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.
Marketing Tools Spotlight
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.
September Focus: Martech
September focuses on martech, the discipline of choosing tools that earn their place in your stack. AI has lowered the barrier to building software, and thousands of tools are chasing your budget.
More options should make marketing easier. Instead, they often create sprawl: disconnected platforms, duplicate data, and manual workflows. A tool that cannot talk to the rest of your stack is a liability wearing a feature list.
Integration is the filter. Before adopting anything new, ask whether it strengthens your system or adds another silo. The best stack isn’t the one with the most tools. It’s the one that works together.
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 center on AI agents moving from product discovery into checkout, with Shopify opening every store to Meta's Muse agent while Amazon blocked it, Google switching on native AI checkout for eligible Shopify merchants, and Meta unveiling its Muse Charm handheld. Costs are shifting too, as OpenAI and Anthropic say they cut model costs by 50% and 40%, and Google previewed a unified AI Max report, making automation cheaper to run but still hard to audit. Measurement housekeeping rounds out the week, with Google's fourth spam update of 2026 starting a two-week rollout, Search Console splitting out image-based searches, Google Analytics adding hostname allowlists, and Meta appearing to lift its 250-ad Page limit without notice, all of which reward marketers who keep first-party data clean and annotated.
Google Starts September 2026 Spam Update With Two-Week Rollout Window
Marketing and SEO • September 24, 2026
Google began rolling out the September 2026 spam update on September 24 at 9:15 a.m. PDT, applying it globally and to all languages, with a rollout window of up to two weeks. It is the fourth spam update of 2026, following March, June, and August, and Google has not said what it targets. Each of the earlier three finished in no more than 2 days and 16 hours, so the longer window means the first few days of data may not show the full effect. Annotate the rollout dates, compare any ranking or traffic changes in Search Console against them, and hold off on site-wide changes until the Search Status Dashboard shows the rollout is complete. Google says affected sites should review its spam policies.
Search Console Adds Multimodal Filter for Image-Based Searches
Marketing and SEO • September 24, 2026
Google is rolling out a Multimodal option under the Web search type in the Search Console performance report, separating image-initiated searches from text-based web traffic. The data covers searches made with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click image search feature. Query data is not available for this traffic because multimodal searches mostly use images rather than text, so you can see which pages receive clicks but not what image triggered them. Image-heavy sites, including eCommerce stores and affiliate publishers, now get a first baseline for visual search traffic. Some properties may not see the filter yet, so check the Search type menu over the coming days.
Meta Unveils Muse Charm Handheld and Adds Retail Partners for Its AI Agent
Technology and AI • September 23, 2026
At Meta Connect, Meta introduced Muse Charm, a keychain-sized AI device for talking to the Muse assistant and showing it what is happening around you, with availability by December. Meta also announced live video chat, real-time voice conversations with custom voices, and an email address for each person's agent, and said Muse is coming to its AI glasses in the coming months. New retail partners include Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, and Wayfair, which contrasts with Amazon's decision to block the agent. Axios notes investor concern that agents could weaken stickiness between brands and customers and says Muse has prompted a stock sell-off. For marketers, agent-mediated discovery is moving from software into dedicated hardware, which raises the value of clean product data, pricing, and agent-compatible checkout.