Big Green Carpetbagging: Environmental Foundations’ Out-of-State Spending

Surprising SEO A/B Test Results - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

You can make all the tweaks and changes in the world, but how do you know they're the best choice for the site you're working on? Without data to support your hypotheses, it's hard to say. In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow explains a bit about what A/B testing for SEO entails and describes some of the surprising results he's seen that prove you can't always trust your instinct in our industry.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another British Whiteboard Friday. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder and CEO at Distilled. At Distilled, one of the things that we've been working on recently is building an SEO A/B testing platform. It's called the ODN, the Optimization Delivery Network. We're now deployed on a bunch of big sites, and we've been running these SEO A/B tests for a little while. I want to tell you about some of the surprising results that we've seen.

What is SEO A/B testing?

We're going to link to some resources that will show you more about what SEO A/B testing is. But very quickly, the general principle is that you take a site section, so a bunch of pages that have a similar structure and layout and template and so forth, and you split those pages into control and variant, so a group of A pages and a group of B pages.

Then you make the change that you're hypothesizing is going to make a difference just to one of those groups of pages, and you leave the other set unchanged. Then, using your analytics data, you build a forecast of what would have happened to the variant pages if you hadn't made any changes to them, and you compare what actually happens to the forecast. Out of that you get some statistical confidence intervals, and you get to say, yes, this is an uplift, or there was no difference, or no, this hurt the performance of your site.

This is data that we've never really had in SEO before, because this is very different to running a controlled experiment in a kind of lab environment or on a test domain. This is in the wild, on real, actual, live websites. So let's get to the material. The first surprising result I want to talk about is based off some of the most basic advice that you've ever seen.

Result #1: Targeting higher-volume keywords can actually result in traffic drops

I've stood on stage and given this advice. I have recommended this stuff to clients. Probably you have too. You know that process where you do some keyword research and you find that there's one particular way of searching for whatever it is that you offer that has more search volume than the way that you're talking about it on your website right now, so higher search volume for a particular way of phrasing?

You make the recommendation, "Let's talk about this stuff on our website the way that people are searching for it. Let's put this kind of phrasing in our title and elsewhere on our pages." I've made those recommendations. You've probably made those recommendations. They don't always work. We've seen a few times now actually of testing this kind of process and seeing what are actually dramatic drops.

We saw up to 20-plus-percent drops in organic traffic after updating meta information in titles and so forth to target the more commonly-searched-for variant. Various different reasons for this. Maybe you end up with a worse click-through rate from the search results. So maybe you rank where you used to, but get a worse click-through rate. Maybe you improve your ranking for the higher volume target term and you move up a little bit, but you move down for the other one and the new one is more competitive.

So yes, you've moved up a little bit, but you're still out of the running, and so it's a net loss. Or maybe you end up ranking for fewer variations of key phrases on these pages. However it happens, you can't be certain that just putting the higher-volume keyword phrasing on your pages is going to perform better. So that's surprising result number one. Surprising result number two is possibly not that surprising, but pretty important I think.

Result #2: 30–40% of common tech audit recommendations make no difference

So this is that we see as many as 30% or 40% of the common recommendations in a classic tech audit make no difference. You do all of this work auditing the website. You follow SEO best practices. You find a thing that, in theory, makes the website better. You go and make the change. You test it.

Nothing, flatlines. You get the same performance as the forecast, as if you had made no change. This is a big deal because it's making these kinds of recommendations that damages trust with engineers and product teams. You're constantly asking them to do stuff. They feel like it's pointless. They do all this stuff, and there's no difference. That is what burns authority with engineering teams too often.

This is one of the reasons why we built the platform is that we can then take our 20 recommendations and hypotheses, test them all, find the 5 or 6 that move the needle, only go to the engineering team to build those ones, and that builds so much trust and relationship over time, and they get to work on stuff that moves the needle on the product side.

So the big deal there is really be a bit skeptical about some of this stuff. The best practices, at the limit, probably make a difference. If everything else is equal and you make that one tiny, little tweak to the alt attribute or a particular image somewhere deep on the page, if everything else had been equal, maybe that would have made the difference.

But is it going to move you up in a competitive ranking environment? That's what we need to be skeptical about.

Result #3: Many lessons don't generalize

So surprising result number three is: How many lessons do not generalize? We've seen this broadly across different sections on the same website, even different industries. Some of this is about the competitive dynamics of the industry.

Some of it is probably just the complexity of the ranking algorithm these days. But we see this in particular with things like this. Who's seen SEO text on a category page? Those kind of you've got all of your products, and then somebody says, "You know what? We need 200 or 250 words that mention our key phrase a bunch of times down at the bottom of the page." Sometimes, helpfully, your engineers will even put this in an SEO-text div for you.

So we see this pretty often, and we've tested removing it. We said, "You know what? No users are looking at this. We know that overstuffing the keyword on the page can be a negative ranking signal. I wonder if we'll do better if we just cut that div." So we remove it, and the first time we did it, plus 6% result. This was a good thing.

The pages are better without it. They're now ranking better. We're getting better performance. So we say, "You know what? We've learnt this lesson. You should remove this really low-quality text from the bottom of your category pages." But then we tested it on another site, and we see there's a drop, a small one admittedly, but it was helping on these particular pages.

So I think what that's just telling us is we need to be testing these recommendations every time. We need to be trying to build testing into our core methodologies, and I think this trend is only going to increase and continue, because the more complex the ranking algorithms get, the more machine learning is baked into it and it's not as deterministic as it used to be, and the more competitive the markets get, so the narrower the gap between you and your competitors, the less stable all this stuff is, the smaller differences there will be, and the bigger opportunity there will be for something that works in one place to be null or negative in another.

So I hope I have inspired you to check out some SEO A/B testing. We're going to link to some of the resources that describe how you do it, how you can do it yourself, and how you can build a program around this as well as some other of our case studies and lessons that we've learnt. But I hope you enjoyed this journey on surprising results from SEO A/B tests.

Resources:

• SEO Split-Testing: How to A/B Test Changes for Google
• Do it Yourself SEO Split Testing Tool With Causal Impact
• Case studies:
  • SmokyMountains.com
  • iCanvas
  • ConcertHotels.com

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Toward a Coasean Approach to Coastal Property Damage

I. Introduction

As North and South Carolinians begin the long process of recovery in the wake of Hurricane Florence many people are asking how much of the property damage caused by the storm we can attribute to anthropogenic global warming.

This line of inquiry is worth considering for its theoretical implications on our approach to public policy vis-à-vis climate. Of all the potential ramifications a warming world would entail, rising sea levels are perhaps the most straightforward and salient. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere begets more heat retention. That heat adds to the water content of the oceans through the melting of land-based ice and causes the thermal expansion of the oceans’ water content. This addition and expansion naturally encroaches upon hitherto dry land.

The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis are two of the many journalists who took up this issue as Florence bore down on the Atlantic Coast. Mooney and Dennis conclude that “we have our own species to thank for at least some fraction of the dangerous storm surge for which the Carolinas are bracing. All storm surges, everything else being equal, can reach farther inland today than they could have before humans started heating up the atmosphere.”

The mainstream position in the physical sciences, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, informs us that at least some fraction of storm surge from today’s hurricanes can be attributed to the human burning of carbon-based fuel sources, but Mooney and Dennis fail to make a critical distinction. In analyzing alleged damages from emissions we must disambiguate the concept of land as such from the concept of property.

It isn’t the Carolinas (as Mooney and Dennis casually write) which stand to suffer the costs of the storm, but specifically it is property-holding Carolinians. The distinction is crucial, as it focuses our attention not on vague notions of environmental damage, but on concrete property damage, enabling us to consider this as a conflict among parties—economic actors whose emissions have contributed to rising waters and property-holders for whom said rising waters would cause loss.

