Digital Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Software Reviews
With 25+ years in digital marketing, Marketing With Dave focuses on discovering, measuring, and optimizing every aspect of it.
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Your LinkedIn Profile Mastered
Get found. Build trust. Create opportunities.
Available in Kindle (ebook), paperback, and audiobook formats.
Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile in about an hour with 17 practical improvements based on a real job search after 25+ years in digital marketing.
Step-by-step guidance to help you make the right changes the first time and build a profile that attracts recruiters, strengthens your personal brand, and creates new opportunities.
August Focus: Operations
August focuses on marketing operations, the systems, processes, and automation that ensure great marketing actually reaches the finish line.
Strategy defines the direction, but marketing operations create the consistency that turns plans into measurable results. From CRM and email automation to analytics, reporting, and campaign workflows, strong marketing operations eliminate friction, improve efficiency, and keep teams aligned.
The objective is not simply to generate more leads or send more emails. It is to build repeatable processes that create better customer experiences, improve pipeline performance, and turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth.
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This Month
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Week in Review
This week's stories show AI-era measurement catching up fast, even as ownership and rules lag behind. Microsoft Clarity's new AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio and Google's Ask Advisor benchmarking give marketers hard numbers they have never had, and Shopify data confirmed AI referrals grew 197 percent without cannibalizing organic search. Standards are splitting, though: Google now lets users strip its visible AI watermark, while Anthropic's Claude embeds one invisibly with no off switch. MarketingProfs found 92 percent of B2B organizations are experimenting with GEO, yet fewer than 15 percent have named an owner, the same accountability gap a federal judge highlighted in letting a toxic-backlink sabotage suit proceed under false advertising law. The common thread: tools to measure and defend AI visibility are arriving quickly, but most teams still have not assigned anyone to watch them.
Google Will Let Users Turn Off Visible AI Watermarks
Technology and AI • August 14, 2026
Google announced it will let users turn off the visible watermark on AI-generated images, videos, and songs, following an X post from Gemini VP Josh Woodward. The toggle covers the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models, rolling out first in Gemini and the Flow video editor, with Search support coming soon. Invisible SynthID watermarking and C2PA metadata stay in place regardless of the setting, so provenance tracking is unaffected. Google is also open sourcing a library called Credentio for local C2PA validation. Implications: marketers producing AI creative assets get more usability without losing traceability, though the move stands in contrast to Anthropic's stricter approach with Claude's mandatory text watermarking, which surfaced days earlier and highlights a real split in how AI vendors are handling transparency.
Microsoft Clarity Adds AI Scrape-to-Referral Insights
Digital Marketing • August 13, 2026
Microsoft Clarity added an AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio metric inside its Bot Analytics report, putting a single number on how often AI crawlers scrape a site versus how much referral traffic those same platforms send back. The update also includes an operator-level breakdown, coverage safeguards for mismatched domains, and a direct link from referral insights into session recordings filtered by AI source. The feature is free inside Clarity's AI Visibility Dashboard. Implications: site owners finally get concrete, no-cost data to decide which AI bots are worth allowing to crawl and which are extracting content with little traffic return, a call many have been making blind until now.
Shopify Data: AI Referrals Up 197 Percent, Organic Still Leads
Digital Marketing • August 13, 2026
Shopify released new commerce data showing AI-referred sessions to merchant storefronts grew 197 percent year over year in the second quarter, while organic search traffic grew 12 percent over the same period. AI-referred shoppers converted at roughly double the rate of organic visitors in research-heavy categories, and conversion rates doubled again when AI systems pulled from Shopify's structured Catalog data instead of scraped feeds. Organic search still sent more total traffic to merchants than all tracked AI platforms combined. Implications: for eCommerce sellers, this confirms AI and organic search are growing the pie together rather than one replacing the other, and it makes structured product data a shared investment that pays off in both channels at once.