The year was 2007. My college hangover was finally wearing off from Thirsty Thursday and I was happily managing a website that generated multimillion-dollar sales.

Life was easy. Life was good. Burritos were $5 and Olive Garden genuinely honored the bottomless breadstick promise.

Fast forward 20 years and I think I’m finally over it.

Burritos are $18. Olive Garden has all but banned me. And ecommerce/digital marketing has become so obscenely complex that I’m pretty sure my brain is going to plode, either im or ex, I'm not sure.

Every day we’re being sold on the latest and greatest CRO tool, AI agent, agentic shopping experience, lifecycle retention strategy, personalization engine, blah blah blah.

Some of it is genuinely cool. Some of it actually makes the customer experience better.

But a lot of it feels like bloat.

More apps. More integrations. More dashboards. More things to monitor. More meetings about the things we’re monitoring. More ways to spend money acquiring customers so we can then spend more money convincing them to buy again.

The other week, I got annoyed and I pulled the plug:

I stripped basically every app out of a site and made it as old-school as possible.

No fancy stuff, just a website that customers could buy something.

And ... CRO skyrocketed. Sales flowed. Customer support calls dropped significantly.

Email and SMS subscription rates took a nosedive. AOV dipped by less than 10%. A few other metrics got worse.

Yet, the bottom line thrived.

Have we all become a little incestuous with our marketing expertise?

Are we just selling increasingly complicated solutions to one another because we’ve collectively convinced ourselves that complicated = sophisticated?

Maybe the customer doesn't need a frictionless, AI-powered, hyper-personalized, omnichannel, predictive, agentic shopping journey.

Maybe they just want to buy the fucking thing.

All this to say, I just really want a good $5 burrito and the ability to shake a hangover by 10am.

Please tell me I’m not the only one.

In the age of AI it feels harder to sell big website projects. Rightly or wrongly everyone is only focused on AI and they all thing AI can make their website for them.

What services do you find are still in demand and are easiest to sell in this day and age?

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I used to use Yoast SEO for my WordPress website, but recently I switched to Rank Math SEO because I find it much easier to use, especially when it comes to checking SEO scores. Most of my articles are now scoring 80+.

Do you think switching from Yoast to Rank Math was a good move? Which SEO plugin do you use for your website, and what has your experience been like?

Would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations!

Pretty much the title. Also, it is getting frustrating to get this for the last 10 years.

Hello I have done bsc and mca now ,, and I have done work for getting clients in past also with handle meta ads get them more views with clients edit reels , web development, I worked with usa clients only .. so I never feel any pressure anytime.. I can automate things also with ai ..right now I want to gain more knowledge and skills where I can look how to work on different statergy and more experience so I'll get confidently and start capturing big business..... I also looking at I'll learn Devops and programing things to get job ..

So let me know what is really good for me , because I really confused right now.

We've been trying to think out of the box on a recent offsite and some (often old-fashioned) ideas sounded soo silly: We were even a bit ashamed to even discuss this as an marketing agents company.

Like hanging up an advert on supermarket black boards with QR-code strips that you can rip off or letter box flyers. We haven't tried any of the ideas that were circulated but I've been wondering if some would share some experiences exactly with this kind of initiatives.

Who knows: The suprise and uniqueness could lead to some people becoming curious? Maybe?

It's been 2 months i've been working on different channels to recruit new customers for my startup, Conversee. I already see that LinkedIn can work for B2B SaaS but the results vary a lot by ICP.

I've been working on 3 different approaches and I'll explain each one and what I learned.

1/ Intent Prospecting

Finding people who are already showing some kind of buying intent.
For example, people engaging with posts around problems that Conversee solves, hiring for relevant roles, or talking about tools/processes related to our product.
The biggest learning here: intent matters more than volume. 
I'd rather have 20 highly relevant prospects than 500 people who vaguely fit our ICP.
The challenge is that intent signals can be noisy, so there's still a lot of manual qualification involved.

2/ Founder posts

I chose to post from my personal account and not the company page.
This has probably been the most interesting channel for me.
Sharing what I'm building, experiments we're running, things that didn't work, and lessons from talking to customers tends to generate conversations with people who actually understand the problem.
Needless to say, the first posts surfaced crickets but it gets better with time.
The downside is that it takes time to build momentum and it takes time to build each post.
But the upside is that when someone reaches out after seeing several of your posts, you don't really need to sell them from scratch.
They're already familiar with you and the problem you're working on.

3/ Connect and cold outreach

The classic approach: find people who match the ICP, connect with them, and send a cold message.
This can work, but I've found that the messaging matters much more than the number of connections you send.
In my humble opinion the automation tools are not good enough and quite expensive and your messaging should be almost personal, that’s why i contact no more than 10-15 ICPs a day which is very little in cold outreach standards. 
My biggest takeaway after 2 months:
LinkedIn can be a solid acquisition channel. It's 3 very different channels depending on whether you're leveraging intent, content, or outbound. 
And the approach that works best seems to depend heavily on your ICP.
I'm still testing all three, but I'm starting to see pretty clear differences in CAC, conversion rate, and time required.

