We celebrated a major milestone in June: the return of SMX Advanced as an in-person event. It was our first since 2019. More than a conference, SMX Advanced 2025 was a reunion. Search marketers from around the world came together to connect, exchange ideas, and learn the most current and advanced insights in search. But […]

Google Search Console seems to have fixed the weeks long delay with the search performance reports. For the past few weeks, we had 50+ hour delays for these reports, but as of the past several hours, the reports seem to be up-to-date. Now up-to-date. If you go to the search performance report, you should just […]

Google Ads launched VTC-optimized bidding for Android app campaigns, letting advertisers toggle bidding toward conversions that happen after an ad is viewed rather than clicked. Previously, VTC worked as a hidden signal inside Google’s systems. Now, it’s a clear, explicit optimization option. The shift. Google is shifting app advertising away from click-centric logic and toward […]

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era. Google was scared. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also: […]

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO basics documentation to clarify how Google’s crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript. In short, if “you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code,” Google wrote. What is new. Google updated this section to read: “When Google encounters the […]

The SEO industry is entering its most turbulent period yet. Traffic is declining. AI is absorbing informational queries.  Social platforms now function as search engines. Google is shifting from a gateway to an answer engine. The result is a sector running in circles – unsure what to measure, what to optimize, or even what SEO […]

This season, Google Search and Shopping Ads are expected to surge past $70 billion in holiday spending. But there’s a hidden flaw in the auction system — one most advertisers don’t realize is costing them money even when competitors aren’t in the game. BrandPilot calls this the Uncontested Google Ads Problem, and it’s becoming one […]

As marketing channels and touchpoints multiply rapidly, the way success is measured significantly impacts long-term growth and executive perception.  Click-based attribution – across models like last-click, first-click, linear, and time-decay – remains the default.  But as a standalone measurement strategy, it’s showing its age.  Click metrics now carry disproportionate weight in executive dashboards, and that […]

Every week, new data highlights both the overlap and the divergence between effective organic search techniques across traditional SEO (Google SERPs) and GEO (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.).  It’s a lot to absorb. One week, headlines say traditional SEO tactics work fine for ChatGPT. The next, you’ll see reports that one platform is elevating Reddit […]

On episode 334 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Sophie Fell Head of Paid Media at Liberty Marketing Group about a real PPC mistake involving location targeting. The conversation focuses on how small oversights can have big consequences—and how to recover from them professionally. The PPC F-Up: worldwide location targeting Sophie accidentally launched […]