Blog.

How medium and enterprise businesses actually grow. Written from the work.

Talk to us

When Static Beats Video In Paid Social

Video wins on reach. Static wins on density of message. Most accounts run the wrong mix.

Performance marketing30 Aug 2026

Do Backlinks Still Matter In The AI Search Era

Yes, but the kind has changed. Authority signals now come from citation density, not raw link counts.

SEO + AI search30 Aug 2026

Where To Place Social Proof For Maximum Lift

Above the fold beats below the fold by 30-50 percent. The exception that breaks the rule.

Conversion + CRO30 Aug 2026

The 7 Rules For A Pricing Page That Closes The Deal

What to show. What to hide. Where to put the FAQ. Why the toggle almost always loses.

Conversion + CRO30 Aug 2026

Rebrand Vs Refresh: When Each Actually Pays Back

Most rebrands waste 6 to 12 months of revenue. A refresh ships in 6 weeks and outperforms.

Brand + positioning30 Aug 2026

Why GA4 Should Not Be Your Source Of Truth

GA4 is a sampling layer. Use it for trend, never for absolute. The replacement.

Analytics + attribution30 Aug 2026

Why Payback Period Beats LTV-To-CAC As A Decision Metric

LTV-to-CAC describes a long-run condition. Payback period decides whether you can keep ordering more spend.

Analytics + attribution30 Aug 2026

The Welcome Sequence That Pays Back Acquisition Cost In 14 Days

5 emails. 14 days. The structure that drives 30 to 50 percent of first-month revenue.

Email + lifecycle30 Aug 2026

Retainer Vs Project Pricing: The Honest Trade-off

Retainers protect the relationship. Projects protect the client. The choice usually gets made backwards.

Agency operations30 Aug 2026

The Review Collection Engine That Runs Without The Founder

Recency, rating average, response rate. The 4-step process that lifts all three.

Tactical playbook30 Aug 2026

When Retargeting Stops Working

Most accounts overspend on retargeting because the dashboard makes it look efficient. The truth is different.

Performance marketing23 Aug 2026

Repurposing Vs Recreation: The Honest Trade-off

Repurposing buys you cadence. Recreation buys you depth. The right ratio depends on your team capacity.

Content strategy23 Aug 2026

The 4 Content Pillars That Map To Buyer Intent

Awareness. Consideration. Decision. Retention. Most brands run only the first.

Content strategy23 Aug 2026

On-Page SEO In 2026: What Still Works

Title, H1, schema, internal links, page speed. The five fundamentals nobody actually does well.

SEO + AI search23 Aug 2026

The Technical SEO Checklist Every Site Should Pass Before Asking An Agency

12 fixes that compound. Most are free. Most sites fail on at least 5.

SEO + AI search23 Aug 2026

The 5 Trust Signals That Actually Move Conversion

Most sites stack 12. Five carry the weight. The other 7 add visual noise.

Conversion + CRO23 Aug 2026

Why Most A/B Tests Conclude Before They Reach Significance

If your traffic is below 10K visits per variant, you are reading noise. The fix.

Conversion + CRO23 Aug 2026

The Positioning Statement Template That Forces Real Choices

5 fields. 90 minutes. Most teams spend 6 months on slide decks that produce less.

Brand + positioning23 Aug 2026

How To Design A First-Party Event Taxonomy That Survives Platform Changes

Pixel went down. CAPI changed. The schema below is the only layer you control.

Analytics + attribution23 Aug 2026

LTV-To-CAC Thresholds By Business Model

3:1 is the textbook answer. The real thresholds vary 2x by industry. The table.

Analytics + attribution23 Aug 2026

The 14-Day Creative Fatigue Curve, Mapped

Every ad creative has a half-life. The accounts winning at scale refresh on the curve, not on the calendar.

Performance marketing16 Aug 2026

The Conversion API Setup That Recovers 30 Percent Of Lost Signal

iOS broke the pixel. CAPI fills the gap, but only if it is set up correctly.

