MarTech
Sharp insights, smarter growth.
Cover story · E-CommerceYour Black Friday discount can lose money however many orders it brings.
What decides it is how many of the extra orders you were going to get anyway, and the usual break-even sum leaves that out. Here’s the fuller sum, what the evidence says about that number, and how to measure your own.
SectionE-Commerce
Reading time~12 min
01 · Editor’s picks
This week’s picks
02 · Explore by channel
Editorial channels, one operator perspective.
0115 articles
AI & Data
Targeting, attribution, the data behind AI ads. The new fundamentals.
Browse channel0216 articles
PPC
Performance Max, Advantage+, paid social. For people who run the campaigns.
Browse channel038 articles
SEO
Core updates, AI search, technical SEO. What’s actually moving rankings.
Browse channel0415 articles
MarTech
Stacks that earn their keep, and the ones quietly subsidized by venture money.
Browse channel0513 articles
E-Commerce
Conversion, checkout, the AI shopping behavior reshaping retail funnels.
Browse channel066 articles
How-To Guides
Step-by-step playbooks you can run on Monday. Tested in real accounts.
Browse channel077 articles
Data & Research
Original analysis and the numbers behind the trends: sources shown, claims checked.
Browse channel088 articles
Digital Marketing
The cross-channel picture: strategy, maturity, and the tool stack that ties it together.
Browse channel093 articles
CRO
Conversion rate optimization: landing pages, checkout, and the experiments that move revenue.
Browse channel03 · The latest
Recent articles
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Nov 62026
E-Commerce
On TikTok Shop, every discount that sells sets the price of the next one.
Campaign and flash-deal prices can’t be above the lowest price customers paid in the past 30 days, and for the 2026 US Black Friday campaign, the past 90. Here’s the rest of what selling there involves in 2026: what it costs in the US, the UK, and the EU, what changed, what’s banned, and how promotions, creators, and ads fit together.
Oct 312026
CRO
Your site probably can’t run the A/B test you’re planning.
The limit isn’t your traffic. It’s your orders. Below a few thousand a month, a test can only ever report a large win, and that win will often be several times bigger than the truth. What to do instead depends on which tier you’re in, and giving up on testing isn’t always the answer.
Oct 312026
AI & Data
Your AI visibility score moved three points. Here are four honest answers to whether it means anything.
AI answers vary from run to run, so a visibility score is a sample with a margin of error. The basic math is already public. What vendors rarely spell out is that the margin depends on what the score claims to describe, and that can change it fourfold.
Oct 312026
E-Commerce
Your Black Friday discount can lose money however many orders it brings.
What decides it is how many of the extra orders you were going to get anyway, and the usual break-even sum leaves that out. Here’s the fuller sum, what the evidence says about that number, and how to measure your own.
Oct 312026
PPC
Should you bid on your own brand? The famous 99.5% is the wrong number, and your answer is a breakeven.
The eBay figure everyone quotes uses a denominator nobody mentions, and on a common one it agrees with the study supposedly opposing it. What decides your case is how much a net-new click is worth against what it costs, and a test you can run in four weeks.
Oct 312026
Data & Research
Ten numbers every marketing deck repeats. We went looking for where they came from.
Three have no measurement we could find behind them, five are real but no longer say what you think, and two hold up. The pattern matters more than the list: a number’s age predicts almost nothing, and its method predicts nearly everything.
Oct 312026
E-Commerce
How much of your ROAS came from customers you already had?
Nobody publishes the split, and the number everyone repeats falls apart when you chase it. You can work out your own from a store export and two platform reports, and the answer changes how you read a 4x month.
Oct 312026
MarTech
We clicked Reject on 47 European stores. Eighteen went quiet. Five carried on tracking.
We tried 143 large online retailers in ten countries and watched the network traffic after refusing cookies, then compared it with accepting. Most ad tags really do stop. The same click still means three different things, and the shopper can’t see which one they got.
Oct 312026
SEO
Your 2027 SEO forecast rests on a click curve nobody agrees on.
In December 2025, two studies built on the same kind of data put position 1 with an AI Overview at 1.6% and 21.4%. The Search Console series underneath them is broken for a year as well. Here is a forecast you can defend without pretending otherwise.
Oct 142026
MarTech
I built web analytics that counts the visit and never the person. This is Kehai.