II. Property Rights

By framing the issue of sea level rise in this way—as a property conflict in need of resolution—we can clarify our thinking and contemplate the best arrangement going forward. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are essentially incidental byproducts of economic activity. In most cases it is intuitive that an actor should be held liable for dumping a byproduct of its activity onto the property of another without consent. The dumping of greenhouse gases, however, is more complicated, because it is dumped into the atmospheric commons. An element of this conundrum that cannot be overstated is the property rights lacuna in the air. If we were able to grant property rights to a party in the air, this problem would be much more tractable.

Nevertheless, a property rights perspective can help us to determine what course of action the problem necessitates. Rights are problem-solving conceptual tools that enable the market to function to humanity’s benefit by providing certainty.

The question at hand is whether the causal chain begun by greenhouse gas emissions results in a violation of the property rights of, say, landowners in Wilmington, North Carolina, that demands redress or whether it falls short of that threshold.

When evaluating nuisances the common law tradition suggests we look for evidence of quantifiable harm or significant risk to one’s person or property. The case for sea level rise as a nuisance is plausible on these grounds, but fraught with uncertainty. Indeed, in the common law, we find the presence of a multitude of legalized nuisances. Transient inconvenience (a truck rumbling past that wakes you early in the morning, for instance) is widely accepted as an inevitability of human life and one cannot turn to the state for every perceived effect of another’s actions.

It is conceivable, however, that greenhouse gas emissions would be miscategorized as potential nuisances and should, rather, be considered as a form of trespass. Trespass is physical entry accomplished by a tangible mass that directly interferes with property. Though greenhouse gases are not tangible mass, water is. So while industrial carbon dioxide emission itself could not be considered trespass, the process it initiates might. A determination of a trespass does not have the quantitative evidentiary requirement that does nuisance.

The answer to the question of whether emissions constitute either a nuisance or a trespass does not present itself readily. Further complicating matters is the notion of the homestead easement, by which an actor claims a de facto right by establishing behavior before the threatened land is taken up as property. It should also be noted that it is not insignificant that nearly all, if not literally 100 percent, of coastal Carolinians are themselves emitters through their use of electricity, transportation and heating fuel, and other carbon-intensive goods and services. It is in the context of this legal quagmire that we might find the work of Ronald Coase useful.

III. Enter Ronald Coase

Lest we unthinkingly succumb to the intuitive, conventional wisdom that an owner of Carolinian coastal real estate has an insuperable legal claim on any incurred cost and that the state must necessarily constrain emitters to protect property holders, we ought consider the work of contrarian 20^th century economist Ronald Coase.

Coase famously stymied conventional, Pigouvian-intervention wisdom in 1960 at a now-legendary gathering of Chicago school economists. At the gathering, and with his subsequent paper, The Problem of Social Cost, Coase challenged the received doctrine on the economics of externalities, which stated that the most beneficial outcomes are facilitated by taxing actors such as the emitters relevant in our current discussion, winning many of the attending economists over to his side. Coase introduced his project with the following passage:

“The conclusions to which this kind of analysis seems to have led most economists is that it would be desirable to make the owner of the factory liable for the damage caused to those injured by the smoke, or alternatively, to place a tax on the factory owner varying with the amount of smoke produced and equivalent in money terms to the damage it would cause, or finally, to exclude the factory from residential districts (and presumably from other areas in which the emission of smoke would have harmful effects on others). It is my contention that the suggested courses of action are inappropriate, in that they lead to results which are not necessarily, or even usually, desirable (The Problem of Social Cost, p. 1-2).”

The key insight Coase delivered with The Problem of Social Cost is that disputes such as the one we are considering involve not just the actions of one party (the emitters), but two (the emitters and the property owners). He labeled this the reciprocal nature of the problem.

In nearly all cases, Coase points out, decisions by both parties contribute to the emergence of conflicting claims. In the threatened coastal property case at hand, yes, the emitters burn carbon-based fuels and initiate marginal encroachment of water onto land, but it also must be acknowledged that the landholders have chosen to take up vulnerable land in the form of coastal real estate. Just as this conflict would not have emerged if emitters were not emitting, this conflict would not have emerged if people had refrained from establishing property in these coastal areas.

In the Coasean framework, it is too simplistic to view the greenhouse gas emitters as encroaching on the rights of the coastal real estate owners. After all, if the people running coal-fired power plants are barred from running their businesses, then they, too, are having their property rights restricted in a way that injures them. Rather than declaring one side the victim and one side the aggressor from the outset, Coase offers a framework in which various parties simply have conflicting goals for the use of scarce property.

Giving credit where it is due, Andrew Kemp, a Tufts University sea level rise expert whom the Post’s Mooney and Dennis interviewed for their article acknowledged this Coasean point, describing (in the words of Mooney and Dennis) “that 100 years ago, not only would the seas have been lower, but there also would have been a lot less property in harm’s way.”

What Coase demonstrates with aplomb is that our economic analysis of conflicts like this one need take into account more than the obvious:

“If we are to discuss the problem in terms of causation, both parties cause the damage. If we are to attain an optimum allocation of resources, it is therefore desirable that both parties should take the harmful effect (the nuisance) into account in deciding on their course of action (The Problem of Social Cost, p. 13).”

IV. Coasean Bargaining for Coastal Property Damage

With the two-party paradigm comes a new approach to resolving this sort of conflict. This insight opens the door for what we now call the Coase theorem, which conveys, in my words, that in the context of assigned and enforced property rights, bargaining between parties heretofore in conflict will, absent transaction costs, engender a solution in which no party is made worse off, and that the ultimate, production-maximizing result is independent from the liability determination.

Put another way, regardless of to whom the property right is granted, parties will negotiate to reach the outcome that is most cost-efficient.

So what can the Coase theorem tell us about our sea level rise example?

Let us consider the following scenarios:

          A) Courts rule that emitters are liable for sea rise damages.

In this scenario emitters can be expected to choose between a range of options in order to comply with the legal ruling. Emitters will opt to pay for the least costly means of compliance. This could entail emissions abatement, emissions capture, sea rise adaptation (like new dikes), geo-engineering, or paying property holders a sufficient sum to render them indifferent—or something else entirely. What matters is that the ruling be clear and that it allow the liable party to choose a least costly path forward.

          B) Courts rule that emitters are not liable for sea rise damages.

This is the circumstance that is most interesting. In this case, according to Coase, even though property holders will be liable for their own losses, we would expect (absent transaction costs) the same least costly solution to emerge. If emissions capture is the most attractive option for emitters when ruled liable, the same can be expected if emitters are not held liable and property holders can be expected to pay for the requisite hardware themselves. If emitters when ruled liable find that buying out property holders is most affordable, we can likewise expect property abandonment if property holders are determined to be responsible for their losses. The economic solution to the conflict essentially hinges on whether the marginal benefit to emitters exceeds the marginal cost to coastal real estate holders, or vice versa.

In short, in a world of low transaction costs, as long as the state clearly delimits property rights and liability, parties can bargain with each other to find a satisfactory solution and the only difference in terms of resource allocation that will result from the ruling is who will pay the bill.

“It is necessary,” writes Coase, “to know whether the damaging business is liable or not for damage caused since without the establishment of this initial delimitation of rights there can be no market transactions to transfer and recombine them. But the ultimate result (which maximises the value of production) is independent of the legal position if the pricing system is assumed to work without cost (The Problem of Social Cost, p. 8).” 