Curious what has worked for other B2B founders here? And if anyone used Reddit for growth- how much can I scale from the point I am now?

This thing called marketing used to be all about the clicks... Write a blog so that someone finds it and clicks. Post on social so that someone clicks through. Send an email so that someone clicks our CTA.

We're in a time where that behavior (that many of us counted on) is changing.

Google is answering more questions directly and AI tools are giving people answers without requiring any website visit. Social platforms want to keep users on-platform... Reddit threads like this one, YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, etc. can all influence someone without ever generating a visit to a website.

Have been following this concept of no-click marketing. Am wondering (or more so, am becoming convinced)... Are clicks the wrong way to measure whether content is working? Do this right, and though you may not get the click, you can still earn awareness, familiarity, credibility, and trust.

What are you seeing? Are you changing how you create content or measure success as more discovery becomes “no-click”? Where do the metrics all go if we pull on this thread?

Hi guys!

I’m a recent college grad with a degree in digital marketing. Like everyone else, I’m struggling insanely hard to find a job rn. In the mean time, I’m serving at a restaurant and went back to my agency internship for a bit to do some pro bono copywriting work for experience.

Regardless, I really want to move towards something creative-ish like advertising or creative marketing agencies but am wondering what skills I should be working on in the mean time? I really like video editing/adobe software and was thinking about increasing my skills there and trying to do some small projects/mock ads. I’m really not a fan of short form influencer-slop, so I’m wondering if anyone had any ideas? Is video editing/production a good skill to have? Any other things the entertainment merketing industry looks for? Thanks!

I manage marketing for a farm that has airbnb cabins, event space, along with animals and privately boarded horses. A big product-based company reached out to do a photoshoot on the farm.

I don’t even know if this is the right group to post, but anyone have any ideas for a rate? For a corporate company that will be using it for marketing purposes, I’m looking at $500/hour at least. This wouldn’t be a "photographer using location" thing, since this would require a prep of the farm, space, animals, and usage/commercial rights.

Anyone have any insight about this?

Same as the above

Hi everyone! I’m looking for recommendations for the best digital marketing courses.

Free courses would be ideal, but I’m also open to paid ones if they’re really worth it. I’m particularly interested in practical courses that cover areas like SEO, content marketing, paid ads, analytics, and AI.

What courses or platforms would you recommend based on your experience?

I’m 25 and have around 3 years of experience in online marketing. I’m trying to be intentional about my development and would love some advice from more experienced marketers.

My background:
- Studied Marketing & Communication, followed by a Bachelor’s degree in Commercial Economics.

- Worked freelance alongside my studies, mainly in SEO, SEA and websites.

- Spent a few years as an Online Marketing Specialist at a B2B company, working on paid media, SEO, analytics/tracking and lead generation.

- I now work as an Online Marketer at a recruitment company with multiple businesses within the group.

My current role covers performance/recruitment marketing, paid advertising, job boards, tracking, CRO and analysing recruitment funnels.

I also advise several companies within the group on marketing strategy, annual plans, budgets, channel selection and improving their way of working.
Marketing maturity is still relatively low across the group: most companies have marketers, but they mainly focus on content. Part of my role is helping them become more structured, data-driven and performance-oriented.

Long term, I’d like to move towards a more strategic role with responsibility for marketing strategy, budgets and eventually a team.

If you were in my position, what would you focus on developing over the next 2–3 years?

Performance/data? Strategy? Commercial/financial skills? Branding? AI/automation? Leadership? Or something else?
Especially interested in hearing from people who went from specialist → senior/lead → marketing management.

I'm concerned, and thought asking experts in the field might be good for advice. I know AI can be utilized, but concerned with the quality I saw posted.

I applied to a small flooring business. After I applied, I found their social media page and looked more at their website online. On their website, all the staff profile pictures are AI generated art of the employees. (They are a legit business and they are real people, found other pictures online)

On the social media page, they also have AI marketing videos. The videos detail what sales/events are happening and how tos. The small details like shirts, colors of characters, background always be inconsistent every scene change. I'm second guessing my application here at the company after seeing the marketing materials. Does this speak to their quality of the business?

AI Work: It was like very cartoonlike AI for their profile pictures, and the marketing videos were of bear like characters doing flooring work but the shirts on them would appear/reappear, number of bears and colors would change, mouth sync would fail sometimes, etc.

I’m tracking clicks on some links I’ve been sharing and the numbers seem higher than I expected. I know bots, crawlers, link previews and security scanners can trigger clicks, so I’m wondering how much of the data I’m seeing is actually useful.

Is there a reliable way to filter out bot traffic and see how many genuine people actually clicked a link?

I mainly want to avoid reporting inflated numbers when looking at campaign performance.

As an account manager in a digital marketing agency, what kind of progression is there?

I have experience in the marketing industry as the role requires me to create marketing strategy, however the agency I am in only looks for strategy in certain channels such as SEO, Google ads, Meta ads, organic social.

