74 posts
Digital Marketing
A session sent me back to first principles - the three customer levers that move revenue, the baseline everyone forgets, and why high ROAS misleads.
20 Feb 2026
What to say when stakeholders ask why their brand isn't in ChatGPT or Gemini - and the questions marketers should ask instead.
30 Jun 2025
A ROAS of 4 is healthy at 70% margin and a loss-maker at 20%. The updated calculator takes your margin and works out the break-even that actually matters.
15 Oct 2024
A page title made of narrow letters fits past 60 characters; one full of wide ones gets cut off early. Google truncates by pixels, so preview by pixels.
13 Feb 2018
A quick little list of useful Digital Marketing Learning Resources that I rate
01 Jan 2018
Sitemap specification for a large ecommerce site with high inventory churn, written in Agile Given/When/Then format.
28 May 2017
On a last-click view, content always looks like the weakest thing you do, which is why it's first on the chopping block. The sceptics aren't wrong either.
25 Apr 2017
A replatform is the most dangerous thing you can do to your organic traffic. Most of the work happens before anyone sees the new site.
14 Mar 2017
The site passed a million sessions in a month. What it took was years of dull, consistent work, and a session still isn't a sale.
19 Jan 2017
We turned our programmatic display off on purpose and left it off. Switching a channel off is the cleanest test of whether it was doing anything.
20 Sep 2016
When the telly is running, more people search and come direct, and it lands in the digital reports as if digital had found them. It didn't.
16 Aug 2016
Broken tracking doesn't announce itself. A look through Google Tag Manager found a chunk of our mobile activity was never being recorded at all.
28 Jun 2016
A simple ROAS calculator that clears the arithmetic out of the way, so the argument about a campaign is about the strategy and not the sums.
21 Jun 2016
A YouTube channel that has run for years turns into a junk drawer. We cut about half of ours, and the channel got better for it.
13 May 2016
Black Friday runs on discounting, and discounting is the one thing a luxury brand spends the rest of the year refusing to do. There's no clean answer.
24 Nov 2015
A black-tie night at the National Business Awards, three Watchfinder shortlists, no wins, and a keynote from a man who has stood on the moon.
13 Nov 2015
I judged the FMBE Awards this year. The entries that won weren't the flashiest - they were the ones that knew what they were trying to do and proved it.
25 Aug 2015
The best marketing asset a luxury business can get isn't a campaign. It's third-party authorisation - and most marketers treat it as an operations footnote.
19 May 2015
A luxury brand doesn't sell itself with a banner ad. A night at the Classic Car Club and what experiential marketing actually does for a watch business.
21 Apr 2015
Every second of every day Google's algorithms work to deliver relevant results, but how can you use them to help your site?
27 Jan 2015
Seven practical steps to build a content marketing strategy that keeps your site fresh and drives organic growth.
08 Jan 2015
Year-end thoughts on where digital marketing is heading in 2015. Mobile, paid social, secure sites, and less certainty than most.
17 Dec 2014
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are nearly here. Mobile shopping has crossed a threshold this year and retailers not ready will feel it.
20 Nov 2014
Weighing up a move from agency-side to in-house marketing. The real trade-offs, from someone still deciding.
14 Oct 2014
Organic reach on Facebook pages keeps falling through 2014. What is behind the squeeze and how brands should respond.
16 Sep 2014
Google has made HTTPS a lightweight ranking signal. What that means, how big it is right now, and how to migrate without breaking things.
11 Aug 2014
Google's Pigeon update has shaken up local search results in the US. Early observations and what it seems to reward.
29 Jul 2014
Local SEO fundamentals in 2014. Consistent citations, the new Google My Business, reviews, and getting the basics right first.
17 Jun 2014
Matt Cutts declared guest blogging for SEO dead in January. A few months on, here is what that actually meant and what survives.
14 May 2014
Content marketing gets stuck on creation and forgets distribution. A practical look at getting the thing seen once it exists.
15 Apr 2014
Early impressions of Instagram advertising in 2014. Handful of brands, no self-serve, and a lot of unanswered questions.
12 Mar 2014
Running paid search beyond the English-speaking web - the search engines that aren't Google, the right-to-left text box that fights back, and why you translate by committee.
18 Feb 2014
Time-based fees versus value pricing in digital marketing. Where each falls down, and why the real answer is usually messy.
11 Feb 2014
A practical look at what a mobile SEO audit should cover in 2014, and the checks that too often get missed.
15 Jan 2014
My end-of-year thoughts on where digital marketing goes in 2014, centred on personalisation, mobile, and the slow death of treating every visitor the same.
16 Dec 2013
Black Friday is a fortnight away and it is a bigger deal in the UK every year. A practical run-through of what to sort out before the traffic arrives.
20 Nov 2013
The received wisdom said keep it short for the web. The evidence increasingly points the other way, so here is my case for long-form content.
15 Oct 2013
Google has just named a new core algorithm, Hummingbird, built around understanding whole questions rather than individual keywords. What it means for SEO.