Performance marketing16 Aug 2026

The 6 Schema-Org Types That Move The Most Traffic

Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article, Review, BreadcrumbList. Why these six and what to skip.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

The llms.txt Standard And Why You Should Ship One This Week

A 1KB file that tells AI crawlers what your site is about and which sections they should read first.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

Programmatic SEO For Service Businesses

How a 200-page programmatic stack drives 80 percent of long-tail organic traffic for B2B services.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

Internal Linking As A Conversion Tool

Internal links are the cheapest CRO lever you own. Most sites burn them on footer noise.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

The Page Speed To Revenue Link, Quantified

100ms shaved off LCP is worth roughly 1 percent in conversion. The maths over a year.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

Answer Engine Optimisation: The Replacement For Keyword SEO

Search is moving from keyword-match to question-match. The page format that wins both.

SEO + AI search16 Aug 2026

The 4 Rules Every Hero Section Should Pass

Outcome, proof, CTA, signal of trust. In that order. In that hierarchy.

Conversion + CRO16 Aug 2026

The Single Form Field That Kills Conversion

Cut one field, lift conversion 12 percent on average. The field that almost always wins the cut.

Conversion + CRO16 Aug 2026

The five-minute lead response stat is from 2007

The 21x speed-to-lead figure comes from a US telephony study run before the iPhone existed. Here is how to measure your own instead.

Websites + CRO08 Aug 2026

Core Web Vitals thresholds did not change

LCP 2.5s, INP 200ms and CLS 0.1 are unchanged in 2026. The real change is soft navigations, and it can make your numbers look worse.

Websites + CRO07 Aug 2026

Press releases are the number one story source again

A 2026 survey of 803 Australian journalists puts press releases first for the first time since 2019, while social media as a source fell to 65%.

PR + authority06 Aug 2026

Five platform deadlines that land inside your next plan

The September AI Max upgrade, the February 2027 DSA sweep and three more changes each need a named owner and a date on your calendar.

Marketing operations06 Aug 2026

Journalists can tell your pitch was written by AI

78% say an AI-written pitch reduces their trust in the sender and 48% can almost always spot one, even though 54% use generative AI themselves.

PR + authority05 Aug 2026

Why 1-day click became the sane Meta attribution window

A shorter window stabilises the signal the optimisation model learns from, which matters more now than the extra conversions a long window reports.

Performance marketing04 Aug 2026

Citation is worth more than double the clicks

A 5.47 million query study puts organic CTR near 2.1% when your page is inside the AI Overview and 0.9% when it is not.

SEO + AI search04 Aug 2026

The pitch test that kills 88% of what you send

88% of journalists discard off-beat pitches immediately, and 78% define relevance as directly affecting the community their audience belongs to.

PR + authority04 Aug 2026

HARO closed and the good journalists moved

Cision shut Connectively in December 2024 and the brand relaunched as a free email service, while higher-tier reporters moved to gated platforms.

PR + authority03 Aug 2026

There are fewer newsrooms to pitch than last year

Nine cut roles twice, Seven merged with Southern Cross, and more than 20 regional mastheads stopped printing. The leverage moved to trade press.

PR + authority01 Aug 2026

The news levy that started in July and what it changes

The News Bargaining Incentive went live on 1 July 2026 as a levy that platforms can offset by paying Australian publishers. Here is what it moves.

PR + authority31 July 2026

Chrome measures every route in your site separately now

Chrome 151 shipped soft-navigation timing in July 2026. Routes you never measured now count, and your percentiles can fall with nothing broken.

Websites + CRO30 July 2026

Some coverage now trains the answer engines

Nine signed an Australian-first Copilot agreement and News Corp licensed to OpenAI, so a placement in those mastheads can surface inside AI answers.

PR + authority29 July 2026

You cannot fix LCP without fixing TTFB

Only 44% of mobile pages have good TTFB, and TTFB is the floor under LCP. No amount of image work rescues a slow origin.

Websites + CRO27 July 2026

What digital PR actually costs and how long it takes

81% of practitioners get first coverage within a week and 85% see results within six months. Most budgets sit under $10K a month.

PR + authority27 July 2026

Your services page is slower than your homepage

Home pages hit good mobile INP 80% of the time in 2025. Secondary pages managed 69%, and secondary pages are where the enquiry happens.

