You know when you understand a subject. You can quote all the stuff you’ve learnt from others and… wait! Nope. It’s the things that come back again and again in different forms from you experience. Magic Bullets v Cold Digital Truth A website developer friend asked me to look at a business and help with their online marketing. Easy, right? Not this time. The prospective clients had an idea that one thing would work (Google Ads) and...
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Business owners love seeing traffic graphs trending upward. But what if that growth is fiction? What if a significant portion of your “visitors” aren’t human — or aren’t potential customers? At Conversion Detectives, the focus isn’t just on traffic — it’s on high-quality traffic that actually converts. That distinction is critical if you want your website to drive real business outcomes, not just inflate vanity metrics. Vanity metrics...
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A client of mine wondered how much of their website traffic was bot traffic and if that bot traffic is growing? Quite a lot, you’ll be surprised. ‘Take Google Analytics with a pinch of salt’ A phrase I’ve used for years. GA is free BUT you can’t trust the numbers. Most people will look at Google Analytics and be pleased with the visitors via Direct traffic and know that some of that direct traffic is bot-made. Wait! Bots are cunning...
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We’re not ones for academic marketing models. We are ones for business reality. Because digital marketing has many strands and those strands like Pay Per Click ads are constantly changing businesses can get a bit lost and not consider the right blend for their market and their customers. Conversion Optimisation The pinnacle of digital marketing practice is conversion optimisation, that is getting more sales for the same amount of...
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I’ve been creating full on marketing plans and online audits for longer than AI has been around. We’ll come to AI and its usefulness in a minute. Mostly I write up full on marketing plans using the S.O.S.T.A.C model. I gave up knitting porridge though. What is a SOSTAC Plan? It stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control. I recommend them because they focus your thinking, budget and act as a benchmark....
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