V. A Caveat: Transaction Cost

If market transactions were costless, the above approach would be enough to resolve disputes, but, alas, transactions are not costless.

“(A)s we have seen,” Coase writes, “the situation is quite different when market transactions are so costly as to make it difficult to change the arrangement of rights established by the law. In such cases, the courts directly influence economic activity. It would therefore seem desirable that the courts should understand the economic consequences of their decisions and should, insofar as this is possible without creating too much uncertainty about the legal position itself, take these consequences into account when making their decisions (The Problem of Social Cost, p. 19).”

The threatened coastal property example is one such case. Property owners have no clear target for their ire, given the billions of emissions sources around the globe, making bargaining implausible. As Coase explains, negotiations will not be fruitful if it is not possible to discover with which party one should deal. Thus, transactions that would otherwise be carried out evade us.

David Friedman succinctly communicates this point in his Coase explainer:

“If there were externalities but no transaction costs there would be no problem, since the parties would always bargain to the efficient solution. When we observe externality problems (or other forms of market failure) in the real world, we should ask not merely where the problem comes from but what the transaction costs are that prevent it from being bargained out of existence.”

So while the Coase theorem tells us to allocate rights, the Coase imperative tells us to minimize transaction costs. This imperative has provided the intellectual core of many an anti-regulation, anti-tax argument in the decades since Coase wrote his seminal paper.

The presence of transaction costs makes a rights allocation significant in a way that it otherwise would not be, rendering the judgment of the courts all the more critical. This is where economic analysis can play a seminal role in guiding decision-making. Sometimes allocating property right and liability in the counter-intuitive manner—e.g., in the sea level rise case, denying landowners a claim against emitters—leads to the better solution. In dealing with the classic railroad-farmer conflict in Section VIII of The Problem of Social Cost Coase demonstrates as much:

“A change from a regime in which the railway is not liable for damage to one in which it is liable is likely therefore to lead to an increase in the amount of cultivation on lands adjoining the railway,” he concludes. “It will also, of course, lead to an increase in the amount of crop destruction due to railway-caused fires.”

In the sea level rise case, similar incentive dynamics are at work—to the extent that coastal property is insulated from costs, it will abound. Note that in the absence of transaction costs, this potential problem doesn’t arise. If the courts or a legislature give coastal real estate owners the right to compensation from emitters in the event of flooding, if it is cheaper—all things considered—to reduce the amount of development on the coast, then emitters will make side payments to achieve this outcome. Thus the people who elect to build on the coast will take the full opportunity cost of their action into consideration, because they are forfeiting the potential side payment.

The Coasean assessment that transaction costs would seem to preclude bargaining between emitters and property owners will suggest to some readers that Coase would in this case resort to the Pigovian tax solution, but this does not appear to be so. Instead, Coase doubles down on his criticism of Pigovian school, describing a glaring tax deficiency:

“Modern economists tend to think exclusively in terms of taxes and in a very precise way. The tax should be equal to the damage done and should therefore vary with the amount of the harmful effect. As it is not proposed that the proceeds of the tax should be paid to those suffering the damage, this solution is not the same as that which would force a business to pay compensation to those damaged by its actions, although economists generally do not seem to have noticed this and tend to treat the two solutions as being identical (The Problem of Social Cost, p. 41).”

It is the Coasean position that all solutions—market transaction, regulation, taxation, et al.—have costs and that the state should take those costs into account when evaluating conflicts, with an eye toward its own weaknesses. There is no reason, Coase thinks, to weigh the scales toward one or another approach without careful evaluation of the particulars of a property conflict. At times, this will result in the conclusion that best thing the state can do is leave the party producing the harmful effect free from liability.

For those who doubt even the possibility that this is the correct outcome, consider: Pushed to its logical limit, the “punish the emitters” mentality would mean that a single coastal real estate owner could have the legal ability to bar every person on earth from so much a lighting a campfire. Surely that can’t be a “market solution” or exhibit “full respect for property rights.” Yet if the reader agrees that such an outcome is absurd, then we realize the proper assignment of property rights when it comes to, say, driving an automobile or even running a coal-fired power plant, is not a simple matter of studying the chemistry of the greenhouse effect.

VI. The Fundamental Issue: Conflict Resolution or Resource Allocation 

Once more, the fundamental question before us is what role the state can play in harmonizing conflicting property interests. The conventional approach is for the state to regulate economic activity; the typical “textbook” economic approach is to apply a tax; the Coasean approach is to compare the total social product yielded by these different arrangements and to arrange property rights in accordance with a maximization of production.

This is a valuable exercise, but total social product alone is unstable ground upon which to build policy. The very notion of total social product is itself dubious on account of the subjectivity of cost, as explained by Carl Menger and the economists that followed in the Austrian tradition—some of whom have been quite critical of the Coasean approach to law and economics. Rather, an ethical perspective must be at the foundation of our public policy approach. Coase himself would, of course, agree that his economic insight can only provide us with so much. As he explained, channeling Frank H. Knight, “problems of welfare economics must ultimately dissolve into a study of aesthetics and morals.”

The approach to conflict resolution that I think proves most durable is one that holds justly-acquired property as an inviolable right. Such a principle does not itself resolve conflict, but provides us a lodestar to guide our evaluation of the various methods of resolution before us—regulation, taxation, tort claims, et al.

Ronald Coase provides us with a thought-provoking exercise for considering conflict resolution that should have a measure of currency in the public discussion of coastal property damage. Coase teaches us that legal judgments will not determine an allocation of resources, but only liability; that the price system determines resource allocation; that transaction costs makes bargaining on the question of sea level rise implausible; but also that state-centric responses to the conflict, like regulation and taxation, have weaknesses of their own.

The strongest argument against the Coasean approach is the trenchant critique that it favors well-established economic powers. Absolving emitters of liability, on this view, is akin to granting them a rent. Given the long history of businesses abusing the power of the state to entrench their own interests, this point is well taken. Conservatives and libertarians ought be wary of their own inclination toward an unqualified, pro-business sentiment that can cloud sound judgment. A property-rights focused perspective is oriented in favor neither or one party nor another, but toward the upholding of principle.

Ultimately, in our evaluation of the conflict between industrial greenhouse gas emitters and coastal property owners—as in all others—economics serves as a complement to considerations of justice. And the Coasean approach affords us a valuable one.

The post Toward a Coasean Approach to Coastal Property Damage appeared first on IER.

The E-Commerce Benchmark KPI Study: The Most Valuable Online Consumer Trend of 2018 Revealed

Posted by Alan_Coleman

The latest Wolfgang E-Commerce Report is now live. This study gives a comprehensive view of the state of digital marketing in retail and travel, allowing digital marketers to benchmark their 2018 performance and plan their 2019 strategy.

The study analyzes over 250 million website sessions and more than €500 million in online revenue. Google Analytics, new Facebook Analytics reports, and online surveys are used to glean insights.

Revenue volume correlations

One of the unique features of the study is its conversion correlation. All website metrics featured in the study are correlated with conversion success to reveal what the most successful websites do differently.

This year we've uncovered our strongest success correlation ever at 0.67! Just to give that figure context: normally, 0.2 is worth talking about and 0.3 is noteworthy. Not only is this correlation with success very strong, the insight itself is highly actionable and can become a pillar of your digital marketing strategy.

These are the top factors that correlated with revenue volume. You can see the other correlations in the full study.