Websites + CRO23 July 2026

Zero-click hit 68% while AI Mode is 0.34% of searches

Clickstream data for January to April 2026 shows the click loss is coming from AI Overviews, not AI Mode, so most strategy work is aimed at the wrong surface.

SEO + AI search21 July 2026

The header that used to break back navigation no longer does

Chrome finished making no-store pages eligible for back-forward cache in April 2025, so a header that used to cost you 200ms no longer does.

Websites + CRO20 July 2026

Your consent banner is probably your worst interaction

Accept-click response times range from 6ms to 468ms across consent platforms, and it is usually the first interaction Chrome records on your page.

Websites + CRO16 July 2026

The Google Ads auto-upgrade most accounts don't know they're on

Google's September 2026 auto-upgrade is keyed to two settings almost every account already has switched on, and neither is DSA.

Performance marketing14 July 2026

Prerender pages without firing your analytics

The prerender-until-script mode builds the page then stops before scripts run, which removes the analytics objection that blocks prerender in marketing teams.

Websites + CRO13 July 2026

The speed feature that doubled a conversion rate

A JSON block in the head prerendered the next page, cut mobile LCP 43% and doubled mobile conversion. No rebuild involved.

Websites + CRO09 July 2026

The year platform risk stopped being theoretical

A retrained US TikTok recommender, rationed Google clicks and a monthly Instagram originality check all landed within twelve months of each other.

Social09 July 2026

Audit your exclusion lists before Display campaigns migrate

The standalone Display migration tool opened in June 2026, and placement, app and brand safety exclusions are what loosen quietly in transit.

Performance marketing07 July 2026

Demand Gen lets you pick Shorts only, and report on it

Channel controls now cover YouTube including Shorts only, Gmail, Discover, Maps and Display, with format-split reporting and a Target CPC bid option.

Performance marketing07 July 2026

One in six sites lazy-loads the image it is graded on

The LCP element is an image on 76% of mobile pages, and roughly one in six of those pages tells the browser to load it last.

Websites + CRO06 July 2026

Agents are visiting your site and reading it differently

Agents read your DOM and accessibility tree, not your pixels. A page that looks perfect can be unusable to the software now doing the browsing.

Websites + CRO04 July 2026

Your field data and Google's will disagree, correctly

Firefox and Safari can now measure Core Web Vitals, but the Chrome User Experience Report only ever sees Chrome. On a Safari-heavy audience, that gap is the finding.

Websites + CRO02 July 2026

Where a mid-market B2B brand should actually post

LinkedIn and YouTube now pull double duty, one because it is semantically ranked and one because it is a heavy AI citation source.

Social30 June 2026

Follower count is the worst number on your social report

The metrics that map to ranking are average watch time, likes per reach and sends per reach, and Instagram's ranking explainer has not been updated since 2023.

Social26 June 2026

Google is about to credit conversions 180 days after the click

Qualified Future Conversions extends attribution to 180 days on the finding that only 40% of Demand Gen conversions land inside 30 days.

Performance marketing24 June 2026

What belongs on the company page and what belongs on a person

LinkedIn's feed is ranked by a large language model reading meaning, which changes what a brand page can do and what only a named person can.

Social24 June 2026

Negative keywords now cost you conversions

Google's own AI Max guidance says use negatives sparingly, and the reason is mechanical: pruning the query list starves the match layer.

Performance marketing23 June 2026

The algorithm statistics being quoted at you do not exist

No platform has published a completion-rate threshold or a send-versus-like weighting, and the circulating figures trace back to blogs citing each other.

Social22 June 2026

Your own logo is fine, the TikTok watermark is not

Instagram suppresses recommendations on third-party watermarked exports, and has confirmed directly that your own handle or logo carries no penalty.

Social18 June 2026

What to fix first when everything needs fixing

Server response time, the consent banner and conversion signal quality each silently cap everything downstream, so they come before content and campaigns.

Websites + CRO18 June 2026

Which campaigns are eligible to serve inside AI Mode

Only four campaign configurations qualify for AI Mode ads, and query fan-out means a single question can drop you into several auctions at once.

Performance marketing16 June 2026

A YouTube Shorts view stopped meaning anything

Since 31 March 2025 a Shorts view counts on any play or replay, while engaged views remain the metric behind payouts and monetisation eligibility.

