Last week we spoke to some SEOs in both agency and in-house roles across all lev­els of respon­si­bil­i­ty regard­ing fore­cast­ing; we want­ed to under­stand how often we’re doing it as an indus­try, how accu­rate it is and how impor­tant we think it can be for cre­at­ing a busi­ness case and get­ting the appro­pri­ate chan­nel invest­ment.

Here are the key high­lights:

Near­ly 78% of respon­dents at least some­times fore­cast their activ­i­ty and only 4% nev­er pro­vide a fore­cast

How­ev­er, 92% of SEOs asked agreed that fore­cast­ing is time con­sum­ing 

1 in 4 respond­ed that fore­cast results are not close to actu­al out­comes

68% believe that fore­cast­ing helps to pos­i­tive­ly man­age a clien­t’s expec­ta­tions and a total of 64% of SEOs asked believe that finan­cial deci­sions are affect­ed by fore­casts; either in win­ning pitch­es or increas­ing invest­ment, with slight­ly more SEOs who work in-house report­ing this to be the case.

Respon­dent Break­down
Job Type
Agency 58%
In-house 37%
Oth­er 5%

The find­ings cement­ed what we thought to be the case; that fore­cast­ing is increas­ing­ly impor­tant for win­ning pitch­es and get­ting the appro­pri­ate invest­ment for your activ­i­ty, how­ev­er it can be time con­sum­ing and is often inac­cu­rate. We’re oper­at­ing in an indus­try in which our activ­i­ty is tar­get­ed against thou­sands of var­i­ous rank­ing met­rics, against mul­ti­ple com­peti­tors and in a land­scape that is always evolv­ing; pro­vid­ing a com­plete­ly accu­rate fore­cast is an ambi­tious chal­lenge, how­ev­er we can make it eas­i­er, we can make it faster and we can con­tin­ue to get bet­ter at it and con­tin­ue to prove the mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties and rev­enues that invest­ing in the organ­ic space can bring.

Thank you to all those who con­tributed and helped us to con­tin­ue under­stand­ing our chan­nel and it’s experts.