27 Sep 2013
Google seems to be moving from matching keywords to understanding things and how they relate. Some informed speculation on where semantic search is heading.
14 Aug 2013
Marketing automation has a reputation as enterprise-only. The tools have come down in price and reach, so here is what a smaller business can realistically do.
15 Jul 2013
Most SEO relationships that go wrong were mis-set at the start. Some general thoughts on managing expectations in a channel nobody fully controls.
13 Jun 2013
Google rolled out Penguin 2.0 this week. It looks past the homepage to the rest of your link profile, so here is what I am checking and why.
24 May 2013
Feeds are getting more visual and the numbers back it up. Why images now do so much of the engagement work, and how to use them without going overboard.
16 Apr 2013
Content marketing pays back slowly, which makes it hard to defend at budget time. Here is how I think about measuring something that takes a year to show up.
11 Mar 2013
Instagram has no ad product yet, but after the Facebook deal it is surely a matter of time. Here is how brands can get ready before it arrives.
12 Feb 2013
After Panda and Penguin, everyone talks content and links. The technical plumbing underneath your site is what I think will matter most in 2013.
14 Jan 2013
Year-end predictions from someone who got last year's wrong. Why 2013 could be when smarter teams stop bolting mobile on and design for it first instead.
13 Dec 2012
Responsive has won the design argument, but a responsive shop still ships desktop-weight pages to phones. Making it reflow is not the same as making it fast.
15 Nov 2012
Google's new disavow tool lets you tell it to ignore bad links. Useful and dangerous in equal measure. When to reach for it, and when to leave it alone.
18 Oct 2012
Last-click reporting misjudges the channels that do your early work. What Google's Multi-Channel Funnels reports reveal, and how far to trust them.
18 Sep 2012
Since Penguin landed, every refresh sends people into a panic. How to tell a real drop from noise, and why a calm mid-year link audit beats thrashing.
14 Aug 2012
Pinterest is growing fast and sends referral traffic that keeps giving. Whether it suits your shop, and how to set your product pages up for pins.
17 Jul 2012
B2B marketers dismiss Facebook because it has no search intent. Used as a top-of-funnel channel with the right targeting, it can still earn its place.
14 Jun 2012
There is no button to undo a Penguin hit. Recovery means finding bad links, emailing webmasters to remove them, and filing reconsideration requests.
16 May 2012
Google's Penguin update targets manipulative links and over-optimised anchor text. An early read on who gets hit and why recovery is far from clear.
25 Apr 2012
Mobile traffic is climbing fast and most ecommerce checkouts were built for a mouse. The m.dot versus responsive choice, and where orders leak away.
14 Mar 2012
A year on from Panda, the link-building numbers game is running out of road. Where I would spend the budget instead, and why it is harder to buy.
16 Feb 2012
Why publishing useful content beats cold outreach for winning new business, and why the results take a lot longer to show than anyone wants.
15 Jan 2012
My prediction for 2012: the line between social and search keeps blurring, and social signals start shaping rankings in ways we can't ignore.
14 Dec 2011
Everyone agrees content marketing works. Proving its return is harder. Here's how I try to measure it fairly, and where the numbers give out.
15 Nov 2011
Clients keep asking whether to spend on Facebook Ads or Google AdWords. They're built for opposite moments in the buying process. Here's how I decide.
13 Oct 2011
Panda hit thin affiliate sites hard. If you make money from affiliate content, the old playbook is broken. Here's how the game has changed this year.
15 Sep 2011
Working across industries at an agency, the same SEO problems keep recurring in different clothes. What travel and retail can borrow from each other.
16 Aug 2011
Google+ has been open for three weeks. Should marketers care yet, given Google's patchy record with social? My early take from the agency.
19 Jul 2011
Display ad rates keep falling. For content publishers, the interesting money is increasingly somewhere other than the banner. Here's where I'd look.
14 Jun 2011
Local SEO advice assumes a single shop. For chains and multi-branch businesses the rules change. Here's what actually works across many locations.
17 May 2011
Google's Panda update has rolled out to English searches worldwide. Here's what the UK can learn from the US version that hit in February.
18 Apr 2011
A publishing schedule tells you when to post. A content strategy tells you why, and what to stop doing. The difference matters more than ever.
15 Mar 2011
Google's new Personal Blocklist extension and its content-farm comments point to a big algorithm change. Here's what it means for publishers.
16 Feb 2011
Most local businesses have a Google Places page they've never claimed. Here's how to sort it out and why it now matters more than it did.
13 Jan 2011
Six months with Google's Caffeine update. Here's what actually changed for publishers.
01 Dec 2010
Mobile traffic is growing faster than expected. But what do you actually do about it when BlackBerry dominates your analytics?
01 Nov 2010
Instagram launched this week. The photos are worse than my Canon. But I've shared more this week than in the previous month.
01 Oct 2010
Google Places is five months old and already reshaping local search. What this means for local businesses and marketers.
28 Sep 2010
