I’ve previously written about the “messy middle,” or the way that people REALLY decide on what to purchase. It’s not as logical as the theories suggest.
Therefore, when Kevin Indig touched on the subject, I was naturally interested.
His article includes a section “What we missed about the Messy Middle”:
Different ways of doing SEO
Severe limitations of attribution models
The need to merge CRO and SEO
From https://www.growth-memo.com/p/messy-middle.
Kevin Indig’s article touches upon a lot of topics, most of which I won’t discuss. Read his article. Instead, I’m going to focus on the second of Indig’s three items (on attribution model limitations) because it intersects with my interests, including the trust funnel.
Surround sound
Indig notes the issues with revenue attribution, and how measurements of conversion touch points often end up as wild guesses.
So he proposes something different.
Instead of trying to figure out where to be, try to be everywhere. It’s more important to understand where your competitors are, and you’re not….The surround sound approach seems intuitive but is a very different approach to what’s happening at companies today….Surround Sound doesn’t mean to do everything, but to carefully observe where competitors are and pull even.
From https://www.growth-memo.com/p/messy-middle.
At this point I only want to interject that you should also carefully observe where competitors AREN’T.
But what are the analysts going to analyze? What they can.
We should also rethink the numbers we look at. Recurring visits and the average number of visits until conversion reflect user behavior and improvements better than bounce rate or pages per visit since users hop around so much.
From https://www.growth-memo.com/p/messy-middle.
While much of the activity remains invisible to us, we can still look at the activity that we CAN see.
Some things remain secret
And yes, much of the activity does remain invisible. A former coworker messaged me on Sunday with a question, and he closed his message with the following.
Btw, enjoy your posts
From a private message.
I’m tossing that message over to Bredemarket’s chief analyst.
Bredemarket 
1 Comment