Migrating a blog from one platform to another reminds me of the saying: “In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they’re different.” In the process of moving this blog from Typepad to WordPress — on the occasion of our 5th anniversary — I was struck by how this is exactly the sort [...]

“The problem is very rarely data, or that we don’t have access to data.” So said Avinash Kaushik, web analytics and marketing data guru, in his keynote at this week’s SES conference in San Francisco. In Avinash’s view, business optimization in the digital world requires mastering three things: Influence — reaching the right people at [...]

Javascript is something that all web programmers should know. But advertisers? The people who manage paid search campaigns on Google? What possible use could they have for learning Javascript? Google has one in mind. At SES San Francisco this week, I sat in on a Google session where they were demonstrating new features in their [...]

I just read Social Marketology by Ric Dragon, and I have to say, I love business books like this. It’s intelligent and practical, written in a direct yet entertaining style, and delivers meaty ideas that you can put into practice pretty much immediately. First, full disclosure, McGraw-Hill sent me a free copy of the book [...]

From my latest article on Search Engine Land, 5 Colorful Sketches on Conversion Optimization: The accompanying write-up in the article: There can be a perceived tension between conversion rate optimization and brand impact, which dates back to the early rivalries of direct marketing vs. brand marketing. But it’s a false choice: you can — and [...]

I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey. Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion [...]

Dave Chaffey curated a great graphic from Nielsen’s most recent report on Trends in Advertising Spend and Effectiveness: As a visualization of Nielsen’s Global Online Survey of U.S. Internet consumers from Q1, there’s a lot of insight embedded here. Of course, recommendations from people I know leads by a mile — 76% of people trust [...]

I finally got around to reading ZMOT: Winning The Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski, published by Google. If you haven’t read it yet, go grab a copy — it’s free. It’s actually a brilliant example of content marketing by Google — a company not exactly renown for their own content marketing (despite enabling [...]

Maybe it’s the Mad Men marketer in my hybrid DNA, but I’ve always been a little underwhelmed with Google AdWords. The business model of pay-per-click (PPC) is great. The ability to scale to thousands of micro-targeted ads is great. The analytics and testing capabilities are pretty good. And, hey, major hats off to intercepting buyers [...]

Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them. Jessep: You want conversions? Kaffee: I want the clicks. Jessep: You can’t handle the clicks! Son, we live in a world that has web pages. And those web pages have to be built for persuasion. Who’s going to do it? You? You, IT manager? [...]