Click to see a bigger version

• Average pages per session (.37)
• Average session length (.49)
• Conversion rate by users (.41)
• Number of sessions per user (.67)
• Percentage of sessions from paid search (.25)

Average website engagement metrics

	Number of sessions per user	Average pages per session	Average session duration	Bounce rate	Average page load time	Average server response time
Retail	1.58	6	3min 18sec	38.04%	6.84	1.02
Multi-channel	1.51	6	3min 17sec	35.27%	6.83	1.08
Online-only	1.52	5	3min 14sec	43.80%	6.84	0.89
Travel	1.57	3	2min 34sec	44.14%	6.76	0.94
Overall	1.58	5	3min 1sec	41.26%	6.80	0.97

Above are the average website engagement metrics. You can see the average number of sessions per user is very low at 1.5 over 12 months. Anything a digital marketer can do to get this to 2, to 3, and to 4 makes for about the best digital marketing they can do.

At Wolfgang Digital, we’ve been witnessing this phenomenon at a micro-level for some time now. Many of our most successful campaigns of late have been focused on presenting the user with an evolving message which matures with each interaction across multiple media touchpoints.

Click through to the Wolfgang E-Commerce KPI Report in full to uncover dozens more insights, including:

• Is a social media engagement more valuable than a website visit?
• What's the true value of a share?
• What’s the average conversion rate for online-only vs multi-channel retailers?
• What’s the average order value for a hotel vs. tour operator?

Video Transcript

Today I want to talk to you about the most important online consumer trend in 2018. The story starts in a client meeting about four years ago, and we were meeting with a travel client. We got into a discussion about bounce rate and its implication on conversion rate. The client was asking us, "could we optimize our search and social campaigns to reduce bounce rate?", which is a perfectly valid question.

But we were wondering: Will we lower the rate of conversions? Are all bounces bad? As a result of this meeting, we said, "You know, we need a really scientific answer to that question about any of the website engagement metrics or any of the website channels and their influence on conversion." Out of that conversation, our E-Commerce KPI Report was born. We're now four years into it. (See previous years on the Moz Blog: 2015, 2016, 2017.)

The metric with the strongest correlation to conversions: Number of sessions per user

We've just released the 2019 E-Commerce KPI Report, and we have a standout finding, probably the strongest correlation we've ever seen between a website engagement metric and a website conversion metric. This is beautiful because we're all always optimizing for conversion metrics. But if you can isolate the engagement metrics which deliver, which are the money-making metrics, then you can be much more intelligent about how you create digital marketing campaigns.

The strongest correlation we've ever seen in this study is number of sessions per user, and the metric simply tells us on average how many times did your users visit your website. What we're learning here is any digital marketing you can do which makes that number increase is going to dramatically increase your conversions, your revenue success.

Change the focus of your campaigns

It's a beautiful metric to plan campaigns with because it changes the focus. We're not looking for a campaign that's a one-click wonder campaign. We're not looking for a campaign that it's one message delivered multiple times to the same user. Much more so, we're trying to create a journey, multiple touchpoints which deliver a user from their initial interaction through the purchase funnel, right through to conversion.

Create an itinerary of touchpoints along the searcher's journey

1. Research via Google

Let me give you an example. We started this with a story about a travel company. I'm just back from a swimming holiday in the west of Ireland. So let's say I have a fictional travel company. We'll call them Wolfgang Wild Swimming. I'm going to be a person who's researching a swimming holiday. So I'm going to go to Google first, and I'm going to search for swimming holidays in Ireland.

2. E-book download via remarketing

I'm going to go to the Wolfgang Wild Swimming web page, where I'm going to read a little bit about their offering. In doing that, I'm going to enter their Facebook audience. The next time I go to Facebook, they're now remarketing to me, and they'll be encouraging me to download their e-book, which is a guide to the best swimming spots in the wild west of Ireland. I'm going to volunteer my email to them to get access to the book. Then I'm going to spend a bit more time consuming their content and reading their book.

3. Email about a local offline event

A week later, I get an email from them, and they're having an event in my area. They're going for a swim in Dublin, one of my local spots in The Forty Foot, for example. I'm saying, "Well, I was going to go for a swim this weekend anyway. I might as well go with this group." I go to the swim where I can meet the tour guides. I can meet people who have been on it before. I'm now really close to making a purchase.

4. YouTube video content consumed via remarketing

Again, a week later, they have my email address, so they're targeting me on YouTube with videos of previous holidays. Now I'm watching video content. All of a sudden, Wolfgang Wild Swimming comes up. I'm now watching a video of a previous holiday, and I'm recognizing the instructors and the participants in the previous holidays. I'm really, really close to pressing Purchase on a holiday here. I'm on the phone to my friend saying, "I found the one. Let's book this."

Each interaction moves the consumer closer to purchase

I hope what you're seeing there is with each interaction, the Google search, the Facebook ad which led to an e-book download, the offline event, back online to the YouTube video, with each interaction I'm getting closer to the purchase.

You can imagine the conversion rate and the return on ad spend on each interaction increasing as we go. This is a really powerful message for us as digital marketers. When we're planning a campaign, we think about ourselves as though we're in the travel business too, and we're actually creating an itinerary. We're simply trying to create an itinerary of touchpoints that guide a searcher through awareness, interest, right through to action and making that purchase.

I think it's not just our study that tells us this is the truth. A lot of the best-performing campaigns we've been running we've seen this anecdotally, that every extra touchpoint increases the conversion rate. Really powerful insight, really useful for digital marketers when planning campaigns. This is just one of the many insights from our E-Commerce KPI Report. If you found that interesting, I'd urge you to go read the full report today.

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Australia Shows Futility of Climate Legislation

An article last month in the New York Times showcases the futility of climate legislation, regardless of one’s views on the desirability of government measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, Somini Sengupta’s piece explained that the Australian government was toppled because of climate policy, and then drew parallels to the United States and Canada. Whether it was her intention, Sengupta demonstrated that if indeed climate change is a problem, activists should realize that the political process offers a very unreliable “solution.”

Sengupta summarizes what just happened in Australia:

This week, the failure to pass legislation that would have reined in greenhouse gas emissions precipitated Malcolm Turnbull’s ouster as prime minister. He was elbowed out by Scott Morrison, an ardent champion of the Australian coal industry who is known for having brought a lump of the stuff to Parliament.

Although the NYT article doesn’t directly discuss it, this episode is similar to the 2013 election of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who ran on a pledge to repeal Australia’s carbon tax. At the time, I discussed the findings of Alex Robson’s study of the Australian carbon tax. Robson found that every one of the standard talking points for a “conservative case” for a carbon tax did not hold true in Australia’s experience.

Yet the political difficulties of carbon legislation are not confined to Australia. The NYT piece draws parallels with Canada:

It could be a bellwether for next year’s Canadian elections, expected in October, in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces a powerful challenge from politicians aligned with the country’s oil industry. Conservatives have pledged to undo Mr. Trudeau’s plans to put a price on carbon nationwide if they take power. At the provincial level, conservatives won a majority in Ontario after campaigning against the province’s newly enacted cap-and-trade program.

And, of course, the connection with the election of Donald Trump—especially his pledge to revive the coal sector—is unmistakable.

The NYT piece tries to bolster hope for those who desire government action: Even though national policy is lacking (according to advocates), lower jurisdictions have adopted renewable energy targets.

Yet even here, this is little consolation. As the article explains:

Most Australian states have renewable energy targets, and Australians are powering their houses with solar energy at one of the highest rates in the world. But Australia’s emissions have continued to rise.

…

Climate Action Tracker, an alliance of European think tanks that tracks countries’ climate pledges under the agreement, concluded recently that “if all other countries were to follow Australia’s current policy settings, warming could reach over 3°C and up to 4°C.” Those are levels that climate scientists consider “highly insufficient” to stop the worst effects of climate change.

