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I only recently learned of a Wikipedia page dedicated to inventors who were killed by their own inventions. That page is amazing, and if you end up leaving this article and just reading that list for the next half hour, I totally understand. But it got me thinking: what are some ways in which paid search managers end up killing their own campaigns as a result of their own optimization attempts?

Today, there is little tolerance for brand irrelevance. Buyers expect brands to engage in meaningful conversations during key moments of need. To meet their expectations, the industry must move away from siloed channel and product-level campaign thinking and more toward managing key customer interactions. These interactions come down to specific moments.

Personalization is an accepted and expected mainstay in digital marketing. Everybody understands the conceptual idea that personalization is about providing your consumers with the right message at the right time and location.

It’s well known that Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) have the potential to feature longer headlines in text ad copy, as these headlines are pulled from the advertiser’s web page and aren’t limited by the hard caps placed on text ads created by paid search managers.

Google recently made some under-the-radar changes to sitelinks in the organic search results. The first change removed small sitelinks from below regular organic blue links that render for high search volume queries (Google has since fixed this glitch). The second change adjusted the number of large sitelinks being displayed for branded searches (this is most likely a test).

At a marketing event I recently attended, there was one aspect that resonated with me the most: the marketing funnel and how marketers should perceive this 100-year-old concept. Microsoft’s Matt Donovan used the analogy of a swarm of starlings to describe and reshape our perspective of the marketing funnel.

One of marketers’ favorite buzzwords these days is the “consumer journey.” With more ways for consumers to engage than ever before, people can now interact with brands on their own terms and at their convenience. In other words, they chart their own journey. So how do financial institutions meet the consumer where they are?

In B2B lead generation, we’re all looking for gold. Picture John Sutter in January 1848, building the foundation for a lumber- and agriculture-based empire in the valleys of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, when engineer James Marshall, who was working at his lumber mill, notices this flaky gold stuff in the river bed.