Amazon Ads. It’s an expansive ecosystem of tools, insights and performance levers, many of which remain underutilized or unknown by brands and marketers. To ensure your brand gets the most from Amazon, let’s highlight the year’s key features, tools and integrations you might have missed — some old, some new and all effective at driving awareness and conversions.
Non-endemic advertising allows brands that don’t sell products on a retail site to advertise there, tapping into the platform’s existing audience and data. Retailers like Amazon, Home Depot, Walgreens and Macy’s have years of shopper data and behavioral insights, offering an unparalleled picture of consumer preferences, habits and life events. As third-party cookies disappear and data privacy tightens, the value of this first-party data from retail media networks (RMNs) has surged.
RMNs present a powerful opportunity for non-retail brands (like insurance companies, streaming services or education providers) to reach their ideal audiences in unexpected but highly relevant environments. For example, shoppers won’t browse Amazon for a new financial advisor. Still, as they shop for other products, they reveal the interests and demographics that may fit the ideal customer profile for a financial advisor lead generation standpoint.
The strength of non-endemic advertising lies in its targeting capabilities. RMNs segment audiences by traits like location, hobbies, life stage or recent purchases, allowing brands to deliver tailored messaging that drives users to their websites and landing pages.
This strategy doesn’t replace search — it complements it by creating demand ahead of need. These capabilities are only made stronger by the measurement tools in their clean-room solution, Amazon Marketing Cloud, which leads the pack in sophistication and measurement.
It’s the most impactful and exciting thing to happen to a lead generation business since LinkedIn. The ability to find, target and segment retailer first-party data at scale — and at a deeper level of demographics and behavior — is a ridiculously powerful tool.
Despite the growing excitement around retail media, Amazon’s recent launch of its Retail Ad Service made a relatively quiet entrance. Marketed as a centralized platform to manage campaigns across multiple retailers for identical SKUs, the promise was clear: simplify retail ad execution with the backing of Amazon’s mature tech infrastructure.
However, the initial rollout lacked participation from major retailers, instead leaning heavily on niche and long-tail partners like iHerb and SayWee. That limits both scale and value — especially as the offering only supports digital placements, with no in-store or storefront integration.
Other players like Instacart, with its Carrot Ads product, are already executing similar models across smaller grocery chains like Thrive Market and The Fresh Market — and expanding licensing of their tech, recently (and most notably) to Uber Ads. Microsoft previously introduced a comparable solution with its Advertising Network for Retailers but sunset the program after struggling to build out the initial list of retailers participating.
Amazon’s entry isn’t yet a substantial threat to Criteo, Koddi and Epsilon. While unifying campaign management across retail channels is appealing, Amazon’s version currently falls short on critical factors like retailer scale and omnichannel support. Unless broader retail partnerships and execution improvements follow, its impact will likely remain limited.
Dig deeper: Amazon’s new Retail Ad Service brings RMN to the masses
Amazon Attribution is a free measurement and analytics tool (also available via API) that allows brands to track how non-Amazon marketing channels contribute to activity on Amazon. Brands can link product detail page (PDP) views, add-to-carts and purchases to the external sources that drove those actions — like text search ads (via Google and Microsoft), organic and paid social media posts (through Meta, Instagram and TikTok), email and some display ads.
It’s definitely not new — the beta was a couple years long, one of the longest I’ve ever participated in — but it’s still lesser known.
It generates unique tracking URLs (called attribution tags) through the Amazon Attribution platform, which are added to a brand’s external media or campaigns. When shoppers click on those tagged links and visit Amazon, their behavior is tracked, and attribution is assigned to the originating channel.
However, it is only available to vendors, first-party Amazon sellers and third-party sellers enrolled in Amazon’s Brand Registry.
In its current format, it’s not without limitations. For example, suppose a shopper ultimately changes variants or buys a product that didn’t originate their journey (meaning there’s no product halo or brand halo reporting). In that case, you may lose track of that search’s original product — but not the referring source, Amazon.