Social14 June 2026

TikTok watermarks AI content invisibly and users can dial it down

An AI slider in Content Preferences lets viewers see less AI content, and invisible watermarking survives re-upload and screen recording.

Social10 June 2026

Your secondary conversion actions now change how Google bids

Journey-aware bidding lets Target CPA Search campaigns learn from non-biddable goals, so anything you marked observation only is no longer inert.

Performance marketing09 June 2026

US TikTok advice describes a different algorithm now

The January 2026 joint venture retrains the US recommender on US data in Oracle's cloud, so American benchmarks stopped transferring to Australian accounts.

Social08 June 2026

Instagram is letting users pick their own algorithm

Your Algorithm spread from Reels to Explore to the main feed through 2026, which rewards content that sits inside a nameable topic.

Social04 June 2026

Stop managing daily budgets in Google Ads

Campaign total budgets cut manual budget edits by an average 66%, and demand-led pacing changes when your money gets spent.

Performance marketing02 June 2026

Instagram grades your account monthly now, not per post

Since 30 April 2026 the originality system covers photos and carousels, scores accounts over a full month, and credit lines do not clear the bar.

Social02 June 2026

Long-form still earns, but not for the reason you think

Zero-click hit 68% of US searches. Depth now pays through citation and sales enablement, so length should follow sub-questions, not a word count target.

Content31 May 2026

The pages you should delete this quarter

Thin and duplicated pages carry scaled-content risk and dilute the passage pool retrieval picks from. Pruning raises citation odds instead of lowering coverage.

Content29 May 2026

The bidding setting that buys queries you would never pick

Smart Bidding Exploration lets you set a tolerance under your target ROAS so the bidder can buy less obvious queries on purpose.

Performance marketing28 May 2026

Australians trust news at 43% and avoid it at 40%

Reach alone no longer buys belief in this market, so proof, named people and first-hand detail have to carry the message instead of volume.

Strategy28 May 2026

Your page gets quoted at the passage, not the page

AI answers pull passages, not pages, so one clean self-contained paragraph outperforms a perfectly optimised page. And no, you do not need to chunk anything.

Content27 May 2026

When to say you used AI and when it costs you

78% of journalists lose trust in AI-written pitches while 54% use AI themselves. Meanwhile TikTok and C2PA label your exports whether you disclose or not.

Content25 May 2026

Google penalises purpose, not tools

Google's spam policy never mentions AI as the trigger. It targets purpose and scale, and it catches human-written thin pages the same way.

Content19 May 2026

Pricing Pages That Actually Convert

Pricing pages are where browsers become buyers or bounce. The mistakes most pages make are easy to spot once you know what to look for.

Conversion strategy15 May 2026

Reviews: How Many You Actually Need And How To Get Them

The number of reviews is not what moves the needle. The recency, the rating average, and the response rate move it. Here is the system that lifts all three.

Tactical playbook15 May 2026

The Weekly Five Numbers, Five Minutes Report

Most weekly marketing reports take an hour to read and make no decisions easier. The five-number version takes five minutes and changes what gets done next week.

Reporting15 May 2026

The 90-Day GTM Plan From Zero

If you are starting with no audience, no content, no ads, and no website that converts, here is the order to fix the layers in over the next 90 days.

GTM strategy15 May 2026

Why GTM Is The Better Frame Than 'Marketing'

When you call it 'marketing' you scope the problem too small and the wrong people own the outcome. When you call it GTM you put revenue on the line and the right people show up.

GTM strategy15 May 2026

What Full-Stack GTM Looks Like When It Is Working

When all six layers of the engine are wired together, the business stops feeling like marketing is a guess. Here is what the day-to-day looks like.

GTM strategy15 May 2026

Sends buy new audience, likes buy the one you have

Instagram says likes weigh slightly more for connected reach and sends slightly more for unconnected. That single split decides which post you should be making.

Social15 May 2026

The Brand Voice Test: Would Apple Write This?

Brand voice is not a font choice or a colour palette. It is the test you apply to every line of copy before it ships. Pass the test, and your premium positioning holds.

Brand14 May 2026

Offer Design: What Your Price Says About You

The offer is the most important thing on the page. Most businesses spend months on the website and seconds on the offer. Reverse the order.

