CategoryMarketing

Google penalties

From an interview with ex-Googler Kaspar Szymanski: But the first and foremost, the most important thing to clarify—because this is a very common misconception—is the fact that there is no such thing as an algorithmic penalty.There are algorithms and manual penalties. Those can have a rather similar impact. They can feel like they are the same thing, but it is very important to understand...

How do you test and measure, if you can’t measure?

As you may know one of my mantras is ‘test and measure‘. That is, always be testing things/ideas/tactics and measuring the results. Which is all fine and good if you can actually measure the results. But what should you do in situations where you can’t reliably measure? And how do you even know? Take for example the recent confirmations about Facebook inflating video metrics...

PPC Trends for 2020

Yes the 2020 posts have started already! Brace yourself…

A useful post (as always) from ConversionXL, covering some of the key trends in PPC for next year.

Key points:

Automation of your advertisingAI (of course!)Video ads (eg Google’s Bumper Machine) Responsive search ads become the norm

Test and Measure

In our podcast, Ian and I are always reminding our listeners to ‘test and measure’ – that is, to continually test new things and check if they work. If they do, double down. If they don’t, testing something else. Here’s an example of Instagram making changes based on analysing results. You don’t need to understand the actual item in the Insta example, instead...

tvCAD – Aussie Technology Success Story

My friend Ewen (CADbloke) has been beavering away on tvCAD for many years now, polishing it into a successful software venture. It’s a niche piece of software, here’s the overview from his site: tvCAD makes cable schedules from your CAD wiring drawings, automatically and quickly and 100% accurately.tvCAD Very specific audience, very specific problem set, very specific solution. And it...

Great Speeches

Wonderful initiative by James Clear to start cataloging (including transcribing) a range of famous speeches.

Looking through the list lead me to JK Rowling’s commencement address at Harvard in 2008. Wonderful stuff.

Nike on Instagram – no products

Thanks to Kevin for bringing this to my attention: Nike never features their products on their Instagram.

Instead, they show people. Who use their products.

It’s a subtle difference. But once you see it, you can never not see it.

You have no privacy (still)

A good insight into how much your web and app activity is tracked by advertising and third party tools. Most marketing people will be aware of this, but if outside the industry you may be shocked. New sites were the worst: Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources. This is partly because the sites serve more...

Modern marketing expectations

A good post from Scott Brinker, inspired by Tim Fishburne on what the expectations of a CMO are these days. From Scott’s post: The real challenge is that everything Tom listed in his strip is, indeed, what we now consider the responsibility — officially or unofficially — of marketing leadership:– Grow the business– Make customers happy– Deliver...

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