I’ve worked with too many brands that spend big bucks to send traffic from Meta to Amazon PDPs, only to receive vague, unhelpful metrics that tell them nothing. If you’re investing in this arena, I’d recommend checking out a third-party partner (like ampd) to help track your customers’ paths.
Speaking of Meta and social commerce, Prime Day is nearly here — but with a twist! This year’s event will be four days instead of the usual two.
What does that have to do with social commerce? A lot. We’re already seeing a rise in influencer-produced content on Meta and TikTok, commissioned by Amazon sellers and brands (often via the Amazon Influencer Program) to feature a product or exclusive deal linking to their Amazon PDP, deal or brand store.
This isn’t a surprise. Given its perceived authenticity (especially by Gen Z), U.S. influencer marketing spending is expected to surpass $10 billion this year. And with Amazon advertising exceeding $54 billion last year alone, it’s no shock that influencer marketing is taking a bigger piece of the pie and making that alamode with Amazon Prime Day.
Will TikTok Shop do another “Deals for You Days” to compete ahead of Prime Day like they did last year? Probably, assuming no federal government interventions.
Not to be outdone, other brands will likely follow the same trend to promote their competing sales events during Prime Day on other retailer channels — so expect an inflated amount of sponsored testimonials on your For You Page. And don’t be shy about using your social channels to drive to your Prime Day experiences!
Dig deeper: Ad costs are soaring and retailers are panicking — here’s the fix
Amazon is betting big on both Prime Video and Live Sports.
Prime Video is Amazon’s subscription-based streaming service that offers on-demand movies, TV shows and original content. It’s included with Amazon Prime memberships but can also be subscribed to separately and has ad-supported-supported tiers.
With more than 132 million viewers on ad-supported Prime Video, it’s one of Amazon’s fastest-growing ad channels — boasting impressive measurement and tracking capabilities stemming from its publisher owning the content. Plus, membership will only continue to grow as ad-free subscription prices increase (and consumers become more amenable to ad-supported tiers).
Live Sports is included in the Prime Video suite (unlike some other streaming services) and currently boasts a lineup of Thursday Night Football and other NFL games, the WNBA and, starting this fall for U.S. viewers, the NBA. There are additional opportunities in other countries like the UK and India for soccer, cricket and more big-name sports.
Earlier, I covered non-endemic advertising on Amazon, so let’s bring it together. Consider the last time you watched Thursday Night Football and the ads you saw. Much more than just brands sold on Amazon, right? There were quite a few from State Farm or Geico. See how powerful this landscape can be?
These offerings give marketers two major places to expand, boasting impressive reach and diversity of interests.
Phew! Alright, consider yourself caught up. There are other programs and features to cover — for instance, as workers return to the office, audio ads are back in a big way. But I’ll get to those at a later date. For now, consider yourself fairly caught up on the newest programs with Amazon Ads.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
Like many great image makers, Bade Fuwa has found a space in photography to explore his inner world, speaking through surreal and tender scenes that touch on themes of loss, bereavement and belonging. Following the passing of his late mother in 2019, the photographer has seen a shift in his visual output and a renewed relationship to the discipline: “I believe for that period I had to force myself to stop feeling emotions so as not to grieve to death from the sadness. It was easy for me to express it all with photography, and I think that in that process my works became much bolder as I took photography as a means to live and express what I felt.”
Completely self-taught, the Lagos-based creative only really started to explore photography in 2023 and much of his work to date has been an experiment in self-expression. Turning to image-making from a background of study at fashion school, many of his portraits are an opportunity to carefully art direct and style scenes to convey complex emotions – “truly the most important thing when trying to capture an image”, he says. “I try not to overthink my process or the idea as I believe once you think about it you ruin it.”
Often Bade sticks to shooting in black-and-white, following in the footsteps of some of his largest photographic inspirations: Peter Lingerberg, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon. Rather than finding visual influence in contemporary photography, he has been drawn to those photographers “who lived, created art and truly existed – I study them and their works, not for their style but their story”, he says. Another important vehicle for visual inspiration in the artist’s works is nature: seascapes populate numerous frames and flowers appear to grow out of his subjects in others. “I think currently I’m in love with shooting nature; nature is beautiful and never judges,” he ends. “I feel there is a connection there. I don’t know what it is I’m searching for but I will keep shooting with nature.”