Kehai is the web analytics product I designed, wrote, and run from Warsaw. This is the full tour: how it counts without a cookie, what the panel shows, what it costs, and what it deliberately does not do.
Oct 132026
Digital Marketing
Google and the Justice Department filed one ad tech judgment with two calendars.
The joint draft agrees on what Google must build and splits on when, where, and who checks. The gaps are six months on Prebid access, a separate 24-month clock outside the United States, and most of the monitor’s powers.
Oct 132026
E-Commerce
Amazon’s seller agent now runs while you are logged out. Its own pages disagree on whether it asks first.
Seller Assistant gained standing workflows, a memory, and a plugin for Claude and Amazon Quick. One Amazon page says every action is reviewed and approved, and another says the agent can act on its own, so check which applies before you switch a workflow on.
Oct 132026
CRO
The 70% cart abandonment rate averages 50 studies. Thirty-three of them are from 2015 or earlier.
Baymard’s 70.22% is the mean of figures that run from 55% to 84.27%, and most of them are more than a decade old. Your own rate depends on where you start counting, and Google Analytics and Shopify start in different places.
Oct 132026
AI & Data
Free ChatGPT searched the web for one answer in seven. Another study counted 7.6 searches a prompt.
Ahrefs read 66.6 million free, logged-out responses. Nectiv ran about 4,000 prompts through a different model over the API, and the two results describe different products.
Oct 132026
Data & Research
Four firms forecast the 2026 holiday season. Their online growth runs from 6.7% to 11%.
Adobe, Deloitte, Bain, and Mastercard count different days, different sales, and different dollars. Find the forecast that matches your own report before you set a target against it.
Oct 132026
E-Commerce
Google stopped pulling products over blurry photos. The size floor arrives in January.
Merchant Center’s low image quality issue no longer warns that a product may be kept out of ads and free listings. A separate rule, 500 by 500 pixels from January 31, 2027, still decides whether an image is accepted at all.
Oct 132026
SEO
A rank tracker checked 27.5 million Google results pages. It says 8% came back swapped.
Nozzle has published a full dataset on what several vendors now report: Google answering suspected bots with a complete, normal-looking page whose results are wrong. Google has not confirmed it, and for one weekend the fallback, Search Console, ran more than 64 hours late.
Oct 132026
How-To Guides
Safari’s block cost one ad network 10.5% per updated reader. Here is how to work out your number.
The first measured figure is in, the bug that started it is closed, and The Trade Desk is unblocked in a beta. What a publisher stands to lose is three numbers multiplied together, and one of them is still close to zero.
Oct 132026
PPC
TikTok’s ad network is live in the US. Its performance numbers are from 2024, and from other markets.
TikTok Ad Network, the renamed Pangle, now lets US advertisers extend campaigns to nearly 400,000 apps. The only test behind the launch page’s lift figures is an internal one from April 2024, and the block list works only if you switch it on in each ad group.
Oct 132026
MarTech
Norway fined Xandr NOK 92 million over Grindr bid requests. Its contracts did not protect it.
The regulator held Microsoft’s ad exchange jointly responsible as both the seller’s and the buyer’s platform, and said a clause telling the publisher to collect consent is not a check. The 54-page decision answers seven defenses that any intermediary in an ad auction might offer.
Oct 52026
Digital Marketing
A judge said publishers never had a deal with Google. Cloudflare is trying to sell them one.
A federal court dismissed the Chegg and Penske Media antitrust suits over AI Overviews because an expectation of traffic is not an agreement. On the same day, Cloudflare opened two ways to charge AI companies, and neither reaches the crawler that matters most.
Oct 52026
MarTech
California closed the cheapest pixel lawsuit. The expensive one is still open.
SB 690 takes the pen register claim over website and app tracking away from private plaintiffs and reaches back two years. The wiretap section that covers pixels, session replay, and chat tools was not touched.
Oct 52026
SEO
GA4 has an AI Assistant channel now. Google’s own AI answers are not in it.
Since May, Google Analytics sorts visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, and other assistants into a default channel of their own. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are filed under Organic Search by definition, and the tracking parameter that seemed to change that last week came from a browser extension.
Oct 52026
SEO
Google wants every AI sentence checked by hand. The meta description counts.
On October 1 Google added a manual fact-check instruction to its generative AI guidance and put the quality raters’ vocabulary into its helpful content page. The same update names invented author profiles as deception.
