When folks ask me about how best to do marketing right now, my answer is consistently turning into the same three words: Read the room. Imagine you’ve walked into a religious space. This room is sacred to the people inside it. When you speak, whatever you say will be viewed through the context of where
Marketing Right Now Is #$%*ing Hard.
By Over the last couple weeks, I’ve talked to dozens of startup founders, small business owners, and web marketers of all kinds. Folks are scared, and rightfully so. Staring into the face of an uncertain period of quarantining followed by what most estimate will be the worst economic downturn of the last 50 years, and maybe
Extraordinary Times Call For Extraordinary Measures
By There can no longer be doubt: the majority of people in advanced economies are living through the most life-altering event of the last forty years. Natural disasters, wars, economic turmoil, political shifts, technological disruption — all of these pale in comparison to COVID-19’s breadth, speed, and the raw quantity of prolonged, global change. That’s in
Avast’s Shutdown of Jumpshot Will Harm the Web and the World
By Last night, I got an email from Deren Baker, Jumpshot’s CEO, informing me that the business would be winding down at the behest of their parent company, Avast. If you support more competition on the web, greater transparency about what the tech giants are doing, and opportunity to hold the powerful to account, this is
Google in 2020: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor
By I’ve written a lot this year about the shifts we’re seeing from Google — moving from search engine to answer to engine and now to a direct competitor for an enormous number of websites and businesses. Today, I’m sharing the latest numbers from our friends at Jumpshot on Google’s Q3 CTRs (using their recently updated
Marketers Say Most of Google’s Public Statements Are False or Misleading
By In July and August of 2019, 1,589 web marketers completed an online questionnaire as part of SparkToro’s Google Ranking Factors Survey. The survey aggregated marketers’ perceptions of the ranking elements used by Google’s search engine. But… it also asked a set of questions around the level of trust in Google’s public statements. Those results are
Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
By We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks. Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of
How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves?
By In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and the
As the Antitrust Case Against Google Kicks Off, Here’s Where the DOJ Should Start
By Google has been, in many ways, a positive force in the worlds of technology, society, convenience, and information dissemination. It’s hard to argue that any of the other tech giants (save, perhaps, Microsoft) have done as much to improve numerous aspects of the lives of people around the world. But in building services outside their
An Unpopular List of Marketing Trends for 2019
By This morning, after celebrating Geraldine’s James Beard Writing Award nomination, I foolishly Google’d “marketing trends 2019“. I’m working on some presentations, and was hoping to tie back… blah blah blah… doesn’t matter. What matters is that the results are awful. Nachos-with-fake-cheese awful. Freezer-burned-waffles awful. Gas-station-hot-dog awful. Just like you’d expect, there’s a bunch of lists