A simple settings change in Google’s Chrome browser is going to wreak Y2k-like havoc on the entire digital marketing industry by the end of 2024. That change? Third-party cookies will default to being blocked.
As the pandemic shutdowns struck in March 2020, many businesses found themselves flat-footed with nothing to do but shut their doors. Businesses that had already embraced selling to customers — both in-store and online — could still count on revenue from their online stores. But most models called for revenue to flow through their doors as well as their portals.
The history of pie charts is more fascinating than you might think. A secret agent who plotted the collapse of the French economy with counterfeit money and the founder of modern nursing are but two of the intriguing historical characters who used pie charts to explain and advocate. The first known pie chart was published in 1801 by Scottish engineer, political economist, and secret agent Willi...
Chaos looms in the online advertising industry. Chrome, the web’s biggest browser with a 65% market share, plans to eliminate support for third-party cookies by the end of 2024. Other browsers, notably Firefox, Safari and DuckDuckGo, already block third-party cookies by default. But Chrome’s massive market share is making the earth move under advertising’s feet.
Third-party cookies are...
Modern marketers are facing more and more responsibility to make sure leads come in and close. It’s enough to scare the bejeebers out of anybody. Some are eyeballing direct mail as one more solution to help move prospects along. However, a recent report from PFL and Forrester Consulting, “Hybrid Experiences Bring Direct Mail Into The Digital Age,” (click here to download; easy registration require...
Consumer goods companies measure their plastic output in big numbers. A single international beverage manufacturer, for example, can produce several million tons of plastic packaging in just one year. Now imagine how much plastic must be out there when considering the multitude of other organizations across the globe—and their collective plastic output over the course of several decades.
The first thing to know about Pivot Tables is that there is nothing a Pivot Table does that an advanced user can’t also do through writing formulas. The value of the Pivot Table is that the data can be sliced and diced quickly and the drag-and-drop interface means that there is no need to wrestling with sometimes-unwieldy formulas. Instead, Pivot Tables help you explore the data and visualize the...
That moment, argues Krug, can be enough to derail the purpose of their visit. “When we’re using the web, every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand,” he writes. Behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work, go further: The easier it is for people to understand any inform...
That was a huge factor in the internet’s acceptance so early, so quickly, and by so many. It was cheap to produce and cheap to deliver. And while physical marketing (particularly direct mail) had good trackability, it was scant compared with the data digital marketing could deliver. But the ensuing years have shown that many of the cost-savings of digital have been offset by increased expenses...
Just north of 20 years ago, a book about how the internet impacts marketing was written. “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, was centered on one big idea: “Markets are conversations.” By arguing that “markets are conversations,” The Cluetrain Manifesto was pointing at a fundamental change that the internet—which was just becoming a c...
Days Payable Outstanding or DPO is the average number of days between the time the company receives an invoice and when the invoice is paid. DPO is typically calculated on a quarterly or annual basis. If a company has a DPO of 23 for its most recent quarter, that means it took 23 days on average to pay its suppliers during that time. DPO is a key cash-flow metric that indicates how well a compa...
Search Engine Journal recently published and interesting article by Lee Wilson in which Lee explores 25 Effective FAQ pages and gives some great advice about them.
It brought to mind a FAQ section I recently built for a client in the event automation space.
They were having Google trouble because their space is dominated by 800-pound gorillas taking up all the Google oxygen.
A key step on a product’s long march from inventor’s brainchild to customer’s favorite gadget is manufacturing. Technically, manufacturing is the process of assembling raw materials into products on a large scale using machinery. But manufacturing is no brief stop on the journey and it must be planned for and nurtured just like any other phase in a product’s birth. An optimized manufacturing pr...
Take, for instance, the complex but necessary issues of globalization. Growing companies that have international markets in their sights will need their accounting software to seamlessly integrate multiple currencies, multiple tax jurisdictions, and multiple languages. But the key to the difference between ERP and simple accounting software goes well beyond features which can come and go. The...
