vineri, 19 iunie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Euroskeptics Poised to Form Government in Denmark, Seek Alliance and Rules Changes with Cameron

Posted: 19 Jun 2015 03:59 PM PDT

Anti-euro parties are on a roll. In a shocking election result in Denmark, Eurosceptic Danish People's Party Surge in General Election.

The eurosceptic Danish People's Party could become the largest party in a new right-wing government in a shock result that brings David Cameron a powerful new ally in his bid for EU renegotiations.

The anti-immigrant party took 21.1 percent of the votes, jumping past their Liberal allies to become Denmark's second biggest party.

With 99 percent of votes counted, Denmark's national broadcasters DR and TV2 projected opposition leader Lars Loekke Rasmussen's bloc would get more than the 90 seats needed to secure a majority in the 179-seat legislature.

"It is completely unreal," said Kristian Thulesen Dahl, the Danish People's Party (DPP) leader, as he congratulated his party, but he gave no hints even on whether his party wanted to join a ruling Right-wing coalition let alone lead it.

"It's an astonishing result," said Ian Manners, a British politics professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Right-Wing Eurosceptics Look Set to Form a New Government

In the wake of the election, The Independent reports Right-Wing Eurosceptics Look Set to Form a New Government.

Euroskeptic Party Wins Danish Elections

Strator explains things a little better with its analysis: Euroskeptic Party Wins Danish Elections.

The results are in following Denmark's elections, and the Euroskeptic and anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP) has won with 21.1 percent of the vote. Denmark's voting system is based on groupings of parties, called voting blocs. To form a government, an individual party's bloc must win an overall majority. This system worked against the Social Democratic Party, the lead party of the incumbent center-left coalition. Although it received 26.3 percent of the vote, its left-wing "red bloc" did not perform as well as the right-wing "blue bloc," in which the DPP is the highest placed.

However the DPP chooses to interact with the government, the party's influence will be significant — and its increased role will impact wider European trends. Recently re-elected British Prime Minister David Cameron is renegotiating the United Kingdom's relationship with Europe and will hold a public "in-out" referendum before the end of 2017. The DPP is part of the same European Conservatives and Reformists Group as Cameron's Tories in the European Parliament and is equally concerned about the erosion of national sovereignty in Europe and perceived high levels of immigration. European Parliament member and DPP vice-chair Morten Messerschmidt said the party's intention is to "make Denmark into Cameron's biggest ally." Indeed, even before the election, the DPP had managed to convince Venstre, which is nominally pro-Europe, to offer its support for Cameron's renegotiation if the blue bloc won. Once the new government takes power, the United Kingdom looks set to gain a firm ally.

The Alternative for Germany party, another member of the European Conservatives and Reformists, is well-positioned to taking advantage of German frustrations with the Greek debt situation. Although the party is currently beset with internal strife, if it emerges united it could also ally with the DPP and the Tories. Poland's Euroskeptic Law and Justice Party, also a member of the right-wing European Parliament group, won the country's presidential election last month and stands to perform strongly in general elections in October 2015. Although some of Cameron's immigration policies might be distasteful to the Polish people, a potential Law and Justice-led government in Warsaw would find common ground on reclaiming sovereignty from the European Union. With all of these likely supporters, Cameron's Conservatives and the DPP have the potential to form an alliance of Northern European parties dedicated to the repatriation of power to European countries.

Euroskeptics on the March

The Stratfor report is via email. I don't have a link for it yet.

Euroskeptic (some spell it Eurosceptic) parties are on the march in Denmark, Greece, France, Spain, Finland, and Poland. We may see renewed life from AfD in Germany.

A potentially huge victory party may be in the works in Spain, where anti-euro party Podemos is flirting with a lead in national elections later this year.

See Shifting Sentiment in Spain: 2011 vs. 2015; Could an Anti-Euro Party Win the 2015 Spanish National Election? for further discussion.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

ECB Unscheduled Conference Today; Emergency Eurozone Meeting Monday; ECB Ponders Shutting of ELA as Cash Withdrawals Accelerate

Posted: 19 Jun 2015 05:03 AM PDT

The mad dash and perhaps last dash for euros in Greece is on. Some will undoubtedly be frozen out as soon as the ECB halts emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) to Greek Banks.

Emergence Meeting Monday, Unscheduled ECB Conference Call Today

There's an Emergency Meeting of Eurozone Leader on Monday to discuss Greece, but the ECB may very well act in advance. Once ELA is removed, Greece will soon be forced to issue capital controls.

Greek banks have continued to suffer withdrawals amid concerns that Athens and its creditors will fail to strike a deal to avoid a debt default.

The eurozone's top central bankers are set to decide in the next few hours whether to approve an increase in emergency loans to Greece's banking system after talks on Thursday between finance ministers failed to strike an agreement to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts and potentially crashing out of the currency bloc.

Depositors pulled out more than €1bn on Thursday from the country's four systemic banks, bringing the total for the week to €3bn - three times the average weekly amount over the past two months.

Greece has already seen more than €30bn of deposit flight this year in an orderly process under which depositors notify their bank of withdrawals and take the cash out 24 hours later.

