Let’s go through the latest in digital marketing news, resources, tools, and jobs…

The Power of Pinterest as a Search Engine
Julia Bocchese 
Julia shares why Pinterest works as a search engine, how SEO skills apply to Pinterest strategy, and how businesses can drive long-term traffic, leads, and brand visibility.

Quantifying YouTube Keyword Opportunities — Whiteboard Friday
Phil Nottingham
How do you assess a YouTube keyword opportunity? Phil shares three unique metrics for evaluating search demand, competition, and value.

The mission mindset: How human conversations build buyer confidence [Study]
Amanda Simpson 
An analysis by Reddit and WPP Media explores how human conversation shapes buyer confidence, turning consideration into action in today’s skeptical consumer landscape. “77% of redditors say they visit two or more communities to validate a purchase decision”.

LinkedIn adds more digital skills visibility
Andrew Hutchinson
LinkedIn announced an expansion of its profile skills display to include a connected apps element, enabling more members to showcase their technical skills. The updated listings feature is backed by various apps and providers in order to support user claims.

What Are Good Google Ads Benchmarks In 2026? [STUDY]
Brooke Osmundson
This report analyzes performance data from thousands of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns across 20 industries between April 2025 and March 2026. “The average conversion rate across all industries for Google and Microsoft Ads in the last twelve months was 8.18%”.

Meta expands live shopping ads and virtual card checkout to drive more purchases
Anu Adegbola
Meta is expanding Live Video Ads globally on Facebook and bringing them to Instagram, allowing businesses to promote livestreams to larger audiences and drive sales directly from live shopping experiences.

Why ACOS-Based Bidding Breaks at Scale (And What Smart Advertisers Do Instead)
Disha
ACOS tells you what happened, not why. Disha goes through how to build smarter Amazon ads strategies using conditional logic that goes beyond a single number.

Automatic Customer List Labels Coming to Google Ads
Hana Kobzová
Starting August 2026, Google Ads will automatically assign customer types to conversion-based customer lists. To maintain control, advertisers should classify their lists in Audience Manager before the deadline.

How to build a strong brand voice in 2026
Christina Newberry
Christina explains what brand voice is, shares real examples, and provides a step-by-step framework to build a consistent, memorable presence.

Why Publishing More Content Is Making Your SEO Worse
Carolyn Shelby
Publishing more content used to boost SEO, but AI-driven search now rewards semantic clarity over volume. Carolyn goes through why content dilution hurts rankings and how to build authority density instead.

Retrieval vs. citation: How AI search changes content strategy
Adam Riemer
From product pages to third-party publications, Adam shares how to create content that helps AI systems understand your brand and who it serves.

Your Website, Your Rules: Why Owned Content Still Wins
Ann Gynn
AI and algorithms, not your team or audience, decide what content a lot of people see. But experts presenting at Content Marketing World say that’s exactly why you can’t abandon your owned content.

Sponsor

Introducing Finchling Trending PR Campaigns: a free resource to discover the PR campaigns getting the most media coverage right now! Updated daily, ranked by coverage, and browsable by industry 👇 With it, you can:

🔎 Discover the latest trending PR campaigns across different industries.
📈 Understand why each campaign is working, with a short description, why it gained traction, and the key lesson to learn from it.
📰 See how coverage has evolved over time, including the publications that have featured each campaign since launch.

The goal is simple: make it easier for digital PR, comms, and marketing teams to spot what’s resonating in the media right now, and learn from the campaigns that are actually earning coverage.

The secret to influencer relationship management success
Emily Jenkins
Emily shares influencer relationship management strategies to retain top creators, streamline collaboration, and switch one-off posts for long-term performance.

How The Creator Economy Actually Works in 2026
Nii A. Ahene
That attention moved from television to the feed is old news. What grew up to replace broadcast is a full ecosystem, with its own stakeholders, economic model, and incentives, and most of it is poorly understood even by the people inside it. Nii shares a snapshot of how that system works in 2026.

TikTok Shop’s European Expansion Signals the Next Phase of Creator-Led Commerce
Kalin Anastasov
TikTok Shop expands into Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Poland, signaling the next phase of creator-led commerce in Europe. The takeaway: TikTok Shop is no longer just another social platform experimenting with shopping features. It is becoming a commerce ecosystem built around creators, content, and discovery.

Influencer marketing mistakes B2B brands keep making in 2026
Ariana Sorensen
The follower-count traps, brief mistakes, and contract gaps cost B2B brands' pipeline. Ariana shares ten influencer marketing mistakes to fix before your next campaign.

The 3 Layer AI Search Diagnostic & Measurement Matrix: To Help Assess & Measure Presence, Readiness, Business Impact [Workbook]​
Aleyda Solis
I created this workbook to help SEOs connect AI search visibility issues with what to diagnose and measure next. It maps Presence, Readiness, and Business Impact metrics so AI search reporting becomes more actionable, and less about isolated screenshots or rankings.

​Do AI Assistants Actually Render Your JavaScript when Grounding? We Put It to the Test​
Andre Alpar
Andre tested 12 AI assistants and found that all major US assistants read raw HTML rather than rendered JavaScript when grounding. It's critical to server-side render or pre-render critical content, put key facts high in the HTML, and validate with logs, not chatbot claims.​

Why Calling Yourself the Best Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI Search​
Lily Ray
Lily’s research shows that self-promotional “best [category]” listicles can be cited by Google AI surfaces while the brand itself is omitted from recommendations. Don’t only track citations; assess whether the brand is represented, framed positively, and actually recommended.​​​