Beyond the Blue Link: Fire an Agency That Won’t Teach You
How to spot an agency that keeps you dependent, four questions to ask it, and a case study of a state agency taking ownership of its data.
Insights
Beyond the Blue Link
Our newsletter series on search, measurement and AI discovery, every issue in one place.
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Beyond the Blue Link #8: Stop Playing With Data
Why most marketing reports change no decisions, how to connect GA4, CRM and ad data, and a three-test checklist for judging your dashboard.
Why Your Brand Is Now a Knowledge Graph
How to make your brand an entity AI can verify, using persistent @id identifiers, sameAs links and connected schema instead of keywords alone.
Beyond the Blue Link #7: Confessions of a Data Plumber
Why fixing tracking basics, from GTM to duplicate counts and server-side tagging, comes before any dashboard, plus a checklist for judging agencies.
Beyond The Blue Link Issue #6: The Ethics of Ghost Data
How Consent Mode v2 modeling fills GA4 reports with estimated data, the difference between Basic and Advanced modes, and the ethics of modeled results.
Beyond The Blue Link Issue #5: The AI Infiltration
How AI summaries are replacing clicks for government and higher ed sites, and why schema, clean data and tracking of AI referrals matter now.
Beyond the Blue Link #4: The Attribution Myth
Why no attribution model shows the full buyer journey, how last-click bias distorts budgets, and how a simple channel pause test shows real impact.
Beyond the Blue Link #3: Server-Side GTM for Signal Loss
How server-side GTM recovers data lost to Safari ITP and ad blockers, keeps cookies first-party, and strips PII before data reaches vendors.
Newsletter: Your AI is only as honest as your data.
AI personalization is only as trustworthy as the data behind it. A three-step privacy audit: server-side tagging, stale user IDs and first-party data.
Beyond the Blue Link: Agentic Optimization Is the New SEO
How to get cited by AI answer engines: structured data, authority signals, citable content and crawlable pages, with a 10-point readiness checklist.
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