Resources

  • Google Data Studio: Using Google Sheets as a Data Source

    Benjamin Estes –

    Data Studio lets us visualize data from many sources. At Distilled, we’ve been using Google Sheets to do most of our reporting for years. It works well—but transitioning to Data Studio is so satisfying. It’s easier to manage permissions. And it’s also easier to get Google Analytics data into Data Studio than Sheets. Read more

  • The Hierarchy of Evidence for Digital Marketing Testing

    Sam Nemzer –

    In the two-and-a-bit years that I’ve been working in digital marketing, I’ve been keen to understand the reasons why we make the decisions we do in digital marketing. There’s a wide variety of ways to approach a problem, and although many of them have value, there has to be a best way to make sure that the decision you make is the right one. I wanted to take my evidence-first way of thinking and apply it to this field. Read more

  • Why You Need to be Building for Intelligent Personal Assistants

    Robin Lord –

    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

  • Google Data Studio: Who can See My Data?

    Benjamin Estes –

    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

  • What We Learned in June 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute

    Andrew Tweddle –

    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...
    Read more

  • The EU is Wrong, but Google is Still in Trouble

    Will Critchlow –

    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

  • Building an Evergreen Machine: How to Write Evergreen Content

    Andrew Tweddle –

    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

  • Finding a Happy Medium: Should You Use Medium for Your company’s Content?

    Lydia Gilbertson –

    You’ve likely read an article on Medium before, even if you didn’t notice the green “M” hanging out in the corner of your screen. The platform houses tons of popular content created by both its users and publications alike. A place for thoughtful, long-form, niche and technical content, it's not surprising that everyone from CEOs to freelance journalists posts there regularly. Increasingly, businesses and publications have been using this platform for their content distribution. With all that in mind, is Medium the right way for your business to reach new readers? Read more

  • What We Learned in May 2017: The Digital Marketing Month in a Minute

    Andrew Tweddle –

    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

  • Early Results from Split Testing JavaScript for SEO

    Will Critchlow –

    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

  • Hey E-commerce Managers, Amazon Loses Their 1-Click Patent This Year

    Will Critchlow –

    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

Load more