Something important is happening in Google Search.
If you’ve looked at your website data in Google Search Console, you may have noticed something odd. Your pages are showing up more often, but fewer people are clicking through.
These two signals – impressions and clicks – are used to rise and fall together. Now, they’re drifting apart.
We call this “The Great Decoupling.”
Screenshot from Jim Thornton (with permission to use), The SEO Community Slack Group, June 2025
And it’s not just your business. This is happening across industries and most website types.
It became more noticeable as Google rolled out something called AI Overviews – automated summaries that answer questions directly in search results.
If your site traffic from search is falling, but your rankings look fine, this article will help explain why.
We’ll examine the changes, their causes, how they manifest in analytics tools, and the responses of leading companies.
The Great Decoupling describes a new disconnect. Your website can appear more often in search results but get fewer clicks.
That was only “the expected behavior” when the SERP had things like featured snippets, or other special content result blocks from Google.
We’ve seen this clearly in client data during the first half of 2025.
Screenshot from Itamar Bauer (with permission to use), Studio Hawk, June 2025
Near the end of 2024, impressions and clicks were still closely linked. But by early 2025, impressions kept going up while clicks went down.
The click-through rate, the percentage of people who click, dropped sharply.
This trend is widespread. Whether your site is an ecommerce store, a B2B company, or a blog, the same thing is happening – more visibility but less engagement.
Martin Splitt has said that when your pages are shown in AI Overviews, you may get more impressions but fewer clicks.
He also said that people might still convert later, perhaps after seeing your brand in search results, even if they never click the first time.
So, we’re in a new “normal”; impressions alone no longer signal opportunity. It’s what happens after the impression that counts.
Google’s move toward AI-powered results is driving this change. The most significant shift is the introduction of AI Overviews.
AI Overviews are summaries shown at the top of search results.
Instead of a list of websites, Google provides an instant answer. That answer is generated from various sources across the web, including yours, without requiring the user to click.
Your site may show up as both a traditional link and as part of the AI Overview. That boosts impressions but often reduces clicks. People get what they need from the overview.
The AI Overview gives users what they want quickly. However, if their need is met before they reach your site, your traffic will drop.
Generic questions, how-tos, and mid-funnel queries are more likely to trigger AI Overviews. These are often top-of-funnel keywords marketers use to drive discovery.
On the other hand, brand searches and high-intent queries are more resilient.
The point is that it’s not just about where you rank. It’s about whether Google decides to answer the question for the user without needing you.
This isn’t entirely new. For years, Google has provided users with quick answers. Featured snippets, “People Also Ask” boxes, and knowledge panels all reduced the need to click.
AI Overviews are just the next step. They are more advanced, appear more often, and answer a broader range of questions. But, the principle is the same: to reduce the effort for the user.
We’ve adapted before. We can adapt again. However, this shift is more significant and impacts multiple stages of the customer journey, necessitating a more strategic approach.
In Google Search Console, the gap between impressions and clicks is clear. In Google Analytics 4, you see the impact on your traffic and behavior metrics.
Your GA4 report shows fewer sessions from Google, even though your rankings haven’t changed. That’s the result of fewer clicks.
Because fewer but more qualified visitors are reaching your site, session length and conversion rates may look stronger. But, overall, reach is down.
GA4 does not show traffic that came through AI Overviews separately.
Some visitors might return later and be counted as “direct” traffic. Others won’t be tracked at all. This makes it more challenging to attribute SEO’s role in brand discovery.
To understand what’s happening, you need to look at GSC and GA4 together. One shows the visibility. The other shows the outcomes.
The most forward-thinking businesses are making strategic shifts to protect and grow their visibility. Here are four things they’re doing:
When users search for you by name, Google is less likely to intervene. These clicks are holding steady and, in some cases, growing.
