Resources
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Why You Need to be Building for Intelligent Personal Assistants
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Apparently seven years ago Jeff Bezos, inspired by a love of Star Trek, decided that Amazon should build a something that you can talk to, and which would turn your commands into actions. Now Amazon Alexa is competing with a growing number of intelligent personal assistants from almost every corporate behemoth around. In order for any one of these companies to win this race, they need individuals and companies to develop a lot of the programs, or at least the program-specific integrations, for them. Read more
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Google Data Studio: How sharing and credential permissions work
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We recently introduced several Distillers to Data Studio. The first question they asked? If I share my report with someone, am I also sharing my data? The answer is no! And yet—there’s more to it. Data Studio sharing settings are rational and helpful, but they aren’t intuitive. Documentation spans several pages, so it’s hard to see the whole picture. Here’s the concise description of share settings you need to get started. Read more
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What We Learned in June 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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June really has been a busy month for the entire industry. In addition to the usual conveyor belt of Google product and services updates, Amazon has been busy buying Whole Foods and turning Echos into intercoms. Facebook is gearing up to take on Netflix and The Wall Street Journal has been leaking traffic. However, this has all somewhat been dwarfed by the huge fine levied against Google by the EU Commission...
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The EU is Wrong, but Google is Still in Trouble
I’ve found it tough to get my head around all the arguments in the recent EU judgement against Google. I find that writing helps me get my thoughts together and work out what I really think, so here goes. Let’s find out whether I agree with the ruling or not… Read more
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Building an Evergreen Machine: How to Write Evergreen Content
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How do you ensure the content you create will be evergreen and that it will generate enough interest to be worth your time? After all, a piece of content that gets one view a week, every week, is technically evergreen, but I wouldn’t recommend writing it. This piece aims to get a concrete handle on the vague idea of evergreen content, including how to recognise it, how to plan your content strategy around it, and how to compound your success into an ever-growing traffic level. Read more
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What We Learned in May 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
Another month, another glut of digital marketing stories to dive into. The usual suspects are covered, from Facebook and its internal content policing rules; to Google adding a number of new features to various offerings. There's also a great voice-search study from Dr Pete Meyers and the best from the folks here at Distilled. Read more
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Early Results from Split Testing JavaScript for SEO
With our new ODN platform, we were excited to test the impact of JavaScript on search performance. Google has been talking about rendering JavaScript and indexing the resulting DOM for some time, and others around the industry have been testing various aspects of it, figuring out when it times out, and finding out the differences between inline, external, and bundled JS. When we ran an SEO split test to remove a reliance on JavaScript, we saw an uplift in search performance. Read more
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Hey E-commerce Managers, Amazon Loses Their 1-Click Patent This Year
I wanted to make sure that you know that Amazon is losing their patent on 1-Click checkout this year. It’s always been amazing to me that they were granted this patent in the first place, but they were (in the US - the EU took the unsurprising view that it was too obvious to patent). If you aren’t already, I strongly recommend speaking to counsel and the product team to build in a plan to launch a one-click option as early as you are legally allowed. Read more
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The New York Times Makes Poor Argument for Breaking up Google
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At the end of April, The New York Times published an opinion piece that was widely circulated among my network entitled “Is It Time to Break Up Google?”. I saw a lot of people excited at the idea, and the concept of a monopolistic Google obviously resonated with many. Unfortunately, I thought that it was a poor article and that there was not nearly enough critical thinking being applied. Read more
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What We Learned in April 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute
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A lot has happened in April in the digital marketing world; so much so that it’s been hard to distill everything down to one blog post. The fake news and extremist content sagas rumble on, while The Guardian shows us that AMP stands to be a major part of publishers’ traffic drivers. There’s also Twitter’s new progressive web app (PWA), which shows the level of functionality you can begin to expect from the new software methodology. Read more
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Boost Your Brand: How to Create Content for Awareness
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Historically, when digital marketing agencies venture into content creation, it’s with the hope of increasing the number, or strength, of backlinks. This post however, aims to challenge you to think more broadly about the value of your content. Read more
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Site Migration
We’ve all heard the horror stories about sites that have migrated from one domain to another and experienced a huge drop in traffic and visibility, and those that have suffered the same fate just by changing protocol. Whether you have acquired a domain, want to roll up your M-Dot site into a responsive design or desire a move from http to https, devising a solid action plan to avoid traffic and revenue loss is paramount. Read more