Author: Awais

forecasting roughly $50 billion in advertising revenue using econometrics, time-series models, and causal inference. When a senior VP asked how confident we should be in a number, I couldn’t hand them a point estimate and shrug. I had to quantify the uncertainty, trace the causal chain, and explain which assumptions would break the forecast if they turned out to be wrong. None of that work involved a Large Language Model (LLM). None of it could have. If you’re a data scientist who’s been feeling left behind by the AI wave, this article is the reframe. The skills the industry is…

Do you think you’re able to answer the question every marketing leader dreads hearing from leadership: “Why isn’t our marketing effort doing more?” How do you even go about answering that? Let’s look at what I mean using a fictional location analytics company we’ll call Acme Area Analytics. The Acme team reviews its reports. Nothing appears broken. Campaigns are running, leads are still coming in, and performance metrics are mostly stable. Yet sales momentum isn’t clearly accelerating, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. Insights are scattered across site analytics, brand monitoring and SEO tools, CRM systems, and paid media dashboards.…

Until a few years ago, schema helped search engines extract basic facts and display visual enhancements like star ratings and sitelinks.  However, in the AI-driven search world, schema plays a different and fundamental role for local SEO, helping Google and other AI systems understand who you are, what you do, where you operate, and how confidently your information can be reused. Improving rankings isn’t as relevant. Now, schema helps reduce confusion for Google and reinforces your business as a stable, trustworthy local entity across traditional search, local packs, AI Overviews, rich results, and external AI platforms. Let’s dig into how…

Robby Stein, VP of Product Google Search, posted that Google is updating AI Mode so that it surfaces more links to creators when users search for recipes. Google’s AI Mode has generated controversy by synthesizing multiple recipes into what some have taken to calling Frankenstein recipes. This new update aims to fix that by making it easier to tap and see a link to the recipe sites. Change To How AI Mode Displays Recipes What Google did was to create an attractive display of recipes that when clicked opens a side panel that displays recipe images and a summary of…

Listening can mean anything from basic mention tracking to deep competitive analysis. That’s why tool selection often gets confusing and messy. Teams compare feature lists instead of starting with the decision they’re trying to make.The best social media intelligence gathering tools aren’t the ones with the most dashboards. They’re the ones that reduce noise and help you answer a specific question: Are we losing trust? Is a theme gaining momentum? Are competitors winning on positioning?Most teams’ needs fall into the following categories.Social listening + sentiment toolsSocial listening tools track mentions, sentiment analysis, share of voice, and topic clusters across major…

Facebook turned 22 this year. And somehow, the platform that everyone keeps writing off still has billions of users and remains the largest social network on the planet. While the “Facebook is dead” narrative hasn’t aged well, the platform has changed in many ways. How people use it, what content performs and where the money flows all look different than they did even two years ago. This roundup of social media statistics cuts through the noise and gives you the numbers that actually matter for planning your Facebook strategy in 2026. Top 3 Facebook stats every marketer should know Facebook…

Los Angeles restaurants have had a brutal year. The 2025 wildfires tore through entire neighborhoods, destroying businesses and displacing tens of thousands. Then, last summer, LA became the first major US city to face large-scale ICE raids, stoking fear among undocumented immigrants and disrupting the restaurant workforce.It’s no surprise that more than 100 restaurants closed last year. “I’m worried about whether we can make all of our tortillas today, because some people are afraid to come in to work,” says Sherry Mandell of Tehachapi Grain Project, a farm north of the city preserving drought-tolerant heritage grains.Into this landscape, Noma—one of…

Google’s Liz Reid, VP and head of Search, drew a clearer line between Google Search and Gemini but said it’s still unclear whether the products will converge, diverge further, or be superseded. The big picture. Reid said Search is an information product focused on helping people connect with the web, while Gemini is centered more on assisting with productivity and creation. She added that the boundaries are fluid, especially as AI products evolve quickly and agentic experiences reshape how people use the internet. What she’s saying. In short, Reid said Search and Gemini share technology but have different product “north…

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the Disavow Tool where someone was worried about how a steady stream of links that he said were accruing to the site but redirecting to another site, saying that they don’t technically link to the site. The thing about that scenario is that there is no link from the spam site to their client’s site. What is likely happening is one of these three methods: The spam site links to an internal tracking URL first It uses JavaScript to rewrite the link It uses a link wrapper In all three scenarios there is…

Important inputs that make predictive analytics workForecasting is not about collecting more data. It is about collecting the right data, labeling it well, and using it to make data-driven decisions with fewer blind spots. Social media predictive analytics leverages various data points from interactions such as likes, shares, and comments to generate actionable insights and forecast future trends.Advancements in data processing and cloud computing are transforming predictive analytics, making it increasingly important for businesses to stay updated with these developments.Machine learning algorithms play a crucial role in processing large data sets, identifying patterns, and improving the accuracy of predictions over…