Episode 14: How to Leverage Brand in Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Acquisition
Episode 14: How to Leverage Brand in Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Acquisition
Multi-channel, multi-device attribution was already a headache in 2018. Answer engines made it harder. When a user asks Alexa a question in the kitchen, reads a featured snippet on desktop, and then converts on mobile three days later, the conventional attribution model breaks down - and the brand’s ability to understand what drove that conversion breaks down with it.
Episode 14 of the #SEOisAEO series tackled that problem directly. Aiden Carroll, Stoney G., and Melissa Fach joined Jason Barnard to examine how brand signals travel across channels and devices, where they get lost, and how to leverage brand presence consistently enough that the algorithm - and the user - recognises the same entity at every touchpoint.
The underlying issue is one that runs through the entire series: an answer engine doesn’t evaluate a single page or a single signal. It evaluates an entity across everything it’s seen about that entity, from every source, across every platform. A brand that presents itself consistently across channels builds a coherent entity profile. A brand that fragments its messaging across channels builds noise. In an answer engine context, noise doesn’t get selected - coherent, corroborated entities do.
The practical challenge is that most brands weren’t built for this. Their channel strategies evolved independently: SEO team, social team, paid team, PR team, each optimising for their own metrics and their own platforms. The AEO model requires those signals to be coordinated around a single entity definition, because that’s what the algorithm is trying to construct. If a brand’s own channels can’t agree on what the brand is, the algorithm has to guess - and it’ll guess from whatever third-party sources are loudest.
That argument, made here in December 2018, is the same argument behind what Jason later formalised as The Kalicube Process™: brand-consistent entity signals, systematically distributed across every relevant platform, so every algorithm that encounters the brand encounters the same coherent picture.
Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Aiden Carroll, Stoney G. Melissa Fach. December 04, 2018
