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What's Actually New in Marketing Measurement
I've written about broken attribution before. More than once. If you've been following along, you know my position: last-click measurement was always a simplification, AI amplifies whatever data infrastructure you feed it, and most mid-market businesses are optimizing against a distorted picture of reality before a single bid is placed. I'm not going to repeat all of that here. What I'm going to do is tell you what's actually changed recently, because Google just published a

Heidi Schwende
Mar 256 min read


Voice Search Isn't a Branding Play. It's a Demand Capture Play.
Your Google Ads search term report is trying to tell you something. The queries are getting longer. More specific. More conversational. Less like someone typing at a desk and more like someone talking to a device while they're doing something else entirely. That's not a glitch. That's voice search, and it's reshaping how buyers find businesses like yours. Google's own data shows 27% of the global online population now uses voice search on mobile. There are more than 8.4 billi

Heidi Schwende
Mar 179 min read


Google Just Quantified the Agency Advantage
Every platform claims credit for the same sale. Your paid search dashboard shows a conversion. Your display report shows a conversion. Your social team is celebrating a conversion. Your programmatic vendor sent a recap email with impressive numbers. Meanwhile, your CFO is looking at actual revenue and asking why none of it adds up. This is the attribution paradox, and it's not a minor reporting annoyance. It's a structural problem that quietly eats marketing budgets, defunds

Heidi Schwende
Mar 1611 min read


You're optimizing a funnel buyers no longer use
There are now 15,384 martech solutions in the market. Up 9% year over year. That number should give every CMO pause, not because there are too many tools to evaluate, but because the entire premise those tools were built on is crumbling. Your martech stack was designed around a simple assumption: that buyers would discover your brand, visit your website, click through your content, and move through a funnel you controlled. Every platform you bought, including your CRM, your M

Heidi Schwende
Mar 159 min read


Most Companies Misunderstand the Difference Between Chatbots and Conversational AI
Why the distinction matters more than most organizations realize For most customers, the experience is familiar. You open a company’s website looking for help. A chat window appears in the corner of the screen. You type a question and wait for a response. Sometimes the answer comes quickly and solves the problem. Other times the conversation goes in circles, leaving you frustrated and searching for a way to reach a real person. What most people don’t realize is that these exp

Heidi Schwende
Mar 116 min read


AI Citations Are Bottom-of-Funnel Search
When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends your business, it's not the same as ranking on page one of Google. It's closer to a trusted advisor handing someone your business card and saying, "These are the people you need to call." That distinction matters for how you measure, budget, and staff around AI search visibility. It also changes where the dollars should come from. This isn't a brand awareness line item. It's demand capture. Why AI Search Signals Higher Intent Traditional

Heidi Schwende
Feb 411 min read


McKinsey Interviewed 50 Marketing Leaders. None Could Prove ROI.
A relatively new McKinsey study on marketing technology landed on my desk last week, and I need to talk about it. Not because it says anything I didn't already know. But because it finally puts hard numbers behind what I've been telling clients about their marketing for years. The finding that stopped me cold: Researchers interviewed more than 50 senior marketing leaders at Fortune 500 companies. Not one could clearly articulate the ROI of their martech investments. Companies

Heidi Schwende
Jan 265 min read


McKinsey Says Your Customers Changed Years Ago
An Analysis of the Data McKinsey just dropped their State of the Consumer 2025 report, and if you're in marketing, you need to pay attention. Not because it's telling us anything shocking—but because it's confirming what many of us have been watching unfold in real-time with actual data that C-suite executives might actually believe. The headline? The pandemic didn't just temporarily disrupt consumer behavior. It permanently rewired it. And if you're still waiting for things

Heidi Schwende
Dec 15, 202510 min read


AI Can't Personalize Chaos: Why The Data Governance Problem Is Killing Marketing ROI
Let me start with something most consultants won't tell you: 65% of contact information from online forms is wrong. And 57% of marketers are getting bad outcomes because they're misreading their data. So when someone promises you AI-powered personalization that actually works, here's what they're not saying: AI can't personalize chaos. It just makes the chaos faster and more expensive. This Is The Same Problem I Keep Seeing A while back, I told you AI won't fix your broken ma

Heidi Schwende
Nov 18, 20254 min read


Leveraging PPC Marketing Agencies to Drive Conversions
Leveraging PPC Marketing Agencies to Drive Conversions Leveraging PPC Marketing Agencies to Drive High Converting Traffic Among the...

Heidi Schwende
Aug 18, 20233 min read


Essential eCommerce Website Features: How to Optimize Your Site
When it comes to eCommerce, there are a few essential features that your website must have in order to optimize your site and increase...

Heidi Schwende
Aug 8, 20222 min read


Get Started with Enhanced Conversions on Google
Are you looking to set up Google's Enhanced Conversions? This feature can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement and unlock...

Heidi Schwende
May 18, 20223 min read


Are you measuring what matters most? An analytics model for success
Measurement should be your top strategic priority According to Google expert Ashley Cohen, Analytical Lead for Google, if you don’t take...

Heidi Schwende
Jan 26, 20213 min read
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