A Fresh Way to Sell During Launches (Without Burning Out Your List)
From the inbox: Past editions of my monthly newsletter, The Clarity Report. Subscribe here if you’d like to receive this monthly dose of marketing insights, strategy breakdowns, and bite-sized nuggets to help you get at least 1% better at marketing.
Issue 004 TL;DR
→ Google’s Helpful Content Update continues to kill low-quality content
→ Three articles worth reading (including Holiday 2025 marketing trends!)
→ Email marketing tip for launches that helps convert without burning out your list
→ Progress on some BIG things in my world
→ How to track ROAS when Shopify and Meta won’t match
The Marketing Insight
Google’s Helpful Content Update: A quiet content killer?
If your website traffic has dropped without explanation lately, it’s probably because Google’s Helpful Content Update has quietly reshaped the entire search landscape. 🫠
And it’s not done yet. This update prioritizes people-first content over SEO-first content, meaning those keyword-stuffed, thin, or generic posts that used to rank… don’t anymore.
And it’s not just about individual blog posts. Google is evaluating your entire site to determine whether it’s helpful overall. So even a few low-quality or outdated posts could tank your credibility in their eyes.
Here’s what this means for your strategy:
→ Blogs need to be written for humans first—with clear, in-depth answers, not surface-level fluff
→ Topical authority and content clusters matter more than ever
→ Evergreen content needs regular updates to stay “helpful”
→ AI-generated content that’s not edited or personalized is a major red flag
So it might be time to do a little audit and comb through your posts to make some updates!
The Scroll
Quick-hit insights and must-reads to keep your strategy sharp.
Marketing’s smartphone moment has arrived
The senior director of marketing at Klaviyo shares what I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years: Marketing’s “smartphone moment” means moving from siloed, channel-based execution to an intelligent, connected ecosystem that responds dynamically to customer behavior in real time.
Holiday shopping 2025: US consumers hunt for early deals
Holiday 2025 will be defined by early deal-seeking, practical spending, and precision marketing. Success depends on showing value early, personalizing offers, and maintaining agility throughout the extended shopping season.
Loop Marketing: The future of marketing isn’t humans vs. AI — it’s humans with AI
I couldn’t agree more with HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar: AI isn’t replacing marketers—it’s replacing inefficient marketing. The future belongs to those who pair human creativity with AI-powered precision to express, tailor, amplify, and evolve their message.
What’s Working in Marketing Right Now
Clicker-Only Emails to Combat Launch Fatigue
Instead of blasting your full list with every single sales email during a launch, try sending a few targeted emails only to people who clicked a previous promo link. These “clicker-only” emails let you follow up with your warmest leads while giving the rest of your list a little breathing room—which can seriously reduce unsubscribes without sacrificing sales.
My clients have been strategically placing these in between full-list emails and seeing strong conversion rates without burning out their audiences.
From My Corner
A little BTS look into my own business(es) right now:
FINALLY launched my first custom GPT – The Marketing Gap Finder GPT! ($27 intro pricing ends on Oct 31st!)
I’m about 9 days away from officially selling one of my businesses 🥳
Applied for and got our EDGAR account approved by the SEC so we can officially start taking investment from investors for BRDGE Insights and we’re a couple of weeks away from having our MVP! Then it’s testing and full speed ahead!
Inbox SOS
An actual question from one of my CMO clients in October 👇
Q: Why is our Shopify ROAS so different from the ROAS Meta is reporting? It’s making it so hard to make decisions on whether I should scale ads up or down!
A: This is one of the most common (and frustrating) issues I see with tracking ad performance and it all comes down to attribution differences.
Here’s what’s happening:
→ Meta uses view-through and click-through attribution with a 7-day window (in our case). That means it might credit a sale even if the customer didn’t purchase right after clicking.
→ Shopify shows last-click data, which only attributes a sale to the last click before purchase—ignoring whether the ad drove that initial interest.
This means that there’s often a discrepancy. Meta could be over-reporting and Shopify is likely under-reporting. Plus, delayed purchases skew things even more. Meta might attribute a sale to when the ad was clicked, while Shopify records it when the transaction actually happens (which could be days later).
I recommend we start tracking both Shopify and Meta ROAS as well as a blended ROAS model (ad spend/total tracked revenue). This way we can focus on trends over time, not isolated spikes or drops.
Result: “Our new tracking method is giving us a better picture of how these ads are performing.” 👈 A week after implementing the new tracking method.
Need help figuring out what’s actually working in your marketing? That’s my thing. 👉 Book a Strategy Session or Explore Other Ways to Work Together
Don’t forget to subscribe here so you never miss an issue of The Clarity Report!
