This month’s Ask a PPC explores a common advertiser question: Why budgets sometimes overspend even when a target ROAS or target CPA is in place. Understanding this behavior requires separating two concepts that are often conflated: budgets and goals. While they work together, they serve very different functions within auction‑based ad platforms. In this post,…
I recently wrote about an unconfirmed Google algorithm update that rolled out in mid-January 2026, which negatively impacted the organic search visibility of dozens of major brands. For most of the impacted sites I analyzed, the impact was disproportionately targeted to the company’s blog, or another folder containing informational articles and resources. That same organic trajectory…
This post was sponsored by No Fluff. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. When ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a company, these large language models (LLMs) are deciding whether that business is safe to reference, not how long it has existed. Most business leaders assume one thing when they don’t show…
When the average customer age increases for a brand, it’s rarely a platform failure. It’s usually a signal that younger audiences are discovering, evaluating, and buying in different places, and older established brands haven’t kept pace. As of 2026, Gen Z spans ages 14 to 29. They’re the first generation raised in a digital online…
Most people still think visibility is a ranking problem. That worked when discovery lived in 10 blue links. It breaks down when discovery happens inside an answer layer. Answer engines have to filter aggressively. They are assembling responses, not returning a list. They are also carrying more risk. A bad result can become harmful advice,…
Most articles don’t make good videos. The ones that do share qualities that translate naturally to 60-second formats. Identifying them before you commit production resources saves more time than any editing shortcut. Data and first-party guidance point to repeatable patterns in how short-form video holds attention. These patterns shape script structure in ways that written…
Hello, my fellow digital marketers! This study was born out of a question that gave me a combination of irritation and renewed curiosity: “If I turned off all paid media, would my business actually suffer?” This is a question that is as old as time (in digital marketing time that is), and just like swallows returning…
Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free! We all know prompt tracking is directional. The most effective way to reduce noise is to track prompts based on personas. This week, I’m covering: Why AI personalization makes traditional “track the SERP” models incomplete, and how synthetic personas fill the gap. The…
This one started with a question from Adorján-Csaba Demeter, a subscriber in Romania, who asked how big the behavior change could be after Google’s AI Mode Personal Search launch, and it pushed me to think past the product announcement and into the habit shift underneath it. AI changing search is a foregone conclusion. The real story is…
Jump straight to examples of affected websites. Over the past year, one of the most common tactics for gaining visibility in AI search has been for companies to publish “listicle” content on their own blogs – ranking the best companies or products in their niche and placing themselves in the No. 1 spot. There are…