How-To Guides
Sharp insights, smarter growth.
Cover story · AI & DataI shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
Tymbre went from a clickable mockup to the App Store in 30 days, built by one person after hours, with AI. Here is the full build: 1,116 commits, a backend thrown out on day 6, a QA pass run by 30 agents, and the lesson that the bottleneck was never the typing.
SectionAI & Data
Reading time~11 min
01 · Editor's picks
This week's picks
02 · Explore by channel
Editorial channels, one operator perspective.
0111 articles
AI & Data
Targeting, attribution, the data behind AI ads. The new fundamentals.
Browse channel025 articles
PPC
Performance Max, Advantage+, paid social. For people who run the campaigns.
Browse channel032 articles
SEO
Core updates, AI search, technical SEO. What's actually moving rankings.
Browse channel046 articles
MarTech
Stacks that earn their keep, and the ones quietly subsidized by venture money.
Browse channel053 articles
E-Commerce
Conversion, checkout, the AI shopping behavior reshaping retail funnels.
Browse channel062 articles
How-To Guides
Step-by-step playbooks you can run on Monday. Tested in real accounts.
Browse channel072 articles
Data & Research
Original analysis and the numbers behind the trends: sources shown, claims checked.
Browse channel085 articles
Digital Marketing
The cross-channel picture: strategy, maturity, and the tool stack that ties it together.
Browse channel091 article
CRO
Conversion rate optimization: landing pages, checkout, and the experiments that move revenue.
Browse channel03 · The latest
Recent articles
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Jul 282026
AI & Data
Labeling your AI creative is the law now. That it costs you sales is a rumor.
From August 2, three separate regimes (the EU AI Act, New York's synthetic-performer law, and Amazon's marketplace policy) start forcing you to disclose AI-generated creative. The panic that the label tanks conversion is repeated everywhere and proven nowhere. Here is what each rule actually covers, and how to decide where a human face still earns its cost.
Jul 272026
How-To Guides
Build a Google Ads agent that can't wreck your account.
You can run Google Ads from a terminal now: read the account, draft the change, spend the money, all in plain English. This is the build guide. Which of the four paths to use (scripts, the official read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a community write server, or the raw v25 API), what v25 quietly broke, and how to wire a write path that fails safe instead of fast.
Jul 202026
SEO
Don't panic-bid on your own brand after the spam update.
The June 2026 spam update set off a wave of "brands lost their own results" panic. No primary data supports it. What actually got demoted was the coupon and affiliate sludge on your brand-plus-modifier queries, and branded search is the one segment AI Overviews are making stronger.
Jul 182026
AI & Data
I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
Tymbre went from a clickable mockup to the App Store in 30 days, built by one person after hours, with AI. Here is the full build: 1,116 commits, a backend thrown out on day 6, a QA pass run by 30 agents, and the lesson that the bottleneck was never the typing.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you're quietly starving
AI, Digital, Automation, Measurement. Every business already runs on all four, and is fragile in the exact one nobody is watching. ADAM is a diagnostic that plots you on a 4×5 matrix, names your weakest pillar, and forces one decision per quarter. Here is the whole framework, and the free playbook.
Jul 132026
AI & Data
Claude Code can operate your ad accounts. The question is what you let it touch.
Claude Code already pulls last week's numbers, drafts the negatives, and stages a budget change across Google Ads and Meta, wired in through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the platforms' own APIs. Here is how the plumbing works, why Google's own connector refuses to spend a cent, and where the guardrails still have to come from you.
Jul 122026
AI & Data
Model Context Protocol: one plug for every AI marketing tool
Model Context Protocol (MCP) turns a large language model (LLM) from smart autocomplete into an agent that can touch your CRM (customer relationship management), analytics, and ad platforms through a single standard. How the handshake works, who adopted it, and the security perimeter it opens.
Jul 102026
Digital Marketing
Marketing's AI reorg is real. The layoffs aren't.
Seventeen percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have cut marketing jobs because of AI. Thirty-six percent expect to within two years. The gap between those numbers is where the restructuring is actually happening.
Jul 92026
AI & Data
One agent will not run your marketing. A team of them might.
When a single AI agent hits its ceiling, the work moves to a fleet with an orchestrator on top. The 2026 problem is no longer model quality. It is coordination, guardrails, and reliability.
Jul 82026
SEO
Half your clicks are gone. Your best ones aren't.
AI Overviews now sit on nearly half of Google searches and have cut clicks to the top organic result by 58%. The traffic that survives is disproportionately the traffic that was going to convert.
Jul 62026
Data & Research
Your best-performing channel might just be a passenger
Last-click and even a mix model can flatter the spend that only harvested demand it never created. Incrementality testing is the causal tie-breaker: geo experiments and holdout lift tests that show which dollar actually caused a sale.
Jul 52026
PPC
Performance Max isn't a black box anymore. You're just running it like one.
Search themes, campaign-level negatives, brand exclusions, and channel reporting quietly turned Google's most opaque campaign type into a controllable broad-match machine. The controls exist. Most accounts still don't use them.
Jul 32026
MarTech
Google Analytics 4 measures behavior well. It was never your system of record.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) got good at engagement, e-commerce, and prediction, and stayed bad at pretending to be a database. In 2026 the working setup reads the interface as a privacy-filtered view and moves the source of truth to BigQuery.
Jul 22026
E-Commerce
Two companies own retail media. Everyone else is a test budget.
US retail media hits roughly $71 billion in 2026, but Amazon and Walmart take nine of every ten new dollars. The channel is huge, growing fast, and more concentrated than any other in digital.
Jun 302026
MarTech
Do you actually need a CDP in 2026, or is the warehouse enough?
Packaged customer data platforms and warehouse-native, composable stacks now do most of the same jobs. The real fork is not buy vs build. It is where you put identity and consent, and how fast you need to act on them.
Jun 282026
PPC
Advantage+ reports one ROAS. It's the wrong one to trust.
Meta made Advantage+ the default and lowered the bar to use it. The performance lift is real. But the number it reports is blended, and the control you give up is not. Here's how to run it without fooling yourself.
Jun 262026
AI & Data
Your AI strategy is an operating-model problem, not a tool list
In 2026 the marketing teams pulling ahead with AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that redesigned how the work is done, who decides, and how the payback gets proven.
Jun 242026
E-Commerce
The referral fee is the smallest line on your Amazon bill
Amazon called its 2026 fee change slight, and for one unit it is. The real cost of selling on Amazon and Walmart sits underneath it: a stack of fulfillment, storage, and ad charges that turns a 6-15% referral into something operators put near 30-40% of gross merchandise value (GMV), and each platform hurts in a different place.
Jun 222026
Digital Marketing
Outdoor screens grew up: programmatic DOOH is now audience media
In 2026 the billboard reports back. Programmatic buys the majority of digital out-of-home, measurement moved from impressions to incrementality, and outdoor screens now compete for performance budgets, not just awareness lines.
Jun 202026
Digital Marketing
People watch connected TV. Budgets haven't caught up. That's the trade.
Streaming is now nearly half of US TV viewing, but connected TV still draws only about 8% of ad spend. The gap is the last piece of underpriced reach in video, if you can survive the measurement and frequency chaos to claim it.
Jun 172026
MarTech
The blast is dead. Email in 2026 runs on lifecycle and deliverability.
Gmail and Yahoo turned deliverability into the price of entry, and behavior-led flows now compound where broadcast sends stall. What actually moves email revenue in 2026, and what to distrust in the return-on-investment decks.
Jun 162026
AI & Data
How to get quoted by the machine that replaced your search traffic
Generative engine optimization isn't SEO with a new coat of paint. It's writing for extraction (answer-first, evidence-dense, cleanly structured) so ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity pick you as the source. This piece is built the way it tells you to build.
Jun 142026
Digital Marketing
Your affiliate program's real cost isn't the commission rate. It's the incrementality.
Pay 10% on every affiliate sale and a chunk of those buyers were coming anyway. The 2026 shift is away from coupon volume toward deeper partnerships, but the number that decides whether the program pays is the one nobody prints on the invoice.
Jun 122026
MarTech
You're not measuring a third of your conversions. Here's the fix and its price.
Client-side tracking now loses 20-40% of events, more in Safari-heavy markets. Server-side tagging recovers a real chunk of it, but it's infrastructure with a bill and a consent trap, not a plugin you switch on.
Jun 102026
MarTech
On June 15, one switch decides whether your conversions still exist.