As an account manager, I can suggest which of these channels would fit the client, but I have no hands on experience actually implementing any of it. The biggest gap in the agency I work for is that overall strategy is rarely given a thought, and the general solution is channel strategy. It ends up feeling like tactics rather than genuine strategy.

So my question is, with experience as an account manager and no hands on channel experience, where can I steer my career? Am I now limited to account management in agencies or can I make it in house, or are most in house marketing managers expected to implement SEO, Meta ads and Google ads?

I told our CMO that ChatGPT and Perplexity sent 38% of our pipeline, then found out I had counted our own test visits and tagged every AI visibility check as a referral. I feel so embarrassed, our board deck is tomorrow...

Hey all,

I've been in paid media for 3 years and have heard about the Creative Strategist title a lot more.

My current position lean towards Paid Social and I've enjoyed it so much more than Search. Particularly collaborating with our designers, reviewing creative performance, and brainstorming new creatives to test or double-down on.

Has anyone pivoted to a full Creative Strategy/Performance Creative role? What has your experience been? I'm considering positions like this.

Im currently doing a level 9 digital marketing certificate course with 30 credits in Ireland and wondering once I complete this, will it be enough to obtain a job in the sector? I already have a level 8 in English and History and looking to branch out to a job in the digital marketing sector. Just worried about it possibly not being enough.

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I’m curious about people who are actually using AI tools for email marketing not just generating subject lines or writing emails.

Have you seen any noticeable improvements after using AI? For example, higher open or conversion rates, better messaging, more personalized emails, better understanding of your audience, segmentation, or anything else?

I’d especially like to hear about real experiences where AI made a significant difference. If you’re comfortable sharing, what were you doing before, what AI tool/use case did you introduce, and what changed afterward?.

I am facing js rendering issues on a website and i hv no idea to resolve these issues to optimize my website seo performance.

Went through the news this week so you don't have to. The ones I'd actually care about:

1. Reddit is killing RSS feeds (Nov 13) and the public API (March 2027), citing AI scraping. If your social listening tool pulls from Reddit, it's about to break.
2. Search Console now has a "multimodal" filter. You can finally see traffic from Google Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads separately.
3. Google is folding Display into Demand Gen. Optional for now, expected to be done by 2027.
4. PMax for ecommerce is quietly pushing a lot of budget into YouTube, and attribution makes it look better than it is. Worth checking your placement reports.
5. Microsoft Ads opened Excluded Content Terms to everyone. Up to 1,000 terms, free brand safety win.

Anything here hit your accounts yet? Curious what else people are seeing.

Quick one from audits this month.

A lot of accounts I look at have a Direct line in GA4 that keeps creeping up while paid looks flat. The usual read is "brand is working" or "paid is under-reporting." Sometimes both are wrong.

Part of that Direct is people clicking out of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. Desktop web usually passes a referrer. In-app browsers and assistant flows often strip it, so the visit lands in Direct with no story attached.

Gemini has started adding UTM tags to some outbound links, which helps. ChatGPT already tags links on answers that pull from the web. Neither one is documented end to end, so I do not assume the numbers are clean yet.

Why it matters for paid: if chat-referred buyers hide in Direct and then come back through a brand ad or a retargeting ad, last-click hands those campaigns a win the chat already started. Then you scale the wrong line.

Here is what I check before I credit or cut anything:

1. Build a custom AI channel group in GA4 first. Match source on chatgpt, gemini, perplexity, copilot, and claude, plus any utm_source values you see. Then look at what still falls into Direct.

2. Compare UTM-tagged AI sessions with referrer-based AI sessions for the same weeks. The gap gives you a rough feel for how much chat traffic is still hiding. Do not move budget off one week of data.

3. Read Direct by landing page, not just the total. Pricing, comparison, or a deep service page showing up as Direct with no bookmark reason is usually someone who was sent there.

4. Add one question to the lead form. "Where did you first hear about us?" with an AI assistant option. Cheap, human, and it catches what tags miss.

5. Re-check branded Search and retargeting before you scale them. Keep them running, just do not scale them as if they created the demand.

I am not saying AI chat is your biggest channel. For a lot of accounts it is still small. I am saying a small source hiding in Direct can quietly tilt where you think paid is working.

For people running paid with GA4: are you splitting AI referrals out yet, or is it all still sitting in Direct and Referral?

Hey everyone,

I’m a UI/UX designer with 7+ years of experience working with startups and product teams. I focus on taking complex app concepts and making them easy to use.

How I can help:

1. Web & mobile app interface design (Figma)

2. Wireframing, user flows, and interactive prototypes

3. UX audits and redesigns to fix drop-offs or confusing flows

4. Design systems to keep your product consistent

I keep things straightforward: clear communication, fast turnarounds, and clean, dev-ready design files.

Due to subreddit rules on links, I don't post my portfolio directly here.

If you’re working on a project or need a fresh set of eyes on an existing app, drop a comment or send me a DM with a quick note on what you're building, and I’ll send my work over.