The latest withdrawals came as eurozone leaders were summoned to an emergency summit on Monday in a last-ditch effort to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debts and potentially crashing out of the EU's common currency.

The European Central Bank's governing council will hold an unscheduled conference call on Friday where they will decide whether to allow a rise of around €3bn in Emergency Liquidity Assistance available from the Bank of Greece, the country's central bank.

A two-thirds majority of voting members of the council would be needed to block the rise. The council, made up of the ECB's top six officials and the governors of member states' central banks, could also approve a smaller rise.

The request for an increase came from the Greek central bank on Thursday evening -- just a day after the ECB backed a €1.1bn rise in ELA that took the figure of emergency loans available to €84.1bn. Greek banks are thought to have around €95bn-worth of collateral that they can use in exchange for the loans under the current terms of the loans.

According to people briefed on eurozone planning, Greece's central bank could request that Mr Tsipras legislate for capital controls if no agreement is reached at the Monday night summit, called for 7pm.

Question of Collateral

The ECB requires collateral in exchange for loans, but pray tell, how good is that collateral?

Capital controls actually violate EU rules, but that will not stop eurozone leaders from telling Greece to impose them.

My suggestion to Greece, and one that I already think is being acted on, is to wait until the ECB halts the ELA. At that point, Greece can and will blame the ECB for the controls.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

To get a sense for the potential value of keywords in a certain niche, we need to do more than just look at the number of searches those keywords get each month. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains what else we should be looking at, and how we can use other data to prioritize some groups over others.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to chat about how you can estimate the total volume and value of a large set of keywords in a market or a niche.

Look, we're going to try and simplify this and reduce it to something that is actually manageable, because you can go way, way deep down a well. You could spend a year trying to figure out whether Market A or Market B is better to enter or better to chase keywords in, better to create content in. But I want to try and make it a little simple without reducing it to something that is of no value whatsoever, which unfortunately can be how some marketers have looked at this in the past.

Asian noodle keywords

So let's try this thought exercise. Let's say I'm a recipe site or a food site and I'm thinking I want to get into the Asian noodles scene. There's a lot of awesome Asian noodles out there. I, in fact, had Chow fun for lunch from Trove on Capitol Hill. When you come to MozCon, you have to try them. It's awesome.

So maybe I'm looking at Chow fun and sort of all the keyword sets around those, that Chinese noodle world. Maybe I'm looking at pad Thai, a very popular Thai noodle, particularly in the U.S., and maybe Vietnamese rice noodles or bun. I'm trying to figure out which of these is the one that I should target. Should I start creating a lot of pad Thai recipes, a lot of Chow fun recipes? Should I go research one or the other of these? Am I going to chase the mid and long tail keywords?

I'm about to invest a large amount of effort and really build up a brand around this. Which one of these should I do?

Side note, this is getting more and more important as Google is moving to these topic modeling and sight specific, topic authority models. So if Google starts to identify my site as being an authority on Chow fun, I can expect to rank for all sorts of awesome stuff around it, versus if I just kind of dive in and out and have one-offs of Chow fun and 50 different other kinds of noodles. So this gets really important.

The wrong way to look at AdWords data

A massively oversimplified version, that a lot of people have done in the past, is to look broadly at kind of AdWords groups, the ones that AdWords selects for you, or individual keywords and say, "Oh, okay. Well, Chow fun gets 22,000 searches a month, Pad Thai gets 165,000, and rice noodles, which is the most popular version of that query -- it could also be called Vietnamese noodles or bun noodles or something like that -- gets 27,000. So there you go, one, two, three.

This is dead wrong. It's totally oversimplified. It's not taking into account all the things we have to do to really understand the market.

First off, this isn't going to include all the variations, the mid and long tail keywords. So potentially there might be a ton of variations of rice noodles that actually add up to as much or more than pad Thai. Same thing with Chow fun. In fact, when I looked, it looked like there's a ton of Chow fun modifications and different kinds of things that go in there. The Pad Thai list is a little short. It's like chicken, vegetable, shrimp, and beef. Pretty simplistic.

There's also no analysis of the competition going on here. Pad Thai, yeah it's popular, but it also has 50 recipe sites all bidding for it, tons of online grocers bidding for it, tons of recipes books that are bidding on that. I don't know. Then it could be that Chow fun has almost no competition whatsoever. So you're really not considering that when you look in here.

Finally, and this can be important too, these numbers can be off by up to 200% plus or minus this number. So if you were to actually bid on Chow fun, you might see that you get somewhere in the 22,000 impressions per month, assuming your ad consistently shows up on page one, but you could see as little as 11,000. I've seen as much as 44,000, like huge variations and swings in either direction and not always totally consistent between these. You want them to be, but they're not always.

A better process

So because of that, we have to go deeper. These problems mean that we have to expend a little more energy. Not a ton. It doesn't have to be massive, but probably a week or two of work at least to try and figure this out. But it's so important I think it's worth it every time.

