Medium has long been considered a leader in community-driven content management systems (CMS). Bloggers and publishers first flocked to the platform for its community-focus and minimal-design approach and now businesses have followed suit with the hope that they can leverage the blogger community to grow their brand exposure. Unfortunately, using this platform to fulfill your blogging needs has certain drawbacks in the form of SEO and terms of service that don't make the platform as appealing as...

In the first installment of this two part series, we created our first Google Tag Manager event listener [http://www.connordphillips.com/2016/04/16/google-tag-manager-event-listeners-how-to-implement-part-one/] to track all outbound link clicks. In part two, we are going to test this setup and make sure that our trigger logic fires tags with the correct outbound link information. Preview and Debug mode To kick off this process, enter Preview and Debug mode. Preview and Debug mode is Google Tag...

One of the most important, yet commonly overlooked portions of the Google Tag Manager (GTM) creation process is debugging. It is the final step before your hard work tracking data points pays off and the last thing that anyone wants to invest time in. Commonly referred to as quality assurance or QA’ing, this step in the tagging process requires repetitive mundane tasks to ensure that every possible user experience scenario is tested for and data consistency is validated. Hate it or not, the qual...

A powerful feature of Google Tag Manager is the platforms ability to create event listeners that collects data on user interactions without the need for code. Never has something sounded so sweet to developers than the idea that data tracking is possible without ever touching the codebase. In the following two part guide, I will dive into detail about creating and testing event listeners for the purpose of reducing development hours and code bloat. Brief Note on Changes in Google Tag Manager (...

Auction-based keyword advertising, or paid search marketing, is a type of advertising that operates in a similar manner to a traditional auction, with users bidding for a top position, but also contains a technical component that makes the process more than a factor of investment. Users make a maximum bid for a specific keyword or keyword phrase and the winner is the one who has the best balance between their willingness to pay for the top position and supplying content that is deemed relevant b...

When it comes to growing organic traffic, many people tend to run before they can walk. They read growth stories about silver bullets that returned 10x growth overnight and try mimic those success stories. What those stories don't tell you is that there was a lot of trial and error before they had any success. It is a long and arduous journey that starts with on-page SEO and then working through a content development loop multiple times before any gains in organic traffic occur. In following gui...

Developing content with the purpose of growing an organic audience is something that is a lot more complex than simply publishing 1,000 words on a specific subject matter. There are no guarantees that you will be awarded a first page or top five ranking with an approach like this and the amount of time that is wasted on writing about something that has a potentially short shelf life is an unfavorable outcome for anyone. In order to avoid this type of scenario, in-depth SEO research should be con...

The process of coding email newsletters sucks! You are forced to use web 1.0 code and have to abide by various platform and device standards. It isn’t a pretty process and definitely a time consuming task, but thankfully, there are groups of programmers who put in a lot of time and effort to create email frameworks that take all of the pain points out of coding an email and make it simple for anyone to take an email from to design to product. For their dedication to helping make everyone's live...

A platform that is frequently used by every marketer is Microsoft Excel. This platform is helpful to marketers in a variety of ways with the core purpose of pairing up and analyzing data points from various analytics and marketing platforms. It is an extremely powerful tool and tends to be the most utilized platform for daily data analysis work. With the amount of analysis that is done within Excel, you would think that the majority of marketers would learn keyboard shortcuts and tricks to reduc...

Over the span of just a few years the digital marketing landscape has evolved into a data-crazed world filled with programmatic marketing products that are aimed at mining data and making bid adjustments based on real time cost-benefit analysis. With the advent of this type of software, businesses have flocked to purchase these solutions in order to reap the exponential lifts that the platforms promise. In some instances these decisions turn out to be a slam dunk, while in other instances the re...