Oct 52026
PPC
Safari now blocks ad tech by name. The list no longer waits for an iOS update.
iOS 27 shipped with a hard block on nine domains, including the one The Trade Desk uses to bid and serve ads. A WebKit commit merged 11 days later turns that fixed list into one Apple’s own service supplies and updates.
Sep 252026
Digital Marketing
Google keeps its ad exchange. The price is plugging it into Prebid.
The court refused to break up Google’s ad tech stack and ordered interoperability instead: AdX bids into Prebid and rival ad servers, exportable data, and a monitor for six years. The order reaches worldwide, and on the buy side it binds Google Ads, not Display & Video 360.
Sep 252026
MarTech
Apple rewrote the tracking prompt for five EU countries. It did not change when you must ask.
From iOS 27.2, apps in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania can show only Apple’s alternative App Tracking Transparency prompt: a full-page sheet, copy the publisher writes, and an Additional Information button. The rule for when to ask stays exactly where it was.
Sep 252026
MarTech
ChatGPT Ads reports two conversion numbers. Know which one you are reading.
OpenAI’s ad platform now has a pixel, a Conversions API, and a reporting API. Its general reports count click-through conversions, its conversion report adds a one-day view window by default, and the pixel assumes consent until you tell it otherwise.
Sep 252026
How-To Guides
Your Google Ads API access now lives in a Cloud project. Check which one.
Google sunset developer tokens on September 9 and moved each access level to the Cloud projects that had called the API with that token in the previous 90 days. A token that sat idle lost its access, and v22 stops answering on October 7.
Sep 252026
PPC
Microsoft’s AI Max claim comes with its footnote: 10 of 44 tests were significant.
Microsoft sells AI Max for Search on at least 8% more conversions and prints the experiment behind it: 44 advertiser A/B tests, a 13.6% spend-weighted uplift, and ten significant results. From October 1 it also removes the Max CPC cap from new standalone campaigns.
Sep 252026
E-Commerce
Shopify let Meta’s shopping agent check out by default. Amazon asked it to leave.
Meta’s Muse can buy from eligible Shopify stores without leaving the app, because Shopify switched direct checkout on for them. Amazon went the other way, with terms that make an agent name itself and leave when asked.
Sep 252026
PPC
The FTC wants to know if ad optimization helps impersonators. The tools in question are yours too.
A September 24 notice asks whether the targeting and delivery systems platforms sell to every advertiser are furthering impersonation scams, and whether platforms should have to vet advertisers. Google and Meta are already answering with verification, and legitimate advertisers will feel it first.
Sep 252026
AI & Data
The Sora API is gone, and OpenAI named no replacement.
OpenAI gave developers six months’ notice and left the replacement column in its deprecation table empty. Adobe’s own list of retired partner models has ten entries dated April to September, so the pipeline has to be built to outlive the model.
Sep 252026
E-Commerce
Connecticut bans surveillance pricing for retailers on October 1. Your discounts need paperwork.
A retailer selling in Connecticut may not set a shopper-specific price from personal data, and New York already makes you say so next to the price. Loyalty prices and posted discounts survive, but only when the terms are public and open to anyone who qualifies.
Sep 252026
MarTech
Google’s word for the tag gateway uplift is “recovered.” Budget for it that way.
Google put numbers on first-party data plumbing on September 10: 14% more conversions with tag gateway, 11% from enhanced conversions, 26% higher incremental ROAS from Data Manager. Two of the four rest on two-week windows and one on a comparison of two half-years, so read them as signal you get back, not demand you create.
Sep 132026
MarTech
Direct marketing can be a legitimate interest. Behavioral advertising is where that stops.
Both the EU and the UK say in their own operative texts that direct marketing may rest on legitimate interests. Neither says it about advertising built on tracking, and the line between them is a balancing test almost nobody writes down.
Sep 132026
E-Commerce
Most storefronts bar the shopping agent from the cart. The rule they use does not bind.
We read the robots.txt of twenty large US storefronts and asked each one for its homepage twice, once as a browser and once as an agent. The blocking is real, the enforcement sits somewhere else entirely, and the feed underneath never expires.
Sep 132026
PPC
Reddit ad prices rose 40% in a year. The efficiency claims are from 2025.
Two Reddit documents describe the same year. The audited one says the price of ads rose 40%, and the marketing one sells a 17% lower cost per action, measured in split tests that ran in 2025.
Sep 132026
Data & Research
Your retail media network says it measures incrementality. Ask which method.