In fact, that last paragraph is a bit misleading. Forget what happens if every country copied Australia. Even if we look at what the governments around the world are actually doing, that same Climate Action Tracker website informs us that under current policy, the world is headed for 3.4°C of warming by 2100. In other words, there’s nothing uniquely “antisocial” about Australia. This is truly “business as usual,” as they say in the climate policy literature.

To be sure, the case for a carbon tax is very weak. We have written on this extensively here at IER, and with climate scientists at Cato I’ve co-authored a formal study. Even if we could set aside the practical political problems of enforcement, it still would make humanity worse off to enforce a globally-implemented carbon tax, for the reasons we raise in the links above.

However, as the recent NYT piece illustrates, a carbon tax (or other top-down government limitations on greenhouse gas emissions) has built-in incentives to fail in its stated objective. A carbon tax (and other measures) necessarily makes electricity and transportation more expensive than they otherwise would be. They impose immediate and tangible pain on citizens, hitting the poorest households in essential components of life. In exchange, the alleged benefit is a slightly cooler planet to be enjoyed by our great-grandchildren, who—under any reasonable scenario—will all be much richer than we are today.

This is not a stable political outcome—especially in the event of a broad economic downturn, when a new set of officials will rise to power, promising relief from the climate policies in order to spur economic growth in the present. Even if most governments around the world stuck to the script, just a few major defectors could undermine the program. And it is the biggest emitters who have the most to gain from such a “defection” from a worldwide framework.

It is fashionable to label skeptics of aggressive government climate action as “deniers” of science. Yet as the election outcomes in Australia, Canada, and the United States show, those favoring a carbon tax are themselves denying political science.

The post Australia Shows Futility of Climate Legislation appeared first on IER.

Are taking advantage of SEI’s job board?

SEI’s job board can help employers find qualified employees, and help job seekers find opportunities in the solar industry

Did you know that SEI has trained over 60,000+ people from all over the world on solar energy?  Did you also know that SEI hosts an exclusive job board that only our 60,000+ alumni can view?  If your company is looking to add an SEI trained professional to your team, please consider hosting your next job opening on SEI’s job board!  Check out the job listing previews at https://www.solarenergy.org/careers-job-board/ (You cannot view full job posting without alumni log in credentials).

Employers: To have your solar job posted send, at minimum, the name/location of your company, job description, and contact info for potential employees to SEI@solarenergy.org .  Your company’s job opening will be hosted for all SEI alumni to view for 90 days; you may resubmit after 90 days.  In the hopes of bringing professionally trained solar personnel in contact with great solar companies looking to hire, this service is completely FREE for both employers and alumni!

Alumni: For those alumni seeking jobs, don’t forget to regularly log into your account at https://solarenergytraining.org/course/view.php?id=402 see the latest job postings.  To get full access to SEI’s exclusive employer job openings, you must be a student/alum with SEI and received your alumni login credentials via email at time of original training.  If you didn’t receive your alumni login credentials or have forgotten them, please contact student services at SEI@solarenergy.org with your full name.

The post Are taking advantage of SEI’s job board? appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

India Ups Its Renewable Energy Goals: What Does It Mean?

Coal Is Still King in the Global Generating Sector

Globally, coal still generates more electricity than any other source. In 2017, coal generated 38 percent of the world’s electricity—64 percent more than natural gas, which ranked second in electricity generation worldwide. Coal’s share in 2017 was no smaller than its share two decades earlier. In that time, electricity consumption worldwide increased by 76 percent. While the global share of electricity from natural gas and from renewable energy each has grown since 1998, their generation has substituted for nuclear and petroleum generation in the world market, rather than for coal generation. Various countries have limited their nuclear generation since the tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear units in 2011, forcing nuclear decommissioning, and petroleum has been on the decline for a long time as a generating fuel.

Countries mainly investing in coal are in Asia and Africa—many getting support from the Japanese as well as the Chinese, who are building coal-fired plants in other countries to support their coal industry as electricity growth has slowed. Even in Germany, states are pressuring Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep coal-fired power for as long as 30 years as Merkel’s administration is committed to shuttering about 120 lignite and hard-coal plants as the nation approaches a deadline for setting an exit date in October. As many as 65,000 direct and indirect German jobs are dependent on coal power generation and lignite mining.

Asian and African Coal Interests

Countries across Asia and Africa are expected to increase their use of coal for expanding power generation through 2040. Asian countries including India and Vietnam are planning major coal projects. In Asia, where the world’s largest coal reserves are located, China and India account for most of the growth in coal use while Vietnam plans a fivefold increase in its coal capacity through 2035.

Bangladesh plans to use coal to generate 50 percent of the country’s power by 2030, up from 2 percent today. Like many countries in the region, it is funding its expansion with loans and technological help from China and Japan. Toshiba Corp. and other partners are building a coal power plant and port on Matarbari Island in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh project will cost about $4 billion, with most of its financing coming from the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

In Nigeria, 54 percent of its 190 million citizens lack access to electricity. Nigeria currently generates its power from hydroelectric dams and natural gas, but frequent vandalism of its pipelines has caused power shortages. By 2030, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, plans to add 30 gigawatts of power. To reach that goal, Nigeria will deploy a mix of solar and hydropower as well as coal, using domestic coal reserves. The project will cost about $3.5 billion a year during development. The World Bank approved a $350 million loan for solar mini-grids and other equipment to provide electricity in Nigeria. But the bank will no longer finance projects involving coal, despite the desperate need for basic electricity in Nigeria.

Some countries planning to expand coal generation are hoping the Trump administration will take a pro-coal approach to the 2016 Electrify Africa Act, which set aside funds for energy projects on the continent without specifying a preference for how power is generated. The program, known as Power Africa, is promoting an all-of-the-above energy development strategy for sub-Saharan Africa.

U.S. Coal Exports

While U.S. coal demand has been declining since 2013, U.S. coal exports increased 61 percent in 2017 to almost 97 million short tons, after having a poor year in 2016, according to the Energy Information Administration. That helped to increase U.S. coal production by 6 percent in 2017. Coal companies in the West have wanted to offset declining domestic coal consumption through exports to Pacific Rim countries. But West Coast cities and states have obstructed proposals for new coal-handling terminals as part of their climate change campaigns. Utah, however, is looking to ship its coal from Mexican ports.

The Utah Office of Energy Development signed a memorandum of understanding with economic development officials for the Mexican state of Baja California to establish “a close binational collaboration” aimed at connecting Utah energy resources with new markets abroad. It would build on existing bulk-handling facilities at the Port of Ensenada, which is 65 miles south of San Diego, and which may expand into Puerto El Sauzal. The agreement between Utah and Baja California seeks to “encourage cooperation across infrastructure development, trade opportunities among regulators and operators, in identifying potential global markets, and promoting visits by government, industry and other specialists.”

Conclusion

While many developed nations are looking to phase out their coal-fired power plants, many countries in Asia and Africa are looking to coal to provide a reliable source of power for their country. Many countries in the world are still not fully electrified and providing electricity to their residents will improve their quality of life and make economic development possible. The U.S. coal industry is looking to export coal to these countries and would benefit from a West coast export-handling terminal. Utah has signed a memorandum of understanding with officials from Mexico to possibly use their port in Ensenada to export coal to Pacific Rim countries.

The post Coal Is Still King in the Global Generating Sector appeared first on IER.

Spectator to Partner: Turn Your Clients into SEO Allies - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Are your clients your allies in SEO, or are they passive spectators? Could they even be inadvertently working against you? A better understanding of expectations, goals, and strategy by everyone involved can improve your client relations, provide extra clarity, and reduce the number of times you're asked to "just SEO a site." In today's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins outlines tactics you should know for getting clients and bosses excited about the SEO journey, as well as the risks involved in passivity.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Kameron Jenkins, and I'm the SEO Wordsmith here at Moz. Today I'm going to be talking with you about how to turn your clients from spectators, passive spectators to someone who is proactively interested and an ally in your SEO journey.

