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.
Marketing Tools Spotlight
My current top picks from everything I have been reviewing and testing. View all reviews and comparisons →
Latest Analysis and Articles
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.
If you missed past content or want to revisit a topic, check out the Content Calendar. Explore the insights below, and please share your thoughts.
This Month
🧭 Start here
New to this topic? Start with these quick reads.
📘 Resources
🛠 Tools
📝 Articles
📚 Book Summaries
Loading this month’s items…
Week in Review
This week's stories show measurement infrastructure racing to catch up with what marketers actually need to prove value, even as trust and standards lag behind the tooling. Search Engine Land's nine-month AI Overview tracking, built on a custom GA4 dimension, gave SEO teams a replicable method for seeing which content gets cited and how much of that traffic gets misattributed, while a 10Fold survey found only 49 percent of B2B marketers are highly confident in the data driving their budgets, even though measurement steers spend for 85 to 88 percent of respondents. Ownership and standardization are still catching up: the ANA's new Retail Media Measurement Standardization report pushes networks toward a shared definition of "outcomes" and a common 14-day attribution window, but Amazon still isn't at the table, and Search Engine Journal's breakdown of seven silent conversion-tracking failures showed how easily a broken pipeline can corrupt Smart Bidding without producing a single visible error. Consolidation is accelerating on the vendor side too: Nielsen's $2.15 billion acquisition of DoubleVerify was quickly followed by workforce cuts at rivals VideoAmp and Comscore, a sign that standalone measurement players are struggling to survive independently. The common thread: marketers finally have sharper tools and frameworks for proving what's working, but the data pipelines, vendor landscape, and industry standards underneath them are still catching up.
AI Update, August 21, 2026: AI News and Views From the Past Two Weeks
AI in Marketing • August 21, 2026 (does not meet material news criteria – please review; included as a curated roundup rather than a single reported story)
MarketingProfs' biweekly AI roundup covers close to two dozen developments, from OpenAI's European ad expansion and its enterprise revenue overtaking consumer revenue, to Anthropic's new text watermarking, tripling enterprise agent adoption, and rising public skepticism toward AI. The standout item: OpenAI's enterprise business has hit a $40 billion annualized run rate, and Ramp data shows even top-spending companies are shifting toward cheaper models rather than premium ones. That's worth factoring into any AI tool budget conversations this quarter. Treat this as a scanning resource for items relevant to your stack rather than a single actionable story.
B2B marketers don't trust the data used to shape budgets
Analytics & Measurement • August 21, 2026
A 10Fold survey of 400 marketing and communications leaders across the US, UK, France, and Germany found only 49% are highly confident in the accuracy and completeness of their data, even though measurement drives budget decisions for 85-88% of respondents across paid social, paid media, and owned content. Just 35% have fully integrated reporting across earned, paid, and owned channels; another 19% are partially integrated, and 18% still have inconsistent attribution. The gap between how much weight leadership puts on the numbers and how much teams actually trust those numbers is a real risk once budgets face scrutiny. Any team leaning on cross-channel reporting to justify spend should audit where attribution breaks down before the next budget cycle, since disconnected systems, not a lack of tools, is the named culprit.
The Conversion Setup Errors That Break Smart Bidding
Paid Media • August 20, 2026
Search Engine Journal breaks down seven conversion-tracking failures, from bad PII hashing in enhanced conversions to duplicate order IDs in Shopify feeds, that quietly corrupt the data feeding Google's Smart Bidding algorithms. The core argument: campaigns often get blamed for bidding strategy problems when the real issue is upstream in the conversion pipeline, and Smart Bidding will confidently optimize toward broken signals with no visible error. As Google automates more bid decisions, a silent tracking failure translates directly into wasted spend that looks like normal performance in reporting. Anyone running Target CPA, Target ROAS, or Maximize Conversions should audit tracking setup against this list before assuming a bidding strategy change will fix underperformance.