Digital marketing insights & playbooks
Our blog will give you the latest insights and trends in digital marketing.
Latest articles
analyticsWhat is CTR, how to calculate it, and what a good one looks like
CTR is clicks divided by impressions times one hundred. There is no official good CTR, so this guide shows how to build…
metaMeta Custom Audiences, and how they differ from lookalike and custom intent
A Meta Custom Audience is built from your own data, not Meta's interest categories. Here is how it differs from lookalike and…
Google AdsGoogle Display Network cost: how CPC, CPM and budgets really work
The Display Network has no rate card. Here is how it charges, how to size a starting budget, and how to work…
Social Media MarketingDigiday: the influencer brand trip is giving way to longer, cheaper, less staged partnerships
Digiday reported on 14 August 2026 that the high six figure creator brand trip is under pressure, with budget moving to longer…
metaMeta's holiday playbook splits Q4 into four phases and tells advertisers to start now
Meta published holiday campaign planning posts on 13 August 2026 that break the fourth quarter into Discovery, Deal, Gifting and Fresh Start,…
Social Media MarketingX publishes more of its ranking code and tests a tool that shows you your own post labels
X expanded the ranking code in its GitHub repository on 13 August 2026 and is testing a label export for randomly selected…
AIAI ad-buying agents entered 86% fewer auctions and paid 13.4% less, DataBeat finds
A DataBeat analysis of June 2026 bidding found agentic buyers entering 86% fewer auctions and clearing at $6.13 CPM against $6.95, and…
geoChatGPT referrals to B2B sites rose 303% in a year, to 0.33% of traffic
A 303% rise sounds like a channel arriving. A 0.33% share says otherwise, and an unexplained May spike sits in the middle…
geoChatGPT picks the brands before it searches: named brands are 33x more likely to be recommended
A single researcher inspected the search_queries JSON that ChatGPT emits, and found the model names brands before it fetches anything. Here is…
Google AdsGoogle Ads deprecations 2026 and 2027: the full timeline
A consolidated timeline of everything Google Ads is removing, retiring or auto migrating between August 2026 and the end of 2027, sourced…
SEOTollBit finds 15% of AI page fetchers in Europe reached URLs robots.txt told them not to
TollBit first half 2026 data shows roughly 15% of identified AI page fetchers in Europe reached URLs robots.txt disallowed. The per agent…
AIOpenAI brings ads to free and Go ChatGPT users across the EEA and Switzerland
OpenAI emailed European users on 15 August 2026 confirming ads will appear in ChatGPT for the EEA and Switzerland later this month.…
SEOGary Illyes says Googlebot's IP location is declared as Mountain View but its real egress points vary
Search Engine Roundtable reported on 14 August 2026 that Gary Illyes described Googlebot IP locations as declared text values, with real egress…
Google AdsGoogle blocked new broad match settings on 3 August, ahead of the September AI Max migration
The 1 September AI Max auto-upgrade was already known. What is new is that Google closed creation of campaign-level broad match settings…
analyticsGoogle Analytics makes both conversion lookback windows fully configurable
Google quietly removed the fixed 3 day engaged-view conversion window and the six-preset click-through list in an 11 August release note. Both…
Google AdsGoogle confirms ad group targets are in scope for the 17 August bidding change
Google Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed three new details about the 17 August 2026 bidding change: ad group targets are in…
AIGoogle adds Gemini 3.7 Flash to the AI Mode model picker
Google added Gemini 3.7 Flash to the AI Mode model menu on 14 August 2026, one day after the model shipped. It…
Google AdsApple opens Maps ad buying in the US and Canada with a 15% spend credit
Apple began accepting Maps ad campaigns from US and Canadian businesses on 14 August 2026, with a 15% credit on spend. Delivery…
geoGoogle starts showing AI generated illustrations inside AI Overviews
A month after Google announced it, image generation in AI Overviews is showing up in live results. A recipe publisher spotted it,…
SEOThe biggest AI crawler on one site was scanning for credentials, not reading content
Search Engine Journal's 14 August log review found the highest volume bot on one site requested credential paths, including agent config files,…
eCommerce MarketingWhat Is Google Merchant Center? A Beginner's Guide
Merchant Center is where your product data lives, not where you buy ads. Here is how it differs from Google Ads, how…
Google AdsGoogle Ads Cost in Thailand: How Pricing Actually Works
Google Ads has no price list. Here is how the auction sets your cost per click, how to work out a starting…
eCommerce MarketingWalmart Connect finally adds negative keywords to Sponsored Products, seven years after Amazon
Walmart Connect rolled out negative keyword controls for sponsored product campaigns in late July 2026, seven years after Amazon shipped the same…