The way tax write-offs work is that they reduce your gross revenue or income by the total amount of allowable expenses. The result is called Adjusted Gross Revenue or income and becomes the basis on which a tax bill is calculated. Depending on the overall value of the deductions, tax write-offs can potentially save thousands or millions per year off a tax bill.
Content marketers rally behind the banner of producing ever more excellent content marketing. Without a doubt, excellence has rightly become the baseline. But excellence, in and of itself, doesn’t guarantee a first-page ranking in Google. Nor a viral share in social media.
...structured data can be defined as a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary used to describe and classify entities, be they news articles or a business’s products and services. In organizations, structured data helps make information more accessible and easier to analyze, leading to deeper insights. On the internet, it helps make information and web pages become more discover...
...The confluence of internet infrastructure, truly useful web-based publishing applications, and web search enabled the company to popularize a shift in the marketing eco-system paradigm. It makes perfect sense: instead of carpet-bombing your market with interruptive messaging, create the content that will attract the people you want to reach. Create good content, the argument goes, and the pe...
Metadata is frequently described as “data about other data.” Whether describing the contents of a web page, providing the technical details of the kind of camera used to capture an image, or the administrative information of usage rights, among many examples, metadata provides additional information that helps assets get found and used more efficiently. In fact, metadata is mainly designed to be m...
...In the world of accounts payable (AP), one of the most challenging jobs is managing the onslaught of supplier invoices that arrive each month. This includes verifying that the invoices are real — small businesses experience billing fraud twice as often as their larger counterparts, according to an Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) report — and then paying the ones that are....
HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the simple language at the heart of the World Wide Web. Created in 1989 by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, HTML was originally considered to be a solution to help scientists at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The first website went live in August 1991. It was a page written by Berners-Lee explaining how to write HTML. To say it caug...
Imagine if a warehouse wasn’t a place to store inventory but just another stop along the distribution path to a customer. This is the idea behind an inventory management strategy known as rolling inventory. Using this strategy, the delivery truck augments the warehouse space. Instead of going through the time and expense of offloading and storing an entire truck’s worth of goods, the rolling inven...
A financial controller’s list of priorities reflects the wide-ranging and complex responsibilities associated with the role – from overseeing day-to-day accounting and finance tasks to managing staff and technology. Depending on the organization, a controller may have to create new policies and processes from scratch, as well as ensuring that existing processes run as efficiently as possible.
As the head of the organization’s accounting team, the financial controller plays an increasingly strategic role in ensuring the company runs smoothly. There are many opportunities for controllers to improve the efficiency of day-to-day financial operations and enhance the business overall. New technologies help companies streamline or eliminate manual tasks and create more accurate financial...
If you want insights into how a company’s business is performing, operating income is a key metric to understand. Operating income measures the profitability of a company’s core business operations after deducting all operating expenses. It shows how efficiently the company can generate cash from its business operations. By excluding the effect of taxes, interest and one-time events such as acquis...
Companies looking for a win from investors, customers, employees, and the community at large are well-served to get the ball rolling on implementing robust and sound Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) elements into the way they do business. Taking action on your ESG practices is a smart way to not only do good but also do well as ESG provides businesses with benefits across the spectrum of stak...
...And there is no let-up in sight. Plastics production has increased substantially nearly every year since 1950. With more plastic pouring out of manufacturers every day and no path in place to get rid of what already exists, our unsustainable dependence on plastic has led to a mounting environmental crisis. In order to address this issue, it is crucial to modernize mixed plastic recycling and em...
The shift to remote and hybrid work over the past year and a more mobile workforce has made the matter worse, as attacks rose and workers became more susceptible. More than half (51%) of respondents to The State of Email Security 2021 report (SOES) reported an increase in BEC attacks that exploited brand impersonation, and 63% reported an increase in phishing attacks that targeted their employees....
How is your martech stack working for you? For the uninitiated, a martech stack (or marketing technology stack) is the set of technologies that marketers use to perform various marketing activities. How you collect leads and nurture them along the path to becoming a customer are just some of the activities that are handled by a martech stack. For many growing companies, the martech stack can be...