Incremental sales is the metric buyers ask for most, and about two-thirds of networks say they supply it. The industry’s own standard lists four methods behind that one word, and only one of them is an experiment.
Sep 52026
Data & Research
Most audit findings are assertions. These six leave evidence.
The paid media audit is sold on percentages, and chased to their sources most end at another agency blog. Here are six failures you can prove inside your own account in an afternoon, and the arithmetic that separates a finding from an assertion.
Sep 52026
E-Commerce
ACP and UCP are converging. The merchant work underneath was never the argument.
Roundups frame agentic commerce as a standards war between OpenAI and Google. Read both specifications and OpenAI’s retreat from Instant Checkout, and the two rails are converging on one journey, asking merchants for the same feed at a cadence the spec never demanded.
Sep 52026
PPC
Google’s 7% and the independent 16% never measured the same advertisers.
Two migration dates are circulating with the wrong campaign types attached. Google’s 7% and the independent 16% come from different verticals, baselines, and years, and the question worth testing is whether the added volume was ever new.
Sep 52026
SEO
The watermark counts the words Claude chose. It does not say who wrote the page.
Claude’s newest models weave an invisible mark into their text, with no documented opt-out. In Anthropic’s explanation the mark measures one thing, how many words the model chose: faint on a proofread draft, loud on prose it wrote end to end.
Sep 52026
PPC
ChatGPT Ads reached Poland with the personalization switched off.
The 31 markets that went live on August 24 are exactly the EEA plus Switzerland, the territory OpenAI carved out of personalization. Polish buyers get a contextual product with a 65 PLN daily floor and a CPC figure that is a suggested bid, not a market rate.
Sep 52026
How-To Guides
The 30-conversion rule is real. It just answers a different question.
Teams running several European markets argue about splitting campaigns per country, and settle it with a number somebody half-remembers. Google publishes it as the sample you need to read a result, not the volume the algorithm needs, and that changes the decision.
Aug 142026
PPC
The thresholds you restructure your account around were never published.
Thirty conversions a month. Fifty events a week. Every consolidation argument in the industry rests on those numbers, and neither platform states them as structural requirements. Google says something quieter and more useful, and once you read what it actually says, the real cost of splitting a campaign turns out to be arithmetic you can do yourself.
Aug 142026
AI & Data
You put AI into the workflow. Your quality control is still a feeling.
Every team now has models writing, classifying, and summarizing at volume, and almost none can say whether the output got better or worse last month. The fix is an eval: a frozen set of real inputs, a rubric that discriminates, and a threshold. The research on how to build one is unusually clear, and unusually uncomfortable about the shortcut everyone takes.
Aug 142026
SEO
Everyone reports AI traffic from a channel that leaves out the biggest AI surface.
The slide says AI traffic is up and to the right. Underneath it, some assistants send a referrer and some send nothing, the biggest AI surface of all arrives labeled as ordinary organic search, and the crawler that decides whether you get cited at all is a different bot from the one everybody blocked. Here is what is actually measurable, and what to stop claiming.
Aug 142026
PPC
Most creative tests end long before they could have concluded.
Two things break creative testing at once: the platform decides who sees what, and almost nobody runs the numbers on how much data a real answer needs. The arithmetic is not close. Detecting a 20% difference takes roughly 400 conversions per variant, and most tests are called at a tenth of that.
Aug 142026
MarTech
The platform buys whatever you last told it about. For most B2B, that is a form.
Your sales team knows which leads were worthless. Your ad account does not, because nothing ever told it. Closing that loop is not a reporting project, it is a change to the optimization target, and the hard parts are a seven-day window, a hashing spec the two platforms disagree on, and the double-counting trap nobody warns you about.
Aug 142026
Data & Research
Average ROAS stays healthy long after the next dollar stops paying.
The number on your dashboard divides all the revenue by all the spend, which describes money you already committed. The decision in front of you is about the next increment, and that return is always lower than the average and falling. Here is how to find where your curve bends, and what to do at the point the two numbers disagree.
Aug 142026
E-Commerce
The feed is the targeting. Everything else is a thin wrapper.
In Shopping and Performance Max you cannot pick keywords, audiences, or placements in any way that sticks. What decides which auctions you enter is a text file: the title, the attributes, and the labels you put on each product. Here is how the matching actually works, and the one Google rule about AI-written titles that almost nobody has implemented.