So if you've ever heard someone come to you, maybe it's a client or maybe you're in-house and this is your boss saying this, and they say, "Just SEO my site," then this is definitely for you. A lot of times it can be really hard as an SEO to work on a site if you really aren't familiar with the business, what that client is doing, what they're all about, what their goals are. So I'm going to share with you some tactics for getting your clients and your boss excited about SEO and excited about the work that you're doing and some risks that can happen when you don't do that.

Tactics

So let's dive right in. All right, first we're going to talk about tactics.

1. Share news

The first tactic is to share news. In the SEO industry, things are changing all the time, so it's actually a really great tactic to keep yourself informed, but also to share that news with the client. So here's an example. Google My Business is now experimenting with a new video format for their post feature. So one thing that you can do is say, "Hey, client, I hear that Google is experimenting with this new format. They're using videos now. Would you like to try it?"

So that's really cool because it shows them that you're on top of things. It shows them that you're the expert and you're keeping your finger on the pulse of the industry. It also tells them that they're going to be a part of this new, cutting-edge technology, and that can get them really, really excited about the SEO work you're doing. So make sure to share news. I think that can be really, really valuable.

2. Outline your work

The next tip is to outline your work. This one seems really simple, but there is so much to say for telling a client what you're going to do, doing it, and then telling them that you did it. It's amazing what can happen when you just communicate with a client more. There have been plenty of situations where maybe I did less tangible work for a client one week, but because I talk to them more, they were more inclined to be happy with me and excited about the work I was doing.

It's also cool because when you tell a client ahead of time what you're going to do, it gives them time to get excited about, "Ooh, I can't wait to see what he or she is going to do next." So that's a really good tip for getting your clients excited about SEO.

3. Report results

Another thing is to report on your results. So, as SEOs, it can be really easy to say, hey, I added this page or I fixed these things or I updated this.

But if we detach it from the actual results, it doesn't really matter how much a client likes you or how much your boss likes you, there's always a risk that they could pull the plug on SEO because they just don't see the value that's coming from it. So that's an unfortunate reality, but there are tons of ways that you can show the value of SEO. One example is, "Hey, client, remember that page that we identified that was ranking on page two. We improved it. We made all of those updates we talked about, and now it's ranking on page one. So that's really exciting. We're seeing a lot of new traffic come from it.I'm wondering, are you seeing new calls, new leads, an uptick in any of those things as a result of that?"

So that's really good because it shows them what you did, the results from that, and then it kind of connects it to, "Hey, are you seeing any revenue, are you seeing new clients, new customers," things like that. So they're more inclined to see that what you're doing is making a real, tangible impact on actual revenue and their actual business goals.

4. Acknowledge and guide their ideas

This one is really, really important. It can be hard sometimes to marry best practices and customer service. So what I mean by that is there's one end of the pendulum where you are really focused on best practices. This is right. This is wrong. I know my SEO stuff. So when a client comes to you and they say, "Hey, can we try this?" and you go, "No, that's not best practices,"it can kind of shut them down. It doesn't get them involved in the SEO process. In fact, it just kind of makes them recoil and maybe they don't want to talk to you, and that's the exact opposite of what we want here. On the other end of that spectrum though, you have clients who say, "Hey, I really want to try this.I saw this article. I'm interested in this thing. Can you do it for my website?"

Maybe it's not the greatest idea SEO-wise. You're the SEO expert, and you see that and you go, "Mm, that's actually kind of scary. I don't think I want to do that." But because you're so focused on pleasing your client, you maybe do it anyway. So that's the opposite of what we want as well. We want to have a "no, but" mentality. So an example of that could be your client emails in and says, "Hey, I want to try this new thing."

You go, "Hey, I really like where your head is at. I like that you're thinking about things this way. I'm so glad you shared this with me. I tried this related thing before, and I think that would be actually a really good idea to employ on your website." So kind of shifting the conversation, but still bringing them along with you for that journey and guiding them to the correct conclusions. So that's another way to get them invested without shying them away from the SEO process.

Risks

So now that we've talked about those tactics, we're going to move on to the risks. These are things that could happen if you don't get your clients excited and invested in the SEO journey.

1. SEO becomes a checklist

When you don't know your client well enough to know what they're doing in the real world, what they're all about, the risk becomes you have to kind of just do site health stuff, so fiddling with meta tags, maybe you're changing some paragraphs around, maybe you're changing H1s, fixing 404s, things like that, things that are just objectively, "I can make this change, and I know it's good for site health."

But it's not proactive. It's not actually doing any SEO strategies. It's just cleanup work. If you just focus on cleanup work, that's really not an SEO strategy. That's just making sure your site isn't broken. As we all know, you need so much more than that to make sure that your client's site is ranking. So that's a risk.

If you don't know your clients, if they're not talking to you, or they're not excited about SEO, then really all you're left to do is fiddle with kind of technical stuff. As good as that can be to do, our jobs are way more fun than that. So communicate with your clients. Get them on board so that you can do proactive stuff and not just fiddling with little stuff.

2. SEO conflicts with business goals

So another risk is that SEO can conflict with business goals.

So say that you're an SEO. Your client is not talking to you. They're not really excited about stuff that you're doing. But you decide to move forward with proactive strategies anyway. So say I'm an SEO, and I identify this keyword. My client has this keyword. This is a related keyword. It can bring in a lot of good traffic. I've identified this good opportunity. All of the pages that are ranking on page one, they're not even that good. I could totally do better. So I'm going to proactively go, I'm going to build this page of content and put it on my client's site. Then what happens when they see that page of content and they go, "We don't even do that. We don't offer that product. We don't offer that service."

Oops. So that's really bad. What can happen is that, yes, you're being proactive, and that's great. But if you don't actually know what your client is doing, because they're not communicating with you, they're not really excited, you risk misaligning with their business goals and misrepresenting them. So that's a definite risk.

3. You miss out on PR opportunities

Another thing, you miss out on PR opportunities. So again, if your client is not talking to you, they're not excited enough to share what they're doing in the real world with you, you miss out on news like, "Hey, we're sponsoring this event,"or, "Hey, I was the featured expert on last night's news."

Those are all really, really good things that SEOs look for. We crave that information. We can totally use that to capitalize on it for SEO value. If we're not getting that from our clients, then we miss out on all those really, really cool PR opportunities. So a definite risk. We want those PR opportunities. We want to be able to use them.

4. Client controls the conversation

Next up, client controls the conversation. That's a definite risk that can happen. So if a client is not talking to you, a reason could be they don't really trust you yet. When they don't trust you, they tend to start to dictate. So maybe our client emails in.

A good example of this is, "Hey, add these 10 backlinks to my website." Or, "Hey, I need these five pages, and I need them now." Maybe they're not even actually bad suggestions. It's just the fact that the client is asking you to do that. So this is kind of tricky, because you want to communicate with your client. It's good that they're emailing in, but they're the ones at that point that are dictating the strategy. Whereas they should be communicating their vision, so hey, as a business owner, as a website owner, "This is my vision. This is my goal, and this is what I want."

As the SEO professional, you're receiving that information and taking it and making it into an SEO strategy that can actually be really, really beneficial for the client. So there's a huge difference between just being a task monkey and kind of transforming their vision into an SEO strategy that can really, really work for them. So that's a definite risk that can happen.