Conversion strategy14 May 2026

Your engineers hold the content AI cannot write

A 30-minute recorded interview yields the numbers, objections and site-specific detail that make a page citable. It is the cheapest content input you own.

Content14 May 2026

SEO In 2026: What Still Works, What Is Dead

Search behaviour is splitting between Google and AI engines. The SEO playbook that worked in 2022 is half-dead and the new half is what most operators have not built yet.

SEO13 May 2026

Getting Cited By ChatGPT, Gemini, And Perplexity

AI engines decide who to cite using rules that are not Google's. Five things every page needs if you want LLMs to recommend you when a buyer asks for a referral.

AI in marketing13 May 2026

Your Website Has One Job And It Is Not Traffic

Doubling traffic to a website that doesn't convert doubles your loss. The job of the site is to turn visits into next steps. Everything else is secondary.

Conversion strategy12 May 2026

Email + SMS: The Lifecycle Layer Most Operators Skip

Acquiring a lead and never following up is the most expensive mistake in the funnel. Email and SMS together convert 3x to 8x more of the leads you already paid for.

Lifecycle marketing12 May 2026

How much creative an automated account actually needs

Matching and bidding are automated, so creative is the last real input, and PMax asset experiments are now how you prove which asset moved the number.

Performance marketing12 May 2026

The project write-up is the highest-return page you own

First-hand detail is the one content input that cannot be generated, which is why nearly all digital PR now runs on data-led and original material.

Content12 May 2026

When To Flip Paid Ads On (And When To Wait)

Most operators turn paid on too early, burn budget on unvalidated creative, then conclude that 'ads don't work for our business'. The signal that says you are ready is specific.

Performance marketing11 May 2026

Meta, Google, TikTok: Where Your First $10K Of Ad Spend Goes

Three platforms, three different jobs in the funnel. Spending the same way on all three is a fast way to print disappointing reports.

Performance marketing11 May 2026

How Often To Post: The Cadence Question Answered

Posting once a week is invisible. Posting ten times a day burns out the team and the audience. Here is the cadence that actually works on every platform in 2026.

Content strategy10 May 2026

Long Video, Short Video, Carousel: A Simple Decision Tree

Three formats, three jobs. Pick the wrong format for your message and the message dies even when the hook lands.

Content strategy10 May 2026

Why Organic Always Comes Before Paid

Paid ads are amplification. They make whatever message you put in front of a cold audience louder. If the message hasn't been validated organically, you're amplifying nothing.

GTM strategy09 May 2026

Hooks Are 80 Percent Of The Game

The first three seconds of a video, the first six words of a headline, the first frame of a carousel. These decide whether the next 60 seconds happen at all.

Content strategy09 May 2026

What Full GTM Actually Means For A $5M-$50M Business

GTM is not a department. It is the single system that turns attention into revenue. Here is what every layer does and why most businesses run only two of them.

GTM strategy08 May 2026

The Three Layers Of A Modern GTM Engine

Distribution, conversion, lifecycle. Most operators try to fix one without touching the other two and wonder why nothing scales.

GTM strategy08 May 2026

Nine questions that expose whether an agency is current

The September AI Max upgrade, the GA4 data-driven threshold and holdout design separate 2022 practice from 2026 practice in about ten minutes.

Strategy07 May 2026

How To Engineer A Page So ChatGPT Cites It

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini are now sending real referral traffic. The pages they cite are structured a specific way. Here's the recipe that works in 2026.

SEO + AI search06 May 2026

Category Design Vs Category Following

The brands that compound own a category they invented. The brands that fight for share rent the one they joined. How to know which one you're playing.

Brand + positioning06 May 2026

Monopoly Voice: The Brand Voice Pattern That Clears The Page

Apple does not mention Samsung. Tesla does not mention Ford. The brands that own a category never name the alternatives. The pattern, applied to your brand.

Brand + positioning06 May 2026

The First Marketing Hire Is Almost Never A CMO

Founders default to hiring a CMO first. Almost always wrong. The right first hire is the operator who can ship daily output, not the strategist who can think about it.

