, which will be available starting at 8:30.

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9:30–9:45 am

Welcome to MozCon 2018!
Sarah Bird

Moz CEO Sarah Bird will kick things off by sharing everything you need to know about your time at MozCon 2018, including conference logistics and evening events.

She'll also set the tone for the show with an update on the state of the SEO industry, illustrating the fact that there's more opportunity in it now than there's ever been before.

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9:50–10:20 am

The Democratization of SEO
Jono Alderson

How much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place?

As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.

We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning. We need more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.

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10:20–10:50 am

Mobile-First Indexing or a Whole New Google
Cindy Krum

The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.

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10:50–11:20 am

AM Break

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11:30–11:50 am

It Takes a Village:
2x Your Paid Search Revenue by Smashing Silos
Community speaker: Amy Hebdon

Your company's unfair advantage to skyrocketing paid search revenue is within your reach, but it's likely outside the control of your paid search team. Good keywords and ads are just a few cogs in the conversion machine. The truth is, the success of the entire channel depends on people who don't touch the campaigns, and may not even know how paid search works. We'll look at how design, analysis, UX, PM and other marketing roles can directly impact paid search performance, including the most common issues that arise, and how to immediately fix them to improve ROI and revenue growth.

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11:50 am–12:10 pm

The #1 and Only Reason Your SEO Clients Keep Firing You
Community speaker: Meredith Oliver

You have a kick-ass keyword strategy. Seriously, it could launch a NASA rocket; it's that good. You have the best 1099 local and international talent on your SEO team that working from home and an unlimited amount of free beard wax can buy. You have a super-cool animal inspired company name like Sloth or Chinchilla that no one understands, but the logo is AMAZING. You have all of this, yet, your client turnover rate is higher than Snoop Dogg's audience on an HBO comedy special. Why? You don't talk to your clients. As in really communicate, teach them what you know, help them get it, really get it, talk to them. How do I know? I was you. In my agency's first five years we churned and burned through clients faster than Kim Kardashian could take selfies. My mastermind group suggested we *proactively* set up and insist upon a monthly review meeting with every single client. It was a game-changer, and we immediately adopted the practice. Ten years later we have a 90% client retention rate and more than 30 SEO clients on retainer.

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12:10–12:30 pm

Why "Blog" Is a Misnomer for Our 2018 Content Strategy
Community speaker: Taylor Coil

At the end of 2017, we totally redesigned our company's blog. Why? Because it's not really a blog anymore - it's an evergreen collection of traffic and revenue-generating resources. The former design catered to a time-oriented strategy surfacing consistently new posts with short half-lives. That made sense when we started our blog in 2014. Today? Not so much. In her talk, Taylor will detail how to make the perspective shift from "blog" to "collection of resources," why that shift is relevant in 2018's content landscape, and what changes you can make to your blog's homepage, nav, and taxonomy that reflect this new perspective.

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12:30–2:00 pm

Lunch

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2:05–2:35 pm

Near Me or Far:
How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent For You
Rob Bucci

In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?

For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.

By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like "best," we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.

With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.

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2:35–3:05 pm

None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us
Lisa Myers

Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people's ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.

In this session she'll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop, and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.

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3:05–3:35 pm

PM Break

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3:45–4:15 pm

Search-Driven Content Strategy
Stephanie Briggs

Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless. Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.

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4:15–4:55 pm

Ranking Is a Promise: Can You Deliver?
Dr. Pete Meyers

In our rush to rank, we put ourselves first, neglecting what searchers (and our future customers) want. Google wants to reward sites that deliver on searcher intent, and SERP features are a window into that intent. Find out how to map keywords to intent, understand how intent informs the buyer funnel, and deliver on the promise of ranking to drive results that attract clicks and customers.

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7:00–10:00 pm

Kickoff Party

Networking the Mozzy way! Join us for an evening of fun on the first night of the conference (stay tuned for all the details!).

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Tuesday, July 10

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8:30–9:30 am

Breakfast

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9:35–10:15 am

Content Marketing Is Broken
and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You
Oli Gardner

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists. We need our M.O.M.s! No, not your actual mother. Your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.

In this session you'll learn data and lessons from Oli's biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content; a context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts; advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA); and innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered.

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10:15–10:45 am

Lies, Damned Lies, and Analytics
Russ Jones

Search engine optimization is a numbers game. We want some numbers to go up (links, rankings, traffic, and revenue), others to go down (bounce rate, load time, and budget). Underlying all these numbers are assumptions that can mislead, deceive, or downright ruin your campaigns. Russ will help uncover the hidden biases, distortions, and fabrications that underlie many of the metrics we have come to trust implicitly and from the ashes show you how to build metrics that make a difference.

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10:45–11:15 am

AM Break

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11:25–11:55 am

The Awkward State of Local
Mike Ramsey

You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.

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11:55 am–12:25 pm

The SEO Cyborg:
Connecting Search Technology and Its Users
Alexis Sanders

SEO requires a delicate balance of working for the humans you're hoping to reach, and the machines that'll help you reach them. To make a difference in today's SERPs, you need to understand the engines, site configurations, and even some machine learning, in addition to the emotional, raw, authentic connections with people and their experiences. In this talk, Alexis will help marketers of all stripes walk that line.

