Douglas Karr's Articles on Martech Zone
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Reach: Why Do Marketers Keep Chasing Audiences That Don’t Actually Exist?
Marketers have always gravitated toward the comfort of large reach numbers. On the surface, reach promises scale, influence, and opportunity. But outside of rare cultural moments like the Super Bowl, where audiences actively lean into advertising rather than feel disrupted…
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Azure Video Indexer: Boost Engagement Using AI-Driven Video Intelligence
Advertisers and media teams face a growing challenge: video is now the dominant format for brand storytelling, yet the intelligence behind ad performance is often limited to surface-level metrics. Impressions, watch time, and click-through rates rarely explain why some creatives…
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Mailtrap: The Smarter Way to Test and Ship Emails at Scale
Modern engineering and product teams face relentless pressure to ship features quickly without sacrificing reliability or user trust. Few areas expose that tension more than email. From onboarding flows and password resets to promotional campaigns and transactional alerts, email must…
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The GA4 Setup Everyone Skips: A Complete Guide to Configuring Analytics for Real Business Outcomes
Most articles walk you through installing Google Analytics 4, verifying your data stream, and watching real-time traffic trickle in. Then they stop. For marketers and business owners, that’s where the meaningful work actually begins. GA4 becomes valuable only when it’s…
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The Potential of MarTech Isn’t the Dots—It’s the Connections That Complete the Vision
After twenty-five years in the marketing technology industry, I’ve seen every generation of platforms promise transformation. CRMs, CDPs, marketing automation, enterprise analytics, AI-driven everything—you name it, I’ve implemented it. Each platform arrived with the same pitch: once it’s in place,…
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Is Your Bloated B2B Website Disqualifying Leads?
A B2B website should absolutely demonstrate expertise and authority, but this purpose is secondary to its real job: capturing and qualifying leads. When a site becomes dense, disorganized, or overwhelming, the expertise that was meant to build trust instead creates…
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Beware of the SaaS Contact Pricing Penalty
The modern Software as a Service (SaaS) landscape is built on a deceptively simple revenue model: charge customers based on the number of contacts stored in the system. Whether you’re working with an email service provider, CRM, customer data platform,…
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Putting Yourself Out There: Navigating Criticism and Negativity
Sharing your voice online, whether through a blog, video, podcast, or even social media, opens you up to a world of possibilities: connecting with like-minded individuals, sparking conversations, and contributing to the online community. However, it also exposes you to…
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How Accurate is Digital Geographic Location Data?
Businesses often make strategic decisions based on where they believe their customers are. Whether it’s tailoring campaigns, triggering localized experiences, segmenting audiences, or attributing conversions, location is treated as a solid data point. Yet for both B2B and B2C marketers,…
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When WordPress Redirects Become a Server-Killing Vulnerability
I’ve spent years optimizing WordPress sites, tuning MySQL, standing up server configurations, and chasing down performance bottlenecks. But nothing prepared me for the discovery I made when my own server began melting under relentless CPU load over the last month.…