Founder + leadership06 May 2026

Marketing For AEC Firms: Why The Standard Approach Fails

Architecture, engineering, construction. Long sales cycles, niche specifier audiences, photography-driven. The marketing playbook that actually works for the trades.

Industry: AEC06 May 2026

Marketing For Personal Brands That Want To Convert, Not Just Entertain

Most personal brands optimise for views and wonder why nobody buys. The 5 funnel layers that turn followers into clients without dropping the entertainment that earned them.

Industry: Personal brand06 May 2026

LinkedIn's feed runs on one 150-billion-parameter model

360Brew replaced the separate feed, jobs and ads models and went live in March 2026, which is why hashtags stopped working and specificity started.

Social06 May 2026

The Carousel Architecture That Drives The Highest Save Rates

10 slides, one idea per slide, one sentence per frame. The architecture that consistently outperforms 4-slide quote cards by 5-10x on save rate.

Content strategy05 May 2026

How To Build A Hook Bank That Never Runs Dry

200 reusable hook structures organised by buying intent. The asset that lets the team ship daily without running out of ideas by week three.

Content strategy05 May 2026

Ad Creative From Organic Winners, Not Briefs

We never write purpose-built ad creative. Every winning ad starts as an organic post that the algorithm and the audience already validated. The mechanic that compounds.

Performance marketing04 May 2026

Weekly Reporting Is The Engine, Not The Output

The Friday report is what makes the next cycle sharper than the last. Three numbers, one narrative, one decision. Without it, every cycle is week one.

Analytics + attribution04 May 2026

Creative Strategy After The End Of Deterministic Attribution

Pixel signal is degraded permanently. The new measurement stack is part platform, part first-party, part lift study. The accounts that adapted are printing. The ones still optimising on a 7-day click attribution window are flying blind.

Performance marketing04 May 2026

How To Split Budget Between Meta And Google For B2B

Meta builds the demand. Google captures it. The split is rarely 50-50, and the right ratio depends on whether you're a known brand or unknown.

Performance marketing04 May 2026

Publish the transcript

A video player gives a browsing agent nothing to read. The transcript turns an hour of expert talk into retrievable passages and satisfies accessibility at the same time.

Content04 May 2026

Why The Brain Is The Marketing Source Of Truth

Everything Ignis ships flows out of one brain document per client. Voice rules, persona, offer language, proof points. The reason the work stays consistent across every contractor, every cycle, every channel.

Marketing operations03 May 2026

Your Site Is A Conversion Engine, Not A Brochure

The site's only job is to turn cold attention into a qualified application. Hero, proof, CTA. Three sections decide whether the rest of your marketing was worth running.

Conversion + CRO03 May 2026

The Brain Site Content Ads Architecture

The four-layer operating system every Ignis partnership ships on. Brain holds the voice. Site converts the demand. Content creates the demand. Ads amplify the winners.

Marketing operations02 May 2026

AI content stopped growing in 2024 and nobody noticed

Common Crawl analysis shows AI-written articles passed human ones in November 2024 and have sat near 50/50 since. The flood narrative is wrong.

Content30 Apr 2026

Why Daily Output Beats Weekly Genius

One brilliant post a week is the wrong cadence for the algorithm and the wrong cadence for the team learning loop. Daily good beats weekly great every time.

Content strategy28 Apr 2026

Video Action Campaigns are gone and five features went with them

The final auto-upgrade to Demand Gen completed in April 2026, and five capabilities did not carry across. Here is what replaces each one.

Performance marketing28 Apr 2026

The four content jobs to give AI and the four to never

Mirror what journalists themselves use it for, and keep the argument, the anecdote, the quote and the number in human hands.

Content28 Apr 2026

The Premium Positioning Test: Would You Pay Your Own Price?

If your founder would not pay your price for your product, the work is not at the standard the price requires. Most premium positioning fails this test.

Brand + positioning25 Apr 2026

AI writing sands off the Australian register first

Homogenisation research finds AI suggestions pull writing toward a Western default, so voice degrades long before accuracy does.

Content24 Apr 2026

ROAS Is A Lagging Metric. Here Is The Leading One.

ROAS tells you what you sold last week. It does not tell you what is about to break. Save rate is the leading metric that does.

