Our (not so simple) search marketing blog
Plain-English insights from a team with 100+ years of combined experience. No hype, just what the data shows and what to do about it.
AEO in the Travel Industry: How AI Search Is Changing the Way Travelers Discover, Plan, and Book
Travelers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to research destinations, compare experiences, evaluate travel brands, and plan their next vacation. Instead of clicking through...
What a 3-second page load costs you in AI search
We just finished redesigning our own website, and like any good SEO nerds, the first thing we did was crawl it. The pages looked great. Then we saw the response times. Our server was taking about...
Meta hit pause. Now what?
Not too long ago, we wrote that a big change was coming to Meta on November 20. Meta's new Commercial Terms would have made advertisers "solely responsible" for anything its AI features created or...
Meta’s AI Enhancements and What it means for Advertisers. Big change coming November 20, 2026!
Big changes are happening on Meta, and companies present on their platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) need to familiarize themselves with a few critical policy and dashboard updates...
Why Google Ads and GA4 never agree, and when you should worry
Every few weeks, a client forwards us two screenshots. Google Ads says one number. GA4 says another, and it isn't even close. The subject line is usually some version of "???" We get it. When two...
Brand Building vs. Lead Generation
How do you Measure ROI? This is a hot topic of discussion whenever we (and partners) work with clients on more traditional brand building vs. lead gen campaigns. Brand building is aimed at shaping...
Google Ads Quality Score & Expected CTR Demystified
If you’ve ever felt like Google Ads is a pay-to-play game where only the biggest budget wins, you are mostly right, but here is a secret: Google ALSO cares about user experience. In fact, Google's...
What AI Overviews actually cite, and why YouTube keeps winning
Here's a fun fact for your next marketing meeting. When Google's AI Overviews answer a question, the source they cite most often is YouTube. It beats Wikipedia, and it beats the big news and medical...
How to measure healthcare marketing without leaking patient data
If you market a behavioral health program, an addiction treatment center, a fertility clinic or any other sensitive service, you've probably had this conversation with your legal team: "What exactly...
HIPAA, PHI, Analytics and Digital Marketing in Healthcare
Google Tag Manager has been a bit of the wild west since its inception, with multiple agencies, analytics vendors and owners adding marketing tags without documentation or any kind of process. It...
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