These are some of my views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Over the years – as you can see – I’ve added to this blog only sporadically. I decided to leave all the old posts ‘live’ as I think they can still be useful in helping folk understand digital marketing.

Oh ... and I write all of these entries myself. There's no AI used on this blog.

Enjoy 😊

Monday, May 11, 2026

Ad spend well spent?

Five million impressions for an ad that seems to be for a podcast 🤔 

Whatever it's about, why did the advertiser/X think I would be interested?



Sunday, May 10, 2026

Ad spend well spent?

 I have no idea what either of these are advertising ... 



Friday, May 8, 2026

ai shopping assistants ...

 ... these numbers seem a little generous to me, I'd like to see the research methodology 🤔



Tuesday, May 5, 2026

what's the point if ...

... 'Grok can make mistakes', [you should] 'verify its outputs'.

In case you're not a follower of football: it was 2-0 at half time [surely every report on this match anywhere on the web would have reported this correctly], particularly as the third goal [on the hour mark] came in the second half. If an LLM can get something as simple and obvious as this wrong, why would to trust it for anything important?



one thing you don't change is your team [3]

 And these are local rivals to my team ... 


Sunday, May 3, 2026

Thursday, April 30, 2026

A follow up to the last post ...

 ... which featured a promotion for 'Lessons from the Web Performance Summit 2026' which featured 'More than 100 corporate digital communications professionals from many of Europe’s biggest companies'. 

Well, I'm sure those folk know there own organizations, but how much can they offer marketers that run digital communications for organization's that are smaller than Europe’s biggest companies?

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

No tracking = not much room to read

Previously I've commended Bowen Craggs on the way their website handles cookies - but it seems the space for users to read the content with the cookie message in place has shrunk a bit [the box I've highlighted in yellow]. 

But things get even worse on a phone's screen - it's the bit at the bottom [again, in yellow. 




Wednesday, April 22, 2026

open ... or closed for business?

This morning I was going to visit an antiques/collectibles shop about an hour away from my home. Because most antiques stores do not keep 9-5, 7 days a week opening hours, before setting off I thought I would check on their website if it was open today. There was no website, only social media pages - none of which included the basic details of the business [just a lot of nice pictures]. I eventually found a phone number and gave it a ring. Landline number, no answer. Is it closed today? Will it be open later? Are they on holiday this week? One thing is certain: they won't be taking any money off me today. Or perhaps ever.

Moral? Well, it could be; read my book - but I'll go with: have a basic web page with 'about', 'address', 'contact details' and 'opening hours' [you can get these for next-to-nothing when you buy a domain name], or have these details on the home/pinned page of any social media presence. Or go old school and have an answerphone message saying 'sorry, we're closed at the moment, our opening hours are ...'. 

Customers can be hard to find, don't make it hard for them to find you.

Update: several hours after originally publishing this post - and because I wanted to follow up this post, not because I was desperate to visit them - I had another go at finding some opening hours ... and after a bit of digging, found them. Ho hum. 

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

a snapshot in time?

After attending a Premier League football match, I was invited to complete a questionnaire about my match-day experience. All fairly standard stuff, but there was one key question missing: what time I arrived at the stadium. I got there an hour before kick off - effectively, one of the first to experience the various elements of the event so, no queues. I'm pretty sure folks arriving after me would have had a very different experience.