Investing in brand and trust is generic advice being thrown around a lot at the moment, but I think you should be looking at your brand in consideration of a user journey and what scope AI platforms have to alter that user journey before your brand is discovered.
Image from author, June 2025
This also means working to understand how well-known your brand is before a user starts at the “top of the funnel,” and whether or not they’re more likely to steer towards your brand due to previous positive brand touchpoints, or the sentiment and user stories of others online.
If your content is generic, Google’s AI can summarize it. If it’s unique, based on experience, data, or opinion, it’s much harder to replace.
Focus on:
Create clusters of related content around a theme. This signals authority to search engines and gives users more reasons to explore your site.
Don’t just list specs. Add real information that helps the buyer:
You want to help the buyer better forecast their experience with the product or service, as well as their understanding of your brand.
Be upfront about as much information as possible, as a negative brand or product experience can be damaging in the long run.
Yes, SEO remains highly relevant despite the rise of AI.
While AI tools are changing how search works and how users find answers, they haven’t replaced the need for a smart, well-executed SEO strategy.
SEO is evolving and becoming more important in new ways.
AI Overviews don’t invent answers. They draw from trusted online sources. That means Google still relies on high-quality, well-optimized content to build its responses.
SEO helps ensure your content meets the standards of E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Even with AI features in search results, users still scroll through traditional listings and click on websites.
SEO ensures your content performs well in these results, whether it’s in the top 10 links, a featured snippet, or a “People Also Ask” box.
AI tools can automate certain aspects of SEO, such as keyword research and content suggestions. But, they don’t replace strategic thinking.
SEO experts continue to guide site architecture, content structure, technical fixes, and intent-based optimization – tasks that AI can’t fully handle alone.
SEO isn’t going away; it’s becoming more sophisticated.
The businesses that succeed will be the ones that blend innovative tools with strategic thinking and treat SEO as a long-term investment in visibility and value.
The new wave of SEO isn’t just about driving traffic. It’s about showing up where your customers are asking questions, building credibility, and creating a footprint that supports all your other channels.
Search may not deliver the same volume of clicks, but it still shapes perception, influence, and decision-making.
SEO remains one of the most effective ways to stay visible and valuable in an increasingly AI-driven world.
The Great Decoupling is not just an SEO story. It’s a business visibility story. More people may see your brand, but fewer will visit your site.
That means you can’t just measure success by traffic. You need to consider engagement, recall, and brand strength.
Search is becoming a reputation game. If people trust you, they’ll find you, even if they don’t click the first time.
The companies that win won’t be the ones who chase rankings; they’ll be the ones who earn attention. Attention is potentially the “new click.”
(Author’s note: The term “The Great Decoupling” was first used to describe this phenomenon by Darwin Santos on X.)
More Resources:
Featured Image: Master1305/Shutterstock
Georgina Bankier, vp, global platform partnerships, Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company
In today’s fractured media environment, connected TV and retail media are dominating advertiser attention — and their budgets.
CTV ad spending is projected to reach $33.35 billion this year, while retail media’s 19.7% growth will be more than double the growth in overall digital ad spending (8.8%). At the same time, emerging opportunities in digital out-of-home and audio are gaining ground as marketers seek new ways to engage audiences during their daily lives.
Navigating these channels effectively requires more than showing up. Each environment presents its quirks — its own data needs, activation challenges and measurement hurdles. To harness these channels’ full potential, marketers need more than isolated pockets of first-party data or walled-garden insights. They need reliable, high-quality third-party data that helps unify targeting and measurement across platforms.
CTV might be growing fast, but its fragmentation makes targeting complex. Streaming services span across countless apps and devices, and consumers bounce among them fluidly. For advertisers, this creates an imperative: Extend audience strategies into CTV without sacrificing precision or scale.
That’s where the right third-party data partner becomes essential. Working with a provider that can deliver quality data and enable activation across major buying platforms is key to making CTV part of a larger omnichannel effort.
