Collin Colburn

The battle for customer loyalty and wallet share will intensify. What happens in 2020 will have implications that extend well into the new decade.

I’m excited to share that “The Forrester Wave™: Performance Marketing Agencies, Q3 2019” is live. This is the newest iteration of one of Forrester’s longest-running Wave evaluations: search marketing agencies. We first evaluated search marketing agencies in 2006, led by my colleague Shar VanBoskirk. Since then, we’ve done six Waves from 2006 to 2017. In […]

Google and Facebook have long dominated the digital advertising landscape. Now, Amazon has staked its claim. What could this mean for the ad industry and for marketers?

Let’s be honest: There is a lot of hype around voice assistants (or, as we call them at Forrester, intelligent agents, or IAs). Marketers, agencies, and vendors alike are all excited about this potential voice search future. But have you ever had a voice search experience with an IA like the cartoon below? We wanted […]

I am pleased to announce that Forrester and SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) are partnering for the second year in a row to field a search marketing survey. From last year’s survey, we highlighted five key trends that we saw in the search marketing industry. This survey will look into the challenges, tasks, budgets, and […]

It’s unbelievable how much attention Amazon Advertising now gets. Prior to 2018, very few media outlets or Forrester clients even spoke about Amazon’s ad products. That has all changed, and we are now seeing a surge of questions from clients across the ecosystem — tech vendors, agencies, CPG clients, non-CPG clients — asking about Amazon Advertising. Over […]

Pick a sport. Any sport. You are now tasked with managing that team’s success. Sounds pretty fun, right? Apply this to managing a company’s search engine optimization, and it quickly turns into a cumbersome task. You know the desired outcome and KPIs you’d like to achieve, but numerous obstacles can stand in the way of […]

The holiday season is upon us once again. For many in the retail and consumer goods industries, this is the most crucial time of the year. Bonuses are made or lost during the holiday season as some toys, electronics, and clothing items become the hit of the season and others fall flat. We know customers […]

Who’d have thought that in 2018 we would be publishing a Forrester Wave™ evaluation on SEO platforms? Honestly, even I’m a bit surprised. We published this Wave because we have seen a rising number of inquiries from Forrester’s clients about SEO and how to improve their websites for searchers. A pivotal part to any enterprise […]

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in place since May 25. Marketers in all areas of the world have been abuzz about GDPR’s impact and what they need to be doing about it. Forrester published a podcast on it before the regulation went into effect that you can listen to here. […]

Susan Bidel, Joe Stanhope, Tina Moffett, and I were able to attend Google Marketing Live this week in San Jose. There were many announcements and changes made to Google’s platforms and products. Possibly the most significant — an announcement that was made over a week ago — was the retirement of the AdWords and DoubleClick brands in […]

Yesterday (Thursday, April 26), Amazon released its Q1 2018 financial results. Amazon knocked it out of the park! In fact, Jim Cramer on CNBC called it “the best quarter I’ve ever seen from a company.” I would argue that it’s the best quarter ever because of a little-known business Amazon has: advertising. In fact, Amazon […]

Amazon is seemingly part of every sector of the economy – and that now includes advertising. We fielded many questions from clients about Amazon ads during 2017 and by year’s end, we were curious about how significant its advertising business had become. Since Amazon doesn’t break out its revenues from advertising (although it’s been estimated […]

Fess up: you don’t know how your customers or prospects originally find your brand/products. I posed this simple question on my blog several months ago: How Do Your Customers Search And Find? It should be a simple question to answer, but it isn’t. That’s because customers use many resources to discover and research a brand […]

There are less than two days to take our Search And Digital Marketing Survey – if you have not already taken 15 minutes to answer it, please do. The survey will close by end of business on Friday January 19. Anyone working in marketing – whether at a brand, agency, vendor, consultancy – can take […]

I am pleased to announce that Forrester and SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) are partnering to field a Search And Digital Marketing Survey to understand search marketing and other digital marketing initiatives. Search marketing has become more complex than ever before, and 2017 was no different. This survey will look into the challenges, tasks, […]

I am pleased to announce that the new Forrester Wave: Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2017 report is now live! This report looked at the 12 most significant search marketing agencies in today’s market. This year’s Wave evaluation uncovered a market in which four agencies — Performics, Merkle, 360i, and iProspect — emerged as Leaders. Five […]

Search marketing has gone through lots of changes over the past several years. The most significant of those changes is the way that customers search for information, brands, and products — from primarily using Google on desktop computers to using any source or website on any device. But most marketers have not evolved their search […]

Let’s face it: voice search is incredibly over-hyped today. Any conference, webinar, or article around the future of search marketing will talk about voice search. Many are predicting voice search will account for 50% of all searches by 2020. And kids are even using intelligent agents (IAs) like Google Assistant to help them do their […]