When the first bits were dropped on the first hard-disk drive, it’s not likely that computer scientists imagined the onslaught of data just 50 years would bring. But those pioneers probably recognized that data management was going to become a challenge. Part of meeting that challenge is data modeling: the practice of developing data storage and retrieval solutions that fit the requirements of a p...
In one experiment into the value of randomness, Ellevate showed three groups of consumers the same movie trailer. One group was told it was randomly selected from a set of 100 trailers. Another group was told the trailer came randomly selected from only 10 options. A third group was shown the trailer and told that a marketer had selected the trailer. Who reported more satisfaction? Consumers pref...
Depending on the industry, marketers are projected to spend between $31 and $208 per lead in 2021, according to the latest research.[1] And with business-to-business (B2B) leads requiring up to 13 or more touches before they convert, it’s critical that lead-gathering be as frictionless as possible. The last thing a company needs is to do all the work prepping prospects, only to have a cybercrimina...
The customer service confirmation scam, whether by phone or phishing email, is just one example of how bad actors are hijacking hard-earned brand equity and using common marketing tactics to make their con. In fact, cybercriminals are deploying a complete range of marketing tactics to try and separate people from their money, as described in Mimecast’s The State of Brand Protection 2021 (SOBP) rep...
In the data mart model, marketing, sales, finance and each operational business unit has access to the segment of the data warehouse and the information that is most relevant to them. Instead of live queries run against mammoth tables, queries run through a data mart are tight and targeted — and fast. Just as important, data marts provide frameworks to deliver actionable reports more rapidly....
If it was trending in #marketing, which Linkedin claims to have more than 19 million followers, would it be unreasonable for me to expect viewership of the post to head upwards and fast? Even a tiny fraction of those 19 million+ #marketing followers ought to give me a huge bump in viewership of my post. For, certainly the Linkedin algorithm must use trending as a component for display. I mean,...
In the Google Universe, there is a position referred to as Position Zero. It appears at the top of the organic results. Sometimes it displays as a list, sometimes a table, sometimes a snippet. It's an enviable spot which boosts click-through anywhere from 114% to 516%, according to Hubspot and SearchEngineLand. It's a smart bit of programming on Google's part. For SEO, though, it has some compl...
With so many B2B products being consideration-heavy purchases, requiring the buy-in of a range of people within an organization, B2B marketers could be making better use of Influencer partnerships to get their products on the awareness, engagement, and purchase path. B2B influencer marketing is as different from B2C influencer marketing as B2B marketing is from B2C marketing. They might be the...
...But methane absorbs heat and radiation at a much higher level than CO2. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Global Warming Potentials (GWP), a system designed to rank and compare the potency of different GHGs, ranks methane at 27 to 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a hundred year period. On a 20-year horizon, methane is 84 times more effective at tra...
In 2019, the United States released around 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels alone. This is less than half the amount released by China, the world’s biggest offender at nearly 10 billion metric tons. These two countries alone account for over 40% of global emissions of CO2.
...There have been two significant inflection points in the history of CO2 in the atmosphere. The first was during the industrial revolution when the rise of industry was powered by large-scale burning of fossil fuels. The second – possibly induced by the industrialization of World War 2 – was in the 1940s
An example of the former comes from the publishing industry. A publisher creates books which they sell to bookstores and bookstore chains at a steep discount in exchange for a bulk purchase. Historically, the discount offered to bookstores is 40%, allowing the book store room to make a profit by selling it to consumers at a higher price.
That is exactly how blockchain works, however super-charged by computers to have thousands or tens of thousands of nodes. When an authenticated transaction is posted to one node, that information is automatically posted to them all. So, as did Scrooge in the example above, a discrepancy can be found out by checking across nodes. And since computers are at play here, a thousand nodes can be checked...
Marketers in the attention economy need to pull out all the stops when it comes to converting complete strangers into paying customers. While sources differ on the number of touchpoints it takes to convert a customer, Hubspot and others estimate that it takes 8 touchpoints to generate a conversion. Modern marketers look almost universally at digital methodologies for reaching prospects. But th...