Analytics + attribution22 Apr 2026

The hidden cost of AI output nobody edits

Research puts clean-up at one hour 56 minutes per instance and around $186 per employee a month, which is where AI content quietly loses money.

Content22 Apr 2026

AI Overviews cite AI-assisted pages more than human-only ones

Of 1.9M cited URLs, 87.8% were mixed human and AI and only 8.6% pure human, with AI share barely affecting citation order.

Content20 Apr 2026

What 70 Million Views Taught Me About Hooks

The first 3 seconds of any post decides whether the next 60 happen. After 70M+ views, the patterns are unmistakable.

Content strategy19 Apr 2026

The Real Cost Of A Marketing Hire vs A Marketing Partnership

Loaded cost of a senior marketer in Sydney versus a partnership that ships across the full stack. The maths almost always favours the partnership for $2M-$30M businesses.

Agency operations16 Apr 2026

What happened to 2,000 unedited AI articles over 16 months

About 71% indexed in month one, then only 3% of pages held a top 100 spot by month three, with nearly all impressions inside ten weeks.

Content16 Apr 2026

Brand mentions track AI visibility better than backlinks

Across roughly 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 and YouTube mentions at 0.737 while backlinks sit at 0.218.

SEO + AI search14 Apr 2026

Why Your Site Sessions Doubling Is The Wrong Metric To Chase

Site sessions climbing is a leading indicator, not the goal. Here is what to read instead.

Analytics + attribution13 Apr 2026

Google named the exact article format not to publish

Its generative AI guidance uses 7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers as the worked example of commodity content. Most calendars run on that template.

SEO + AI search09 Apr 2026

What compounds in marketing and what resets every month

PR, content and citations accrue while paid resets at zero on the first. A budget split is really a decision about how much of your spend has a memory.

Strategy09 Apr 2026

Half of AI-cited content is under 13 weeks old

The freshness premium in AI answers turns a content refresh schedule into a citation tactic, and most refresh work does not qualify.

SEO + AI search07 Apr 2026

The Organic-To-Paid Flywheel

How content that proves itself organically outperforms purpose-built ads when amplified with paid spend. The mechanic behind the 20x average return.

Performance marketing04 Apr 2026

AI referrals convert brilliantly and barely exist

Visitors from ChatGPT and Perplexity convert several times better than Google organic, and still sit near one percent of sessions.

SEO + AI search02 Apr 2026

The First 30 Days Of The Engine

What happens in week one, week two, week three, and week four when the operation goes live. Daily output. Every platform. Measured from day one.

Marketing operations01 Apr 2026

There is no single AI visibility number

Only about 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity, so one blended score averages systems that fundamentally disagree.

SEO + AI search31 Mar 2026

YouTube is a search asset, not a brand asset

YouTube supplies 17% of AI Mode citations and 18.2% of AI Overview citations from pages outside the top 100, which changes who should own it.

SEO + AI search26 Mar 2026

Five domains carry over 62% of AI Mode citations

Reddit at 19.9% and YouTube at 17% lead a citation pool so concentrated that presence there is a search decision, not a social one.

SEO + AI search24 Mar 2026

Consent mode modelling needs 700 clicks or you get nothing

Google only models non-consented conversions above 700 ad clicks in seven days per country and domain, a bar most Australian accounts never clear.

Marketing operations20 Mar 2026

One search now fires eight to twelve searches

Query fan-out scores you against a cluster of sub-queries the system writes itself, which is why unranked pages get cited and ranked ones get skipped.

SEO + AI search19 Mar 2026

Branded search is the only line that compounds

With 68% of Google searches ending without a click, the demand you create off-platform is what still arrives, which makes brand a measurable line.

Strategy18 Mar 2026

One meta tag can remove you from AI answers

Google's only documented AI controls are nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex, so a legacy directive quietly makes pages ineligible.

SEO + AI search17 Mar 2026

Schema is an entity tool now, not a snippet tool

After three years of deprecations only a short list of markup still renders anything, so schema now earns its keep by proving who you are.

SEO + AI search13 Mar 2026

FAQ rich results were switched off in May

Google deprecated FAQ rich results globally on 7 May 2026, including the government and health exemptions, and pulled the Search Console report by June.