Excitement + partnership = better SEO campaigns

There's a lot of different things that can happen. These are just some examples of tactics that you can use and risks. If you have any examples of things that have worked for you in the past, I would love to hear about them. It's really good to information share. Success stories where maybe you got your client or your boss really bought into SEO, more so than just, "Hey, I'm spending money on it."

But, "Hey, I'm your partner in this. I'm your ally, and I'm going to give you all the information because I know that it's going to be mutually beneficial for us." So at the end here, excitement, partner, better SEO campaigns. This is going to be I believe a recipe for success to get your clients and your boss on board. Thanks again so much for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and come back next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Improve Your Link Building Outreach Pipeline

Posted by John.Michael123

Link building is probably one of the most challenging pieces of your SEO efforts. Add multiple clients to the mix, and managing the link outreach process gets even tricker. When you’re in the thick of several outreach campaigns, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts and which tactics will bring you the most return on your time and resources.

Three common questions are critical to understand at any point in your link campaign:

• Do you need more link prospects?
• Do you need to revise your email templates?
• Do you need to follow up with prospects?

Without a proven way to analyze these questions, your link building efforts won’t be as efficient as they could be.

We put together a Google Sheets template to help you better manage your link building campaigns. The beauty of this template is that it allows for customization to better fit your workflow. You'll want to make a copy to get started with your own version.

Our link building workflow

We've been able to improve our efficiency via this template by following a simple workflow around acquiring new guest posts on industry-relevant websites. The first step is to actually go out and find prospects that could be potentially interested in a guest blog post. We will then record those opportunities into our template so that we can track our efforts and identify any area that isn’t performing well.

The next step is to make sure to update the status of the prospect when anything changes like sending an outreach email to the prospect or getting a reply from them. It’s critical to keep the spreadsheet as up to date as possible so that we have an accurate picture of our performance.

Once you've used this template for enough time and you've gathered enough data, you'll be able to predict how many link prospects you'll need to find in order to acquire each link based on your own response and conversion rates. This can be useful if you have specific goals around acquiring a certain number of links per month, as you'll get a better feel for how much prospecting you need to do to meet that link target number.

Using the link outreach template

The main purpose of this template is to give you a systematic way to analyze your outreach process so you can drill down into the biggest opportunities for improvement. There are several key features, starting with the Prospects tab.

The Prospects tab is the only one you will need to manually edit, and it houses all the potential link prospects uncovered in your researched. You'll want to fill in the cells for your prospect’s website URL;, and you can also add the Domain Authority of the website for outreach prioritization. For the website URL, I typically put in an example of a guest post that was done on that site or just the homepage if I can’t find a better page.

There’s also a corresponding status column, with the following five stages so you can keep track of where each prospect is in the outreach process.

Status 1: Need to Reach Out. Use this for when you initially find a prospect but have not taken any action yet.

Status 2: Email Sent. This is used as soon as you send your first outreach email.

Status 3: Received Response

Status 4: Topic Approved. Select this status after you get a response and your guest post topic has been approved (this may take a few emails). Whenever I see this status, I know to reach out to my content team so they can start writing.

Status 5: Link Acquired. Selecting this status will automatically add the website to your Won Link Opportunities Report.

The final thing to do here is record the date that a particular link was acquired and add the URL where the link resides. Filling in these columns automatically populates the “Won Link Opportunities” report so you can track all of the links you acquire throughout the lifetime of your campaign.

Link building progress reports

This template automatically creates two reports that I share with my clients on a monthly basis. These reports help us dial in our efforts and maximize the performance of our overall link building campaign.

Link Pipeline report

The Link Pipeline report is a snapshot of our overall link outreach campaign. It shows us how many prospects we have in our pipeline and what the conversion/response rates are of each stage of our outreach funnel.

How to analyze the Link Pipeline report

This report allows us to understand where we need to focus our efforts to maximize our campaign’s performance. If there aren't enough prospects at the top of the funnel, we know that we need to start looking for new link opportunities. If our contact vs. response rate is low, we know we need to test new email copy or email subject lines.

Won Link Opportunities

The Won Link Opportunities report lists out all the websites where a link has been officially landed. This is a great way to keep track of overall progress over time and to gauge performance against your link building goals.

Getting the most out of your link building campaigns

Organization is critical for maximizing your link building efforts and the return on the time you're spending. By knowing exactly which stage of your link building process is your lowest performing, you can dramatically increase your overall efficiency by targeting those areas that need the most improvement.

Make a copy of the template

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Is the Environmental Left really ‘David’ fighting Goliath?

In the narrative crafted by environmental groups, the fossil fuel industry is depicted as a greedy, politically connected, and downright evil conspirator working to undermine the democratic will. It has been compared to the mid-century tobacco industry as a disseminator of misinformation about the harm of its products to keep people “addicted” to them. To fight this evil Goliath there has emerged a ‘David’ – a scrappy, rag tag team of environmental groups and renewable energy companies, whose weapons of “truth” and science must overcome the larger might of money and power wielded by their opposition. But this self-serving narrative is false.

Who Has the Money?

A prominent presenter of the “David vs. Goliath” narrative is Drexel University professor of sociology Dr. Robert Brulle. Brulle, an Energy Foundation-funded ‘environmentalist for Bernie,’ accuses the fossil fuel industry of using “outsize economic and cultural power to distort the public debate by introducing falsehoods.” His best-known work was a 2013 study “tracking the ‘dark money’ trail from conservative foundations to the think tanks that make up the ‘climate change counter-movement’ that promote climate denial.” The study reverberated in an echo chamber of environmental journals and left-leaning mainstream media sources, with headlines such as “Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change.” Yet the actual study showed only that conservative think tanks (what Brulle called the “climate change counter-movement”) received an average of $900 million per year in income (IE: donations), making no attempt to determine how much of this money was actually spent fighting climate action.

In response to the study, the Capital Research Center created the Climate Dollars project, critiquing Brulle’s study and calculating the unaddressed factors. It found that in 2010, the total money conservative think tanks received for all of their operations, $1.51 billion, was outmatched by environmental groups’ $3.70 billion (increasing in 2014 to $1.73 and $4.59 billion, respectively). Furthermore, conservative think tanks only spent $100 million on any activities relating to climate science. The Heartland Institute’s James Taylor estimated that of the money spent climate change, only a net of $46 million was actually opposing climate action.

The conclusion that environmental groups are the real Goliath corroborates a 2011 study by Dr. Matthew Nisbet, which found:

Overall, in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, the major conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations took in a total of $907 million in revenue, spent $787 million on all program-related activities, and spent an estimated $259 million specific to climate change and energy policy. In comparison, the national environmental groups took in $1.7 billion in revenue, spent $1.4 billion on program activities, and spent an estimated $394 million on climate change and energy-specific activities.

Brulle was well aware of Nisbet’s more encompassing study before he released his own, having been one of five peer reviewers to comment on it. Perhaps after realizing that the findings contradicted his favored narrative, however, Brulle abruptly asked his name to be withdrawn and helped Center for American Progress’ Joe Romm slam the study two days before its release.

Who Controls the Government?

Brulle was in the news again this June with a study analyzing federal lobbying spending on climate-related issues since 2000. He concludes that “environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector lobbying expenditures were dwarfed by a ratio of 10:1 by the spending of the sectors engaged in the supply and use of fossil fuels” —the latter of which counted as all fossil fuel and transportation corporations, electric utilities, and affiliated trade organizations. The study made rounds in a familiar echo chamber, with the Huffington Post reporting, “Fossil Fuel Industries Outspend Clean Energy Advocates On Climate Lobbying By 10 To 1” and Joe Romm at ThinkProgress declaring, “Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill U.S. climate action, new study finds.”

