Social Media KPIs That Actually Drive Decisions
A practitioner’s guide to social media KPIs that survive a CFO review: cut vanity metrics, calculate engagement honestly, and tie social to real business outcomes.
Michael Crawford
Server-Side Tracking: When the Complexity Is Worth It
Server-side tracking pays off for high-volume e-commerce and lead-gen, and quietly drains budget for small content sites. Here is how to tell the difference.
Email Deliverability Beyond SPF/DKIM: 5 Underused Levers
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are entry tickets. Here are the five behavioural levers that actually move email inbox placement in 2026, with effort, impact, and when each applies.
Marketing Mix Modeling for Small Teams: Bayesian Beats Last-Click
Why Bayesian MMM is replacing last-click for small teams in 2026 — Robyn, Meridian, PyMC-Marketing, and when MMM is worth building.
ROAS vs MER vs CAC: Which Metric Drives Your Bid Strategy
ROAS, MER, and CAC each answer a different question — and picking the wrong one to drive bid strategy quietly drains paid-media budgets. Here’s how to match the metric to the decision.
Consent Mode v2: The Trade-Off Most Marketing Teams Skip
Consent Mode v2 isn’t a single toggle — Basic and Advanced have different legal exposure, data quality, and reporting trade-offs. Here’s the honest framework.
How to Build a Tracking Plan for GA4 (With Template and Examples)
Every GA4 property I have audited that lacks a tracking plan has the same problems: duplicate events with different names, missing parameters, and reports that do not answer the one question the CMO actually asked. A tracking plan prevents all of this. A tracking plan (sometimes called a measurement plan or analytics brief) is a … Read more
Marketing Dashboards: What to Include and How to Build Them
A marketing dashboard pulls your scattered data into a single screen so you can answer one question fast: is what we are doing working? That sounds simple, but in my experience, most dashboards fail within a few weeks. They get built with too many metrics, no clear audience, and no connection to decisions anyone actually … Read more
First-Party Data Strategy: How to Track Without Third-Party Cookies
Third-party cookies are going away. Safari killed them years ago with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Firefox followed with Enhanced Tracking Protection. Chrome has been winding down support through its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The result: the tracking infrastructure most marketing teams built over the past decade is breaking down. In my experience working with dozens of marketing … Read more
UTM Parameters: The Complete Guide to Campaign Tracking
What Are UTM Parameters? UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module) are short text tags you append to the end of a URL. When someone clicks that tagged link, your analytics tool — whether it’s GA4, Adobe Analytics, or anything else — reads those tags and records exactly where that visitor came from, which campaign sent them, … Read more