1) Keyword research dive

First off, we're going to conduct a broad keyword research dive into each one of these. Not as much as we would do if we knew, hey, Chow fun is the one we're going to target. We're going to go deep. We're going to find every possible keyword. We're going to do kind of what I call a broad dive, not a deep dive into each market. So I might want to go, hey, I'm going to look at the AdWords suggestions and tally those up. I'm going to look at search suggest and related searches for some of the queries that I get from AdWords, some of the top ones anyway, and I'm going to do a brief competitive analysis. Maybe I'll put the domains that I'm seeing most frequently around these specific topics into SEMrush or another tool like that -- SpyFu, Key Compete or whatever your preference might be -- and see what other terms and phrases they might be ranking on.

So now I've got a reasonable set. It probably didn't take me more than a few hours to put that together, if that. If I've got an efficient process for this already, maybe even less.

2) Bid on sample keyword sets

Now comes the tricky part. I want you to take a small sample set, and we've done this a few times. Random might be not the right word. It's a small considered set of keywords and bid on them through AdWords. When I say "considered," what I mean is a few from the long tail, a few from the chunky middle, and a few from the head of the demand curve that are getting lots and lots of searches. Now I want to point each of those to some new, high-quality pages on your site as a test.

So I might make maybe one, two, or three different landing pages for each of these different sets. One of them might be around noodles. One might be around recipes. One might be around history or uses in cuisine or whatever it is.

Then I am going to know from that exercise three critically important things. I'm going to know accuracy of AdWords volume estimates, which is awesome. Now I know whether these numbers mean anything or not, how far off they were or not. I could probably run for between 10 and 15 days and get a really good sense for the accuracy of AdWords. If you're feeling like being very comprehensive, run for a full month, especially if you have the budget, because you can learn even more over time, and you'll rule out any inconsistencies due to a particular spike, like maybe The New York Times recipe section features Chow fun that week and suddenly there's a huge spike or whatever it is.

You can also learn relative price competition in click-through rate. This is awesome. This means that I know it costs a lot more per visitor that I'm trying to get on pad Thai. There are two really good things to know there. When a click costs more money, that also usually means there are more advertisers willing to pay for that traffic.

If you're primarily on the organic side and you believe you can compete with the folks in the organic ranking, a very high bid price and payment price that you have to pay to AdWords is a good thing.

If you're on the other side of that, where you think, "Hey, look, we're not going to compete organically right now. We just don't have the domain authority to do it. It's going to take us a while," then a high price is a bad thing. You want that cheaper traffic so you can start to build up that brand through paid as you're growing the organic side. So it really depends on who you are and what situation you're in.

Then finally you can figure out some things around click-through rate as well, which is great to know. So you can build some true model estimates and then go into your board meeting or your client pitch or whatever it is and say, "Hey, here are the numbers."

Lastly, you're going to learn the difficulty of content creation, like how hard was it for you to create these kinds of things. Like, "Wow, when we write about Chow fun, it's just easy. It just rolls off. Pad Thai we have a really hard time creating unique value because everything has been done in that world. We're just not as passionate about those noodles as we are about Chow fun." Cool. Great, you know that.

Also, assuming your test includes this, which it doesn't always have to, you can guess from sort of engagement rate, browse rate, time on site, all those kinds of things, but you can look at search conversion as well. So let's say you have some action to complete on the page -- subscribe to our email newsletter, sign up to get updates when we send them out about this recipe, or create an account so you can sign in and save this recipe. All that kind of stuff or a direct ecommerce conversion, you can learn that through your bidding test.

3) Analyze groups based on relevant factors

Awesome. That's great. Now we really, really know something. Based on that, we can do a true analysis, an accurate analysis of the different groups based on:

Relative value
Difficulty
Opportunity
Growth rate
ROI

Growth rate might be an interpreted thing, but you can look at the Google trends to kind of figure out over time whether a broad group of terms is getting more or less popular. You could use something like Mention.net or Fresh Web Explorer from Moz to look at mentions as well.

Now, you can be happy here. I might have chosen chow fun because I looked and I said, "Hey, you know what, it did not have the most volume overall, but it did have the lightest competition, the highest return on investment. We were great at creating the content. We were able to engage our visitors there, had lots of mid and long tail terms. We think it's poised for big growth with the growth of Chinese noodles overall and the fact that the American food scene hasn't really discovered Chow fun the way they have Vietnamese noodles and pad Thai. So that is where we're placing our bet."

Great. Now you have a real analysis. You have numbers behind it. You have estimates you can make. This process, although a little heavy, is going to get you so much further than this kind of simplistic thinking.

All right, everyone, I look forward to hearing from you about how you've done analyses like these in the past, 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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Seth's Blog : Kneejerks

Kneejerks

Just about all the ranting we hear is tribal. "He's not one of us, he's wrong." Or, the flipside, "He's on our team, he's right, you're blowing this out of proportion."

The most powerful thing we can do to earn respect from those around us, though, is to call out one of our own when he crosses the line. "People like us, we don't do things like that." This is when real change starts to happen, and when others start to believe that we really care about something more than scoring points.

Calling out our own jerks is the best kind of kneejerk.