In a world of unlim­ited options but limited differ­en­ti­ation, brands will need to learn to stand out from the crowd.

As the complex­ity of data collec­tion, stor­age and processing decreases, analysts will need to shift their focus to answer­ing busi­ness ques­tions – and train­ing machines to help them do so.

Think again. Because… Your site is slow. Thousands of visit­ors each month land on or reach error pages, ‘out of stock’ messages, empty URLs and dead ends. Visitors frequently find the wrong products or services when they search, or content with incor­rect or outdated inform­a­tion. They find pages targeted at the wrong coun­try, currency or context. Thousands[...]

A client recently asked me to chip in on a debate they were having with an internal tech team about retir­ing old 301 redir­ects. Concerns had been raised about ageing and legacy CMS func­tion­al­ity which needed to be replaced, and as part of this process the IT folks pushed to remove (and not replace) the thou­sands of redir­ects which the system was power­ing.[...]

I think that our industry is the best that it’s ever been, but, perhaps, also the best that it’ll ever be. Is it only down­hill from here? Our industry is at a pivotal moment. We’re in a time where the people, agen­cies and brands which truly under­stand, prac­tice and reap the rewards of SEO have a unique blend of[...]

In advert­ising and market­ing, campaign perform­ance – and by exten­sion, success – is almost univer­sally meas­ured in the context of compar­ison to previ­ous campaigns. The answer to “How did we do?” is invari­ably phrased in terms of “This campaign delivered X% more than that campaign”, or “We had Y% less traffic this week than this week last[...]

Avinash Kaushik, whom I have an enorm­ous amount of respect for as a marketer, a speaker and an educator, has posted a summary of a new frame­work for digital market­ing strategy and meas­ure­ment. It’s great. Superb. Perfect, and unequi­voc­ally right. A conjunc­tion of all of the content market­ing, RCS and inbound philo­sophies into an eleg­ant model. However, it’s just unachiev­able.[...]