Category: Writing

Are you immigrating to Canada?
If so, then you’re welcome here! I’m happy to have you as my neighbour. Here are some tips from me for people who are coming over to live in Toronto. This is a basic list that I’ll keep updating in the future.

Food

You might live near “convenience stores” that have some food, but very few people use them for regular groceries. The food products at Convenience Stores tend to be unhealthy and stale. You’ll want to look for a large grocery store (No Frills, Metro, Loblaws etc.). If you want groceries delivered directly to your home, Metro.ca is the best in my family’s experience. Depending on what part of town you’re in, the best supermarkets are the independent Asian/Southeast Asian supermarkets (Galleria, C&C, Sunnymart).  

Email bot clicks are a problem for all marketing automation platforms. People complain on the /Pardot subreddit, the Marketo forums. Eloqua only recently (2022) started dealing with “Auto Opens”… . These clicks come from corporate email security systems (like Microsoft Defender for Office). Security systems follow every link in an email and check whether the destination page has malicious code running on it.

Many marketing automation systems let you define your own set of “bot” IP ranges so they can filter them out. You will get more accurate clickthrough reporting by adding more bot IP/domain ranges to your system.

Below is a list of known email click bots. It includes the default list from Pardot, and also extra ranges from my own personal investigations into this. Feel free to use these ranges & domains in your system. Do you have your own IP ranges? Know of extra ranges that are not here? If so, please write me a note in the comments!

The list is below:

This video combines 6 interesting factoids about Canada’s email marketing laws. I posted these videos to Linkedin in July 2022 to promote this long writeup on Canada’s CASL laws (what it takes to comply, how much time compliance activities take and the consequences of violating the law).
Text transcripts are below.

What unusual replies did your email campaigns get? Share your story in the comments! 👇

Note: this is a copy of an Article I posted on Linkedin in November 2021

Are your LinkedIn Ads page load conversions not showing?

This is a roundup of conversion tracking issues you might run into. Including a couple undocumented problems I ran into recently (as of Nov. 2021). This document should give you fresh ideas for what to check when your campaign manager conversions are not tracking. Especially if everything you’ve tried so far hasn’t worked…

How to Test Pageload Conversions in LinkedIn Ads

To test that your conversion tracking is working you will need to:

On October 27th, 2021, I spoke at the ParDreamin’ conference (archive link) about quality control and testing in Pardot. Here is the video recording:

Below is a copy of the presentation deck:

If any of these tips make a difference in your projects, please let me know by emailing me at “jacob” @ the domain of this website. I’d love to hear your story!

Tunes with some things in common. Sometimes they’re obvious commonalities. And sometimes it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me 🙂

If you set up a Google Tag Manager blocking Trigger / Exception Trigger, and it doesn’t block your tag from firing, then the reason could be Tag Sequencing.

Imagine a scenario where:

In Google Analytics, the utm_source URL parameter is mandatory when you’re trying to capture campaign parameters.

Even if your URL has utm_campaign and utm_medium on it, GA will not capture the Campaign and Medium data if you are missing utm_source.

If your Google Analytics tagged campaigns are not capturing Campaign / utm_campaign data, then it might be because of this missing utm_srouce parameter. Even great resources like the “troubleshooting missing acquisition sources” post from Bounteous leave out this reason.

The diagram below shows how GA handles campaign & traffic source reporting when certain URL parameters are missing. This will clarify how it misclassifies campaign links that are missing utm_source: