Digital Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Software Reviews
With 25+ years in digital marketing, Marketing With Dave focuses on discovering, measuring, and optimizing every aspect of it.
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My current top picks from everything I’ve been reviewing and testing.🔥 On My Radar → and view all reviews and comparisons →
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Your LinkedIn Profile Mastered
Get found. Build trust. Create opportunities.
Available in Kindle (ebook), paperback, and audiobook formats.
Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile in about an hour with 17 practical improvements based on a real job search after 25+ years in digital marketing.
Step-by-step guidance to help you make the right changes the first time and build a profile that attracts recruiters, strengthens your personal brand, and creates new opportunities.
August Focus: Operations
August focuses on marketing operations, the systems, processes, and automation that ensure great marketing actually reaches the finish line.
Strategy defines the direction, but marketing operations create the consistency that turns plans into measurable results. From CRM and email automation to analytics, reporting, and campaign workflows, strong marketing operations eliminate friction, improve efficiency, and keep teams aligned.
The objective is not simply to generate more leads or send more emails. It is to build repeatable processes that create better customer experiences, improve pipeline performance, and turn marketing into a measurable driver of business growth.
If you missed past content or want to revisit a topic, check out the Content Calendar. Explore the insights below, and please share your thoughts.
This Month
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Week in Review
This week's stories show AI reshaping both how customers find brands and how much they trust what they see once they arrive. Google confirmed it's testing AI Overviews that load fully by default without a "Show more" click, pushing organic results further down the page, while ChatGPT Ads added automated "Maximize results" bidding, platform-level targeting, and view-through conversion reporting as it expands into Brazil and Mexico. Trust is having a rougher week: a SponsorCX survey found 78 percent of Americans feel marketing has grown more performative than genuine, even as Nielsen Norman Group research found AI-generated stock imagery carries no measurable trust penalty when undisclosed. Compliance is starting to bite too. Anthropic's Claude now embeds invisible watermarks in generated text under EU AI Act rules, with no public detector yet available to check what a third-party tool might flag. On the infrastructure side, Google is unifying Google tag and Tag Manager into one no-code measurement system to lower the technical bar for conversion tracking. The common thread: AI is making discovery more automated and authenticity more contested at the same time, leaving marketers to build trust manually while the platforms race ahead.
The Authenticity Backfire: How Americans Feel About Marketing
B2B Marketing Strategy • August 30, 2026 (does not meet material news criteria – please review)
A SponsorCX survey of 1,000 U.S. adults found 78% feel modern marketing is more performative than genuine, and 67% say brands overuse the word "authentic" without backing it up. The research, released as an infographic, also covers the enduring pull of word-of-mouth and which brand partnerships actually build audience trust. For marketers leaning on authenticity messaging or creator partnerships, the data suggests overused authenticity claims may now backfire, making concrete proof points more valuable than the word itself.
Google Making AI Overviews Into AI Mode Responses
SEO & AI Search • August 28, 2026
Google confirmed it is testing a version of AI Overviews that loads the full AI response and an open "Ask anything" box by default, without requiring a "Show more" click, which pushes traditional organic results further down the page for affected queries. Google says the dynamic expansion only triggers where its systems judge it "most useful" and cancels if a user has already begun scrolling past the AI Overview. The behavior was first spotted publicly on August 27 and confirmed by Google the next day. This is a further step toward making AI Mode-style answers the default search experience, adding pressure on organic visibility and click-through rates for affected queries.
AI Update, August 28, 2026: AI News and Views From the Past Week
AI in Marketing (Roundup) • August 28, 2026 (does not meet material news criteria – please review)
MarketingProfs' weekly AI roundup compiles over 20 developments from August 21-28, including Brainlabs data showing AI-referral traffic converts at roughly 1.5x the organic-search rate despite a 10.5% organic traffic decline across 54 advertisers, a study linking OpenAI publisher licensing deals to a 48% jump in ChatGPT citation rates, and Google's John Mueller stating that solid SEO fundamentals are sufficient for AI search visibility without separate GEO tactics. It also covers The Trade Desk's new agentic Kokai Zuma platform, X's launch of an Ads MCP server for third-party AI tools, and IAB's early work on an AI-attribution measurement framework. This is a broad recap rather than one discrete story, included here as an index to several developments worth monitoring.