So research, competitive analysis, and simply synthesizing what the client has said all fall to the wayside. They get done fifteen minutes before or after a meeting, by whoever happens to have the time to spare, if at all. The cracks start to show. Every time the client has to clue in the agency or…
To see why MCP matters to marketers, start with what’s happened to the buyer journey. Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched it fold in on itself: a category decision that used to take someone 10 steps – Google the category, click a result, compare providers, check reviews, search again, then finally narrow down…
Apple Maps ads haven’t officially launched yet, but advertisers now have a clearer view of who can participate. The newly published Apple Advertising Services policy prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, including plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting. Apple hasn’t disclosed a launch date beyond “this summer” in the…
Every site you have ever optimized carries a record of that work, and it is more detailed than the platforms usually admit. Search systems have kept a per-domain profile for years, assembled from signals you know intimately because you spent a career shaping them. That profile is real, it is granular, and it never needed…
Thanks to Rand’s excellent research and Barry’s expletive-laden ranting, we know that Google processes over 5 trillion searches each year. Trillion. Per day, that’s 13.7 billion. Per second, 158,000. There are some sizeable and growing caveats here: That still means Google processes 2.92 billion clicks to the open web every day. It’s still a figure…
Google is adding AI image generation to AI Overviews and redesigning the Google Images homepage to mark the service’s 25th anniversary. Brad Kellet, Senior Engineering Director for Search, announced the changes in a company blog post. Image Generation In AI Overviews Image generation inside AI Overviews turns a text prompt into a custom image built…
One of the AI concepts currently reshaping the digital marketing industry is agentic commerce. It’s similar to the shift we’ve lived through in search over the past four years, where AI has reduced the friction needed to find things. Search used to mean digging through 10 blue links to assemble your own answer. Now you…
Google is clarifying its Smart Bidding update after advertisers questioned how budget-limited campaigns will behave beginning August 17. The original announcement around Smart Bidding changes was June 22. The update essentially changes how Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns behave when they’re limited by budget. Today, many budget-limited campaigns outperform their bidding targets. Smart Bidding…
Multi-channel marketing tends to sound more complicated than it needs to be. But we live in a world of “more”: more platforms, more campaigns, more assets, and more reporting to explain. The work expands, but the strategy behind each channel is not always clearly defined. Especially when you’re asked to do more at the speed…
For more than two decades, digital strategy has revolved around a deceptively simple objective: Drive people to webpages. Search engines rewarded documents. Analytics rewarded pageviews. Marketing rewarded engagement. As organizations matured, they invested heavily in designing increasingly sophisticated digital experiences that guided customers through carefully orchestrated buying journeys. Information was intentionally distributed across dozens, sometimes…