Aug 142026
PPC
Your bidding is automated. The number you feed it is not.
Google and Meta will optimize toward whatever a conversion is worth, and they take your word for it. Most accounts send the order total, which is not profit, then set a target on top of a number the business never earned. Here is what to send instead, and the refund pipeline that keeps it honest.
Aug 12026
How-To Guides
Connect Google Analytics to an AI assistant, and let it do the reporting.
The whole path, in order: the Google Cloud project, the credential, the connection, and then the part that actually pays for itself. One scheduled pull becomes a dashboard, a cohort grid the interface cannot draw, a written weekly summary, and a Slack alert that stays quiet until something real moves.
Jul 282026
AI & Data
Labeling your AI creative is the law now. That it costs you sales is a rumor.
From August 2, three separate regimes (the EU AI Act, New York’s synthetic-performer law, and Amazon’s marketplace policy) start forcing you to disclose AI-generated creative. The panic that the label tanks conversion is repeated everywhere and proven nowhere. Here is what each rule actually covers, and how to decide where a human face still earns its cost.
Jul 272026
How-To Guides
Build a Google Ads agent that can’t wreck your account.
You can run Google Ads from a terminal now: read the account, draft the change, spend the money, all in plain English. This is the build guide. Which of the four paths to use (scripts, the official read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a community write server, or the raw v25 API), what v25 quietly broke, and how to wire a write path that fails safe instead of fast.
Jul 202026
SEO
Don’t panic-bid on your own brand after the spam update.
The June 2026 spam update set off a wave of “brands lost their own results” panic. No primary data supports it. What actually got demoted was the coupon and affiliate sludge on your brand-plus-modifier queries, and branded search is the one segment AI Overviews are making stronger.
Jul 182026
AI & Data
I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
Tymbre went from a clickable mockup to the App Store in 30 days, built by one person after hours, with AI. Here is the full product: 1,116 launch-period commits, a self-hosted core architecture in Warsaw, adversarial QA, and the lesson that the bottleneck was never the typing.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you’re quietly starving
AI, Digital, Automation, Measurement. Every business already runs on all four, and is fragile in the exact one nobody is watching. ADAM is a diagnostic that plots you on a 4×5 matrix, names your weakest pillar, and forces one decision per quarter. Here is the whole framework, and the free playbook.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
Claude Code can operate your ad accounts. The question is what you let it touch.
Claude Code already pulls last week’s numbers, drafts the negatives, and stages a budget change across Google Ads and Meta, wired in through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the platforms’ own APIs. Here is how the plumbing works, why Google’s own connector refuses to spend a cent, and where the guardrails still have to come from you.
Jul 122026
AI & Data
Model Context Protocol: one plug for every AI marketing tool
Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns a large language model (LLM) from smart autocomplete into an agent that can touch your CRM (customer relationship management), analytics, and ad platforms through a single standard. How the handshake works, who adopted it, and the security perimeter it opens.
Jul 102026
Digital Marketing
Marketing’s AI reorg is real. The layoffs aren’t.
Seventeen percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have cut marketing jobs because of AI. Thirty-six percent expect to within two years. The gap between those numbers is where the restructuring is actually happening.
Jul 92026
AI & Data
One agent will not run your marketing. A team of them might.
When a single AI agent hits its ceiling, the work moves to a fleet with an orchestrator on top. The 2026 problem is no longer model quality. It is coordination, guardrails, and reliability.
Jul 82026
SEO
AI Overviews cut your clicks. Nobody has shown the best ones stayed.
AI Overviews sit on nearly half of Google queries by most 2026 counts, and cut clicks to the top organic result by 58% in one large study. We first said the traffic that survives is the traffic that was going to convert. The evidence does not settle that.
Jul 62026
Data & Research
Your best-performing channel might just be a passenger
Last-click and even a mix model can flatter the spend that only harvested demand it never created. Incrementality testing is the causal tie-breaker: geo experiments and holdout lift tests that show which dollar actually caused a sale.
Jul 52026
PPC
Performance Max isn’t a black box anymore. You’re just running it like one.
Search themes, campaign-level negatives, brand exclusions, and channel reporting quietly turned Google’s most opaque campaign type into a controllable broad-match machine. The controls exist. Most accounts still don’t use them.