Google Analytics stops reading its own ad settings and hands the entire decision to Consent Mode. If your consent management platform (CMP) wires the wrong signal, EU conversions and remarketing quietly fall off, and Analytics will still look fine.
Jun 82026
AI & Data
The ad-ops agent is real. Full autonomy is a story you're being sold.
AI agents already run bidding, budget shifts, and creative rotation end to end. But 2026 is the year of assisted autonomy: humans on the guardrails, not off the loop. The gap between those two things is where accounts get wrecked or saved.
Jun 62026
PPC
Half your display dollar never reaches the publisher. Here is where it goes.
Independent audits keep finding the same thing: only about half of a programmatic display dollar reaches the site that ran the ad. The rest is the ad tech tax, and in 2026 the way to claw it back is structural, not another blocklist.
Jun 42026
PPC
The average LinkedIn CPC is a number that will lose you money.
Published 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn cost per click (CPC) anywhere from $5.58 to $10.11, and as high as $15.72 in peak quarters, with cost per lead (CPL) from $15 to $350. The spread isn't noise. It's the whole game. Plan to the range that matches your audience, not the headline that matches nobody's.
Jun 22026
MarTech
Automate the plumbing, not the judgment: n8n and Make
The 2026 workflow-automation choice is not really n8n versus Make. It is knowing which marketing tasks belong to a no-code canvas, which need real code, and which should stay in a human's hands.
May 302026
Data & Research
Marketing mix modeling is back. Not to replace attribution, to overrule it.
Privacy killed the click-level view, and marketing mix modeling (MMM) returned to fill the hole. But the brands getting it right don't run MMM instead of attribution. They run three layers, each doing the one job it's actually good at.
May 282026
AI & Data
RAG for marketing: how to ground an LLM in your own brand knowledge
Retrieval-augmented generation is how you stop a large language model (LLM) from inventing your product facts. In 2026 the work is a governed pipeline, not a prompt, and the payoff is brand-safe content and support you can actually audit.
May 262026
E-Commerce
TikTok Shop will outsell Target this year. Ninety-nine percent of sellers won't feel it.
US TikTok Shop is forecast at $23.4 billion in 2026, bigger than Target's or Costco's e-commerce. But the top 1% of sellers drive about 60% of that, and half the headline stats are forecasts and second-hand claims. Read it with both eyes open.
May 222026
AI & Data
Prompt engineering is dying as a job title and growing as a skill you cannot skip
The standalone 'prompt engineer' role is fading, but the competency is now baked into marketing operations. What survived is not clever wording. It is structured prompting, real context, and prompts you actually test.
May 202026
How-To Guides
Let the AI write the script. Don't let it decide what the script does.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that's the whole point.
May 172026
PPC
Most of your retargeting is theater now. Here's what still converts.
Third-party cookies stopped carrying your retargeting a while ago. The value moved to first-party audiences, server-side signals, and the automation layers inside Meta and Google. Here's what to keep funding and what to quietly cut.
May 142026
Digital Marketing
60/40 was an average. You turned it into a commandment.
The most cited number in marketing came from analyzing 996 campaigns and taking the mean. It was never a law, and applying it to a three-year-old brand burning runway is how good research becomes bad strategy. The rule is real. The dogma is the problem.
May 102026
CRO
AI won't triple your conversion rate. It'll move it 10-30%, if you aim it right.
The average e-commerce conversion rate is somewhere between 1.4% and 2.96%, which tells you almost nothing. AI personalization is a real lever, but the honest number is a 10-30% relative lift, not the miracle in the case study. Here's where it actually shows up.
← · From the archive
Past pieces worth revisiting.
PPC
Jun 28, 2026
Advantage+ reports one ROAS. It's the wrong one to trust.
AI & Data
Jun 26, 2026
Your AI strategy is an operating-model problem, not a tool list
E-Commerce
Jun 24, 2026
The referral fee is the smallest line on your Amazon bill
Digital Marketing
Jun 22, 2026
Outdoor screens grew up: programmatic DOOH is now audience media
Quote of the week
"A metric that never changes a leadership decision is just a decoration.
MS
Mikołaj Salecki · from ADAM: four pillars, five levels
04 · Reading now
Popular & editor's picks
Popular this week
- 01
Labeling your AI creative is the law now. That it costs you sales is a rumor.