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12:25–1:55 pm

Lunch

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2:00–2:30 pm

Email Unto Others:
The Golden Rules for Human-Centric Email Marketing
Justine Jordan

With the arrival of GDPR and the ease with which consumers can unsubscribe and report spam, it's more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads. To understand how email marketing is changing and to identify opportunities for brands, Litmus surveyed more than 3,000 marketers worldwide. Justine will cover the biggest trends and challenges facing email today and help you put the human back in marketing’s most personal — and effective — marketing channel.

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2:30–3:00 pm

Your Red-Tape Toolkit:
How to Win Trust and Get Approval for Search Work
Heather Physioc

Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.

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3:00–3:30 pm

PM Break

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3:40–4:10 pm

The Problem with Content &
Other Things We Don't Want to Admit
Casie Gillette

Everyone thinks they need content but they don't think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value. In this session, we'll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.

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4:10–4:50 pm

Excel Is for Rookies:
Why Every Search Marketer Needs to Get Strong in BI, ASAP
Wil Reynolds

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I'll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.

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Wednesday, July 11

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8:30–9:30 am

Breakfast

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9:35–10:15 am

Machine Learning for SEOs
Britney Muller

People generally react to machine learning in one of two ways: either with a combination of fascination and terror brought on by the possibilities that lie ahead, or with looks of utter confusion and slight embarrassment at not really knowing much about it. With the advent of RankBrain, not even higher-ups at Google can tell us exactly how some things rank above others, and the impact of machine learning on SEO is only going to increase from here. Fear not: Moz's own senior SEO scientist, Britney Muller, will talk you through what you need to know.

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10:15–10:45 am

Shifting Toward Engagement and Reviews
Darren Shaw

With search results adding features and functionality all the time, and users increasingly finding what they need without ever leaving the SERP, we need to focus more on the forest and less on the trees. Engagement and behavioral optimization are key. In this talk, Darren will offer new data to show you just how tight the proximity radius around searchers really is, and how reviews can be your key competitive advantage, detailing new strategies and tactics to take your reivews to the next level.

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10:45–11:15 am

AM Break

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11:25–11:45 am

Location-Free Local SEO
Community speaker: Tom Capper

Let's talk about local SEO without physical premises. Not the Google My Business kind — the kind of local SEO that job boards, house listing sites, and national delivery services have to reckon with. Should they have landing pages, for example, for "flower delivery in London?"

This turns out to be a surprisingly nuanced issue: In some industries, businesses are ranking for local terms without a location-specific page, and in others local pages are absolutely essential. I've worked with clients across several industries on why these sorts of problems exist, and how to tackle them. How should you figure out whether you need these pages, how can you scale them and incorporate them in your site architecture, and how many should you have for what location types?

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11:45 am–12:05 pm

SEO without Traffic:
Community speaker: Hannah Thorpe

Answer boxes, voice search, and a reduction in the number of results displayed sometimes all result in users spending more time in the SERPs and less on our websites. But does that mean we should stop investing in SEO?

This talk will cover what metrics we should now care about, and how strategies need to change, covering everything from measuring more than just traffic and rankings to expanding your keyword research beyond just keyword volumes.

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12:05–12:25 pm

Tools Change, People Don't:
Empathy-Driven Online Marketing
Community speaker: Ashley Greene

When everyone else zags, the winners zig. As winners, while your 101+ competitors are trying to automate 'til the cows come home and split test their way to greatness‚ you're zigging. Whether you're B2B or B2C, you're marketing to humans. Real people. Homo sapiens. But where is the human element in the game plan? Quite simply, it has gone missing, which provides a window of opportunity for the smartest marketers.

In this talk, Ashley will provide a framework of simple user interview and survey techniques to build customer empathy and your "voice of customer" playbook. Using real examples from companies like Slack, Pinterest, Intercom, and Airbnb, this talk will help you uncover your customers' biggest problems and pain points; know what, when, and how your customers research (and Google!) a need you solve; and find new sources of information and influencers so you can unearth distribution channels and partnerships.

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12:25–1:55 pm

Lunch

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2:00–2:30 pm

You Don't Know SEO
Michael King

Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Michael will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.

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2:30–3:00 pm

What All Marketers Can Do about Site Speed
Emily Grossman

At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The recently announced "speed update" underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe that site speed should only be a developer's problem. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.

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3:00–3:30 pm

PM Break

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3:40–4:10 pm

Traffic vs. Signal
Dana DiTomaso

With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal.

We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.

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4:10–4:50 pm

Why Nine out of Ten Marketing Launches Suck
(And How to Be the One that Doesn't)
Rand Fishkin

More than ever before, marketers are launching things — content, tools, resources, products — and being held responsible for how/whether they resonate with customers and earn the amplification required to perform. But this is hard. Really, really hard. Most of the projects that launch, fail. What separates the wheat from the chaff isn't just the quality of what's built, but the process behind it. In this presentation, Rand will present examples of dismal failures and skyrocketing successes, and dive into what separates the two. You'll learn how anyone can make a launch perform better, and benefit from the power of being "new."

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7:00–11:30 pm

MozCon Bash

Join us at Garage Billiards to wrap up the conference with an evening of networking, billiards, bowling, and karaoke with MozCon friends new and old. Don't forget to bring your MozCon badge and US ID or passport.

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