SEO + AI search11 Mar 2026

Meta Signals Gateway is not a rename of CAPI Gateway

It ingests web, app, CRM and offline events and ships its own pixel on your domain, so scoping it as a tag swap is how builds stall.

Marketing operations10 Mar 2026

Google published the AI optimisation rules and they kill three popular tactics

The May 2026 guide says structured data is not required for AI features, content does not need chunking, and manufactured mentions do not help.

SEO + AI search08 Mar 2026

Customer Match uploads moved and the old road closed

From 1 April 2026 first-party audience uploads run through the Data Manager API, and jobs still pointed at the old path simply stopped.

Marketing operations06 Mar 2026

llms.txt is not doing anything for you

Across 137,210 domains, 97% of published llms.txt files got zero requests in a month, and the top requester was SEO audit tools.

SEO + AI search05 Mar 2026

You can finally see what the Search Partner Network is spending

Search Partner segmentation reached all accounts in January 2026, and an alpha lets some advertisers switch partners and Display off separately.

Performance marketing03 Mar 2026

A top 10 rank no longer gets you cited

The share of AI Overview citations coming from top 10 results fell from 76% to 38%, and a third of cited pages rank outside the top 100.

SEO + AI search02 Mar 2026

The 11% measurement uplift almost nobody switched on

Google Tag Gateway serves your tags from your own domain with no snippet change, and most of the benefit of server-side at a fraction of the work.

Marketing operations27 Feb 2026

The marketing job moved from targeting to signal

Both major ad platforms automated matching and bidding. Feed quality, creative volume and clean conversion data are the only inputs your team still controls.

Strategy26 Feb 2026

Feed CRM outcomes back or you are bidding on form fills

Data Manager is now the single ingestion path for offline conversions, and offline imports are what stop automated bidding optimising toward junk enquiries.

Performance marketing24 Feb 2026

GA4 forgets your buyer after 30 days

The acquisition lookback default dropped from 90 days to 30, and any business with a real consideration cycle is being undercredited.

Marketing operations20 Feb 2026

Performance Max has controls now, so a bad build is yours

Brand exclusions, 10,000 campaign negatives, account-level placement exclusions and channel reporting ended the black box argument.

Performance marketing17 Feb 2026

Your data-driven attribution is probably last click

GA4 needs 400 conversions on the action and 20,000 across the property before data-driven works, and it never tells you when it falls back.

Marketing operations13 Feb 2026

Customer Match now works at 100 records

The minimum audience size for Customer Match fell from 1,000 to 100, which puts list-based activation inside reach of businesses with small, valuable customer files.

Performance marketing11 Feb 2026

The GA4 consent change that quietly broke Ads data

Since 15 June 2026 one parameter decides whether GA4 shares data with Google Ads, and both failure modes are silent.

Marketing operations06 Feb 2026

There are only two attribution models left

First click, linear, time decay and position based are gone from Google Ads and GA4. The real levers now are lookback windows and conversion hygiene.

Marketing operations05 Feb 2026

Your product feed is doing the targeting now

In Shopping and Performance Max the feed is the targeting layer, which means the fix for poor performance usually lives in the feed rather than the campaign.

Performance marketing04 Feb 2026

Privacy Sandbox is being removed and cookies survived

Google is deleting the Sandbox APIs from Chrome and third-party cookies stayed on by default, so a lot of measurement roadmaps are two years stale.

Marketing operations30 Jan 2026

PR is a search channel now

Brand mentions track with AI visibility more closely than backlinks do, and Google has published exactly what it thinks of that.

PR + authority27 Jan 2026

Meta's Incremental Attribution has two settings and teams use the wrong one

One version changes your reporting and nothing else. The other changes who Meta serves your ads to. They share a name and are frequently confused.

Performance marketing20 Jan 2026

When to stop arguing about attribution and run a holdout

Attribution answers a question nobody can verify. A geo or audience holdout answers one you can, and it survives the next platform change.

Marketing operations14 Jan 2026

The survey is the story

A journalist can get a quote from anyone. Here is how to build the one number they cannot get anywhere else.

PR + authority08 Jan 2026

Contact the Ignis Team

Send through your details and we will audit your business before we reply.

Talk to us