AI & Data · 7 min - 02
Build a Google Ads agent that can't wreck your account.
How-To Guides · 14 min - 03
Don't panic-bid on your own brand after the spam update.
SEO · 5 min - 04
I shipped an AI iOS app solo in 30 days. Writing the code was the easy part.
AI & Data · 11 min - 05
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you're quietly starving
AI & Data · 9 min - 06
Claude Code can operate your ad accounts. The question is what you let it touch.
AI & Data · 10 min - 07
Model Context Protocol: one plug for every AI marketing tool
AI & Data · 5 min - 08
Marketing's AI reorg is real. The layoffs aren't.
Digital Marketing · 5 min - 09
One agent will not run your marketing. A team of them might.
AI & Data · 6 min - 10
Half your clicks are gone. Your best ones aren't.
SEO · 6 min - 11
Your best-performing channel might just be a passenger
Data & Research · 6 min - 12
Performance Max isn't a black box anymore. You're just running it like one.
PPC · 5 min - 13
Google Analytics 4 measures behavior well. It was never your system of record.
MarTech · 5 min - 14
Two companies own retail media. Everyone else is a test budget.
E-Commerce · 4 min - 15
Do you actually need a CDP in 2026, or is the warehouse enough?
MarTech · 7 min - 16
Advantage+ reports one ROAS. It's the wrong one to trust.
PPC · 5 min - 17
Your AI strategy is an operating-model problem, not a tool list
AI & Data · 5 min - 18
The referral fee is the smallest line on your Amazon bill
E-Commerce · 5 min - 19
Outdoor screens grew up: programmatic DOOH is now audience media
Digital Marketing · 4 min - 20
People watch connected TV. Budgets haven't caught up. That's the trade.
Digital Marketing · 3 min - 21
The blast is dead. Email in 2026 runs on lifecycle and deliverability.
MarTech · 5 min - 22
How to get quoted by the machine that replaced your search traffic
AI & Data · 6 min - 23
Your affiliate program's real cost isn't the commission rate. It's the incrementality.
Digital Marketing · 4 min - 24
You're not measuring a third of your conversions. Here's the fix and its price.
MarTech · 4 min - 25
On June 15, one switch decides whether your conversions still exist.
MarTech · 4 min - 26
The ad-ops agent is real. Full autonomy is a story you're being sold.
AI & Data · 4 min - 27
Half your display dollar never reaches the publisher. Here is where it goes.
PPC · 5 min - 28
The average LinkedIn CPC is a number that will lose you money.
PPC · 5 min - 29
Automate the plumbing, not the judgment: n8n and Make
MarTech · 6 min - 30
Marketing mix modeling is back. Not to replace attribution, to overrule it.
Data & Research · 3 min - 31
RAG for marketing: how to ground an LLM in your own brand knowledge
AI & Data · 6 min - 32
TikTok Shop will outsell Target this year. Ninety-nine percent of sellers won't feel it.
E-Commerce · 4 min - 33
Prompt engineering is dying as a job title and growing as a skill you cannot skip
AI & Data · 6 min - 34
Let the AI write the script. Don't let it decide what the script does.
How-To Guides · 4 min - 35
Most of your retargeting is theater now. Here's what still converts.
PPC · 4 min - 36
60/40 was an average. You turned it into a commandment.
Digital Marketing · 5 min - 37
AI won't triple your conversion rate. It'll move it 10-30%, if you aim it right.
CRO · 4 min
Editor's picks
- 01
Build a Google Ads agent that can't wreck your account.
How-To Guides · 14 min - 02
Don't panic-bid on your own brand after the spam update.
SEO · 5 min - 03
ADAM: four pillars, five levels, and the one you're quietly starving
AI & Data · 9 min - 04
Marketing's AI reorg is real. The layoffs aren't.
Digital Marketing · 5 min - 05
Half your clicks are gone. Your best ones aren't.
SEO · 6 min
05 · Subscribe
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06 · The editor
MS
Mikołaj Salecki
Editor-in-chief
Writes about media, tech, and AI business for people who actually run digital. Former agency lead. Skeptic of frameworks that read better than they perform.
37Articles
9Channels
3hOf reading
2026Since
Also works as a digital consultant, helping companies with the day-to-day of their digital, from planning to shipping, over at salecki.digital.