How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel begins. Weirdly, it’s less precise,…
60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year. The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every source of referral traffic —…
Most folks who follow me know I’m a bit of a late adopter and skeptic of AI. Yes, it can do some impressive things that takes humans a long, painful amount of time to replicate. But, they’re also stereotype machines whose reasoning and capabilities, especially in the creative and novel needs that marketing demands, isn’t replacing even 1% of jobs…
Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn’t exist. Worse than that, actually, there’s hundreds of years of evidence and sophisticated analyses from hundreds of sources showing the opposite is true: AI will almost certainly create more jobs than it displaces, just like thousands of remarkable…
It’s a day ending in Y, which means my social feeds are filled with people attempting to rebrand the acronym “SEO.” Look, I ain’t here to rain on your parade, so if you love calling it AIO or GEO or EIEIO, be my guest. I haven’t been an SEO for more than seven years, despite what all the “top SEO…
There are tons of marketing conferences. Most follow a familiar formula: slick slide decks, broad-strokes keynotes, case studies you’ve seen before, and maybe a tote bag to take home. But when you’re deciding where to spend your budget, time, and energy, the real question is: Which event will actually make an impact on me? That’s the question we asked ourselves…
Our friend Tommy Walker, founder of The Content Studio, contributed the following, superb, much-needed article; thank you sir! Tommy was the Editor-in-Chief at ConversionXL, the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus, and Global Editor-in-Chief at QuickBooks. As a 20-year career veteran, his methodologies have contributed to 10-figures in revenue, and have become integral to developing category-defining brands. You’ve just wrapped…
Look, I get it. The new world of a zero-click web, where search engines, AI tools, and social networks hoard traffic and send fewer and fewer visits out is scary. For a lot of businesses, especially those in publishing or those funded by CPM ads, it’s gonna get ugly. A world of declining traffic means many of us need to…
Last week, we launched the latest version of SparkToro, replete with a plethora of new features and upgrades. And over the past 10 days, we’ve been answering a flurry of questions about the product, including one that’s come up so often, it deserves its own blog post. That question: “What are the Search & AI Tools and Social Networks graphs…
An overwhelming number of marketers are using AI tools to bolster their campaigns, their tactical output, and even their strategic ideas. I don’t actually recommend all of those (AI can seriously mislead you on strategy, and using it to write anything you’re going to publish directly is a recipe for unsubscribes), but there are some clever, high-quality marketing use-cases out…