Why You Should Scrutinize Positive Results Harder Than the Losses

The False Confidence of a Win

When a campaign flops, everyone wants to know why. We comb through metrics, question assumptions, scrutinize every click and conversion. But when something works? Most teams throw it on a slide deck and move on.

That’s the trap. Wins are rarely clean. They’re rarely the result of one thing going right. And they’re almost never replicable without understanding the full picture. If you don’t interrogate your wins , just as hard as your losses , you’re setting yourself up to scale the wrong thing.

‍The Dangerous Simplicity of Case Studies

A client recently came to us energized by case studies from Zendesk and Rippling, two high-growth SaaS companies supposedly succeeding with programmatic SEO. Their board read the articles and wanted to know why we weren’t doing the same.

The problem? The wins they were seeing were surface-level. And when we dug in, the real story told something very different.

Zendesk, for instance, isn’t succeeding because of its content scale, it’s suffering from it. Over 165,000 total indexed pages, a 35% drop in top-10 rankings, and nearly 30% loss in blog performance. That’s not momentum, it’s cannibalization. But none of that makes the case study.

‍

Rippling’s growth looks more legitimate, but again, it’s misunderstood. Their most successful blog content is long-form, editorial, and driven by specific search intent. One post ranks for 3,500+ keywords and drives over 40,000 visits a month. That’s not templated content. It’s sharp strategy and excellent execution.

They also do something most marketers don’t notice: they publish company news, like funding announcements, on their blog. This earns high-quality backlinks from media outlets, which quietly increases domain authority, an SEO cheat code few companies can replicate.

‍Winning ≠ Understanding

When performance improves, it’s easy to take the win at face value. Traffic is up. Conversions are climbing. The deck looks good. But very few teams take the time to unpack why it happened.

Was the campaign well-executed? Or did it just benefit from a competitor dropping the ball?

Was it the ad creative? Or a better landing page, new offer, or simple timing?

Was it SEO gains? Or the result of a backlink spike from a press mention?

Wins are rarely clean or the result of a single smart move. They’re usually the product of a dozen contributing factors, some replicable, some not. If you’re not deconstructing your wins as thoroughly as your losses, you’re not learning. You’re guessing.

‍Interrogate Success Like You Would a Failure

If there’s one habit that separates strategic teams from reactive ones, it's they question good news. They ask:

• What exactly caused the lift?
• Is it repeatable? Or circumstantial?
• Did we actually outperform? Or just get lucky?
• What’s going to break if we scale this?

They break down every moving piece: creative, audience, offer, timing, market noise, competitive behavior, UX. Because they know scaling an unexamined win is just scaling a future problem.

The same goes for outside case studies. Just because a company saw growth doesn’t mean it was from the thing they’re now famous for. The Zendesk article highlights structured content, but the data shows a long-term decline from content sprawl. Rippling’s blog growth is held up as volume-based success, but it’s actually powered by editorial quality and smart PR.

Wins Aren’t Evidence Until You’ve Earned Them

If you’re in a room where everyone is celebrating a result, your job isn’t to pile on. It’s to ask: Why did this work? What’s behind it? Are we sure we understand it before we build on it?

Real growth comes from understanding, not luck, not hope, and definitely not borrowed tactics. Hope isn’t a strategy. And neither is blind optimism.