These headlines overstate the study’s findings in important ways. Transportation corporations and electric utilities are not part of the fossil fuel industry. They use and transport fossil fuels, but they also use and transport steel, aluminum, and uranium oxide. It is even less tenable to assume that all of the money that the transportation and electric utility sectors spend in climate-related lobbying is to kill climate action; in fact, climate action is as likely to benefit these industries as it is to hurt them. A carbon tax would make the 30.1% of electricity being produced by coal more expensive, but subsidies for clean energy would make the 37.1% of electricity being generated by nuclear and renewable sources much cheaper. The auto industry may pay extra to comply with emissions standards, but they love subsidies for electric and hybrid vehicles.

In practice, little of that $2 billion in total 2000-2016 climate lobbying expenditures was used to try to kill climate action. Before lumping it wholesale along with the fossil fuel and transportation industries, Brulle admits, “the utility sector did not lobby as a unified block… utilities that were expected to benefit from passage of climate legislation, especially those with large natural gas power generation capacity lobbied in favor of climate legislation.” In fact, even coal-reliant electric utilities have reason to love plenty of government climate action. That is because, due to the Averch-Johnson effect on utilities subject to rate-of-return regulation, by increasing capital accumulation utilities can increase their profits. Large-scale nuclear, hydro, and wind projects have been great for this, and disallowances have simply turned utilities’ sights on capital-intensive expenditures for pollution abatement and excessive safety and reliability standards. As for transportation, major automakers negotiated and endorsed President Obama’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) mandates and, eventually, lobbied against President Trump’s rollbacks to them.

Alone, fossil fuel corporations and their trade organizations still out-lobby environmental groups 3 to 1—but they are far from a united force against climate action either. Natural gas competes with coal, whereas subsidies for wind and solar will only increase the demand for natural gas as the critical backup to unreliable intermittent sources. Fossil fuel corporations are also huge players in the renewable and carbon-offsetting industries. BP, for instance, heavily invests in biofuels, solar energy, and touts itself as one of the top wind producers in the US. Shell sells carbon capture and storage, so every bit of the extra state support for CCS that they lobby for benefits them significantly. Even where climate action may hurt the fossil fuel industry as a whole, large fossil fuel corporations often lobby for and help create regulations that will strengthen their competitive advantage; BP, Shell, Exxon, Stantoil, and others support a carbon tax, a policy that will cost them initially but will debilitate their smaller competitors. Despite what Brulle’s study implies, the total climate-related lobbying expenditures are not a coordinated attack on climate action.

Nisbet’s study found that in 2009, environmental groups and their network of organizations and corporate allies spent $229 million on lobbying, while opponents of cap and trade legislation spent $272 million. Part of this imbalance is due to the fact that many environmental groups are 501(c)(3)s and are thus restricted from lobbying. But lobbying is not the only way to advance a mission, and environmental groups have found great success in funding academics like Dr. Brulle and suing fossil fuel corporations, states, and the federal government. They outspent their opponents and successfully shot down the fossil fuel-friendly Proposition 23 in California, and nationally outspent oil & gas interests by more than 3 to 1 in the 2016 elections and more than 2 to 1 (thus far) in the 2018 elections.

Conclusion

When these factors are considered, the environmental left looks less like David and their opponents look less like Goliath. In the end, the $1.51 billion in total annual income for conservative think tanks and the $2 billion that the (generously-defined) fossil fuel industry spent on climate lobbying over 16 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the $100 billion that Citigroup has committed to climate action or the $110 billion in clean energy investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the product of an alliance of environmental groups and major labor unions). These numbers speak for themselves, as do the numbers in our latest project, Big Green, Inc.  —tracking more than $3.7 billion in environmental grants flowing from just ten left-leaning foundations. When the fog clears, it appears that the ostensibly giant fossil fuel Goliath has fallen, and the no-longer puny green David has been crowned ruler.

 

View Big Green, Inc. here

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Large Coal Plants Slated to Close in Ohio and Pennsylvania

FirstEnergy is planning to close its last coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio over the next several years as they struggle to compete against natural gas and subsidized solar and wind plants unless federal aid saves them. FirstEnergy plans to de-activate the 2490-megawatt Bruce Mansfield Power Plant—the largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania—on June 1, 2021. Also, the 1490-megawatt W.H. Sammis power plant in Stratton, Ohio will be deactivated on June 1, 2022, as well as two smaller generating units in Ohio. The plants employ 550 people. According to the company, the plants are being retired because of “a market environment that fails to adequately compensate generators for the resiliency and fuel-security attributes that the plants provide.” Closure of these plants would leave about two dozen coal-fired plants operational in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Also affected would be the coal mining industry that employs over 5,000 workers in Pennsylvania and 2,800 in Ohio directly. Directly and indirectly, the coal industry employs 33,000 Ohioans. According to the Ohio Coal Association, coal-fired plants provide about 60 percent of the state’s energy.

These are not the only coal plants slated for retirement. For example, AES announced it would likely be forced to close a 360-megawatt Oklahoma coal plant, in the Southwest Power Pool, after Oklahoma Gas & Electric did not extend its power-purchase agreement. The plant employs about 100 workers. It also supports 800 to 1,200 other jobs directly and indirectly and has an annual economic impact of $48 million in its southeast Oklahoma region.

At least 11.4 gigawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity is expected to retire this year in the United States—more than has been retired in a single year since 2015 when 14.7 gigawatts of coal capacity was retired. Another 19.8 gigawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity is scheduled to close between 2018 and 2022. Moody’s Investors Service expects about 35 gigawatts of capacity from coal and nuclear plants to be shut down over the next five years. Since 2010, almost 40 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power capacity has either been shut down or designated for closure. And, over a quarter of our nuclear power plants cannot cover their operating costs, raising the threat of early retirement as well.

FirstEnergy Closure Plans

First Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March, stating that Bruce Mansfield lost $90 million in 2017 and projected a loss of $104 million this year, indicating low-cost natural gas as a cause for the plant’s losses. Because the plants cannot compete in PJM Interconnection’s regional wholesale markets with natural gas and subsidized and mandated renewable energy (wind and solar power), the company announced earlier this year it would also deactivate its three nuclear plants starting in 2020. Davis-Besse, in Oak Harbor, Ohio, would go offline by May 2020, and the company’s Beaver Valley nuclear plant in Shippingport and its Perry plant in Ohio would deactivate by May 2021.

The plant closures are subject to review by PJM, who could offer higher rates temporarily, until new transmission lines are built, if needed, to move additional power to the region. PJM Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic grid where FirstEnergy’s plants are located, will review the company’s plan over the next 90 days to determine if there would be any effects on the grid that require transmission upgrades. A spokesman for PJM Interconnection indicated that the grid had “adequate power supplies and healthy reserves in operation.”

The company has asked for an exemption from PJM’s “must offer” rules for fossil and nuclear plants for the 2022-2023 delivery year and beyond. Under must-offer rules, generating companies in the PJM region are required to make their plants’ capacity available to the grid in regular capacity auctions unless granted an exemption. The auctions are held to secure capacity three years in advance.

Conclusion

Coal and nuclear power plants are finding they cannot compete in wholesale markets with natural gas and wind and solar plants, which are heavily subsidized through state mandates and federal and state tax subsidies. Many U.S. utilities with coal and nuclear plants in their fleet are losing revenue, have filed for bankruptcy protection, and announced closures of their coal and nuclear plants. Coal, once the backbone of the U.S. generating industry, producing over half of the country’s power, is now generating less than a third of it, putting plant workers and miners in unemployment lines.

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