Jul 32026
MarTech
Google Analytics 4 measures behavior well. It was never your system of record.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) got good at engagement, e-commerce, and prediction, and stayed bad at pretending to be a database. In 2026 the working setup reads the interface as a privacy-filtered view and moves the source of truth to BigQuery.
Jul 22026
E-Commerce
Two companies own retail media. Everyone else is a test budget.
US retail media hits roughly $71 billion in 2026, but Amazon and Walmart take nine of every ten new dollars. The channel is huge, growing fast, and more concentrated than any other in digital.
Jun 302026
MarTech
Do you actually need a CDP in 2026, or is the warehouse enough?
Packaged customer data platforms and warehouse-native, composable stacks now do most of the same jobs. The real fork is not buy vs build. It is where you put identity and consent, and how fast you need to act on them.
Jun 282026
PPC
Advantage+ reports one ROAS. It’s the wrong one to trust.
Meta made Advantage+ the default and lowered the bar to use it. The performance lift is real. But the number it reports is blended, and the control you give up is not. Here’s how to run it without fooling yourself.
Jun 262026
AI & Data
Your AI strategy is an operating-model problem, not a tool list
In 2026 the marketing teams pulling ahead with AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that redesigned how the work is done, who decides, and how the payback gets proven.
Jun 242026
E-Commerce
The referral fee is the smallest line on your Amazon bill
Amazon called its 2026 fee change slight, and for one unit it is. The real cost of selling on Amazon and Walmart sits underneath it: a stack of fulfillment, storage, and ad charges that turns a 6-15% referral into something operators put near 30-40% of gross merchandise value (GMV), and each platform hurts in a different place.
Jun 222026
Digital Marketing
Outdoor screens grew up: programmatic DOOH is now audience media
In 2026 the billboard reports back. Programmatic buys the majority of digital out-of-home, measurement moved from impressions to incrementality, and outdoor screens now compete for performance budgets, not just awareness lines.
Jun 202026
Digital Marketing
People watch connected TV. Budgets haven’t caught up. That’s the trade.
Streaming is now nearly half of US TV viewing, but connected TV still draws only about 8% of ad spend. The gap is the last piece of underpriced reach in video, if you can survive the measurement and frequency chaos to claim it.
Jun 172026
MarTech
The blast is dead. Email in 2026 runs on lifecycle and deliverability.
Gmail and Yahoo turned deliverability into the price of entry, and behavior-led flows now compound where broadcast sends stall. What actually moves email revenue in 2026, and what to distrust in the return-on-investment decks.
Jun 162026
AI & Data
How to get quoted by the machine that replaced your search traffic
Generative engine optimization isn’t SEO with a new coat of paint. It’s writing for extraction (answer-first, evidence-dense, cleanly structured) so ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity pick you as the source. This piece is built the way it tells you to build.
Jun 142026
Digital Marketing
Your affiliate program’s real cost isn’t the commission rate. It’s the incrementality.
Pay 10% on every affiliate sale and a chunk of those buyers were coming anyway. The 2026 shift is away from coupon volume toward deeper partnerships, but the number that decides whether the program pays is the one nobody prints on the invoice.
Jun 122026
MarTech
You’re not measuring a third of your conversions. Here’s the fix and its price.
Client-side tracking now loses 20-40% of events, more in Safari-heavy markets. Server-side tagging recovers a real chunk of it, but it’s infrastructure with a bill and a consent trap, not a plugin you switch on.
Jun 102026
MarTech
On June 15, one switch decides whether your conversions still exist.
Google said Analytics would stop reading its own ad settings on June 15 and hand the decision to Consent Mode. If your consent management platform (CMP) wires the wrong signals, EU conversions and remarketing can quietly fall off, and Analytics will still look fine.
Jun 82026
AI & Data
The ad-ops agent is real. Full autonomy is a story you’re being sold.
AI agents already run bidding, budget shifts, and creative rotation end to end. But 2026 is the year of assisted autonomy: humans on the guardrails, not off the loop. The gap between those two things is where accounts get wrecked or saved.
Jun 62026
PPC
Half your display dollar never reaches the publisher. Here is where it goes.
Independent audits keep finding the same thing: only about half of a programmatic display dollar reaches the site that ran the ad. The rest is the ad tech tax, and in 2026 the way to claw it back is structural, not another blocklist.
Jun 42026
PPC
The average LinkedIn CPC is a number that will lose you money.
Published 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn cost per click (CPC) anywhere from $5.58 to $10.11, and as high as $15.72 in peak quarters, with cost per lead (CPL) from $15 to $350. The spread isn’t noise. It’s the whole game. Plan to the range that matches your audience, not the headline that matches nobody’s.
Jun 22026
MarTech
Automate the plumbing, not the judgment: n8n and Make
The 2026 workflow-automation choice is not really n8n versus Make. It is knowing which marketing tasks belong to a no-code canvas, which need real code, and which should stay in a human’s hands.
May 302026
Data & Research
Marketing mix modeling is back. Not to replace attribution, to overrule it.
Privacy killed the click-level view, and marketing mix modeling (MMM) returned to fill the hole. But the brands getting it right don’t run MMM instead of attribution. They run three layers, each doing the one job it’s actually good at.
May 282026
AI & Data
RAG for marketing: how to ground an LLM in your own brand knowledge
Retrieval-augmented generation is how you stop a large language model (LLM) from inventing your product facts. In 2026 the work is a governed pipeline, not a prompt, and the payoff is brand-safe content and support you can actually audit.
May 262026
E-Commerce
TikTok Shop will outsell Target this year. Ninety-nine percent of sellers won’t feel it.
US TikTok Shop is forecast at $23.4 billion in 2026, bigger than Target’s or Costco’s e-commerce. But the top 1% of sellers drive about 60% of that, and half the headline stats are forecasts and second-hand claims. Read it with both eyes open.
May 222026
AI & Data
Prompt engineering is dying as a job title and growing as a skill you cannot skip
The standalone “prompt engineer” role is fading, but the competency is now baked into marketing operations. What survived is not clever wording. It is structured prompting, real context, and prompts you actually test.
May 202026
How-To Guides
Let the AI write the script. Don’t let it decide what the script does.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that’s the whole point.
May 172026
PPC
Most of your retargeting is theater now. Here’s what still converts.
Third-party cookies stopped carrying your retargeting a while ago. The value moved to first-party audiences, server-side signals, and the automation layers inside Meta and Google. Here’s what to keep funding and what to quietly cut.
May 142026
Digital Marketing
60/40 was an average. You turned it into a commandment.
The most cited number in marketing came from analyzing 996 campaigns and taking the mean. It was never a law, and applying it to a three-year-old brand burning runway is how good research becomes bad strategy. The rule is real. The dogma is the problem.
May 102026
CRO
AI won’t triple your conversion rate. It’ll move it 10-30%, if you aim it right.
The average e-commerce conversion rate is somewhere between 1.3% and 2.7%, depending on whose data you read, which tells you almost nothing. AI personalization is a real lever, but the honest number is a 10-30% relative lift, not the miracle in the case study. Here’s where it actually shows up.
← · From the archive
Past pieces worth revisiting.
Digital Marketing
Oct 5, 2026
A judge said publishers never had a deal with Google. Cloudflare is trying to sell them one.
MarTech
Oct 5, 2026
California closed the cheapest pixel lawsuit. The expensive one is still open.
SEO
Oct 5, 2026
GA4 has an AI Assistant channel now. Google’s own AI answers are not in it.
SEO
Oct 5, 2026
Google wants every AI sentence checked by hand. The meta description counts.
Quote of the week
“A bigger sale day only makes the loss harder to see.
MS
Mikołaj Salecki · from Your Black Friday discount can lose money however many orders it brings.
04 · Reading now
Pick a lane
Popular right now
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On TikTok Shop, every discount that sells sets the price of the next one.
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Your site probably can’t run the A/B test you’re planning.
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Your AI visibility score moved three points. Here are four honest answers to whether it means anything.
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Your Black Friday discount can lose money however many orders it brings.
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Editor’s picks
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We clicked Reject on 47 European stores. Eighteen went quiet. Five carried on tracking.
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I built web analytics that counts the visit and never the person. This is Kehai.
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ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you’re quietly starving
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I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
AI & Data · 13 min - 05
Norway fined Xandr NOK 92 million over Grindr bid requests. Its contracts did not protect it.
MarTech · 7 min
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06 · The editor
MS
Mikołaj Salecki
Editor-in-chief
Writes about media, tech, and AI business for people who actually run digital. Former agency lead. Skeptic of frameworks that read better than they perform.
91Articles
9Channels
11hOf reading
2026Since
Also works as a digital consultant, helping companies with the day-to-day of their digital, from planning to shipping, over at salecki.digital.