For instance, Eyeota audiences, including those powered by Dun & Bradstreet and other branded partners, can now be activated in Google DV360 and Google Ad Manager using CTV IDs. That unlocks reach across 98% of CTV households — 5 billion hours of ad-supported viewing every month — within a trusted ecosystem. More importantly, it ensures advertisers can bring CTV data into their broader identity spine, improving targeting and performance across screens.
Retail media’s promise is clear: a direct line to shoppers, surrounded by real purchase signals. But its data challenges are mounting. Disparate first-party data sets, integration complexity and inconsistent quality are all making it harder for brands to scale campaigns and prove value.
Strong third-party data is essential here too — not just for campaign execution, but to help retailers and advertisers bridge gaps in their customer understanding. Without it, even the most promising campaigns can suffer from narrow reach, mismatched messaging or flawed measurement.
The most effective retail media strategies are grounded in unified data that blends B2C and B2B intelligence. Advertisers need to understand who their customers are, but also the roles they play in their households and workplaces. That level of insight requires a partner that can help consistently validate, enrich and activate person-level data across environments. This need becomes even more vital as powerhouse channels like CTV and retail media become more intricately entwined.
As formats like digital audio and digital OOH become more integral to media plans, marketers are recognizing a familiar challenge: identity fragmentation. Each of these environments introduces new consumer behaviors, identifiers and context requirements. Tying them together requires adaptable infrastructure and a data partner that can keep pace.
High-quality third-party data helps normalize disparate signals and bring emerging channels into the fold. Whether activating near a retail location via digital signage or engaging consumers through a podcast app, advertisers need audiences built on reliable data that can carry across multiple identifiers.
This is where interoperability comes into play. From mobile advertising IDs and IP addresses to hashed emails and universal IDs, Eyeota has long prioritized compatibility across environments. Now, with CTV IDs joining that mix, advertisers have even more ways to reach the right people in the right context, across an increasingly complex media ecosystem.
As new channels gain traction, the limitations of first-party data become more visible. It doesn’t always scale, it doesn’t always travel and it rarely provides a complete view on its own. That’s why third-party data is more important than ever.
The ability to activate accurate, privacy-compliant data across emerging environments is what will separate today’s good media strategies from tomorrow’s great ones. Marketers need partners who understand that and are building for these environments, with support for the identifiers and platforms that matter now.
Third-party data remains the connective tissue of effective omnichannel advertising. And as CTV, retail media and new formats continue to reshape what that looks like, advertisers will need to be just as agile as the audiences they’re trying to reach.
Sponsored by Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company
With PS5 Pro out for over six months now and vague details of the next Xbox emerging, speculation is inevitably turning what Sony will do next. Presumably, there will be a PlayStation 6. But for now, all we really know about Sony’s vision for future hardware is that it’s working with GPU-maker AMD on an AI collaboration called Project Amethyst.
What is Project Amethyst and what does it mean for PS6 and future PlayStation consoles? Sony isn’t revealing much about its hardware, but it is talking about the AI tech (also see our pick of the best games consoles).
PS5 Pro Technical Seminar at SIE HQ – YouTube
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No ranking data. No impression data.
So, how do you measure success when AI-generated answers appear and disappear, prompt by prompt?
With these significant changes to how we optimize for search, many brands are seeking to understand how to achieve SEO success.
If your content isn’t appearing in AI-generated responses, like AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, you’re already losing ground to competitors.
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Most marketing measurement models operate on a simple assumption: effects are additive.
Campaign A drives 100 leads, Campaign B drives 200, so the total impact is 300.
But in reality, marketing often defies this logic. Some efforts multiply the effects of others.
And in some cases, combined initiatives create outcomes that are greater than the sum – or even the product – of their parts. These are known as additive, multiplicative, and synergistic effects.
Consider a glass of cold milk and an Oreo cookie. Each is perfectly enjoyable on its own. But together, they create something unexpectedly better. The same principle applies to marketing: when initiatives are strategically integrated, the outcome can be amplified far beyond what any single effort could achieve on its own.
Which raises a few important questions:
Let’s start by defining the terms.
Let’s start with a quick visual before getting into the details:
Definition: The total effect is simply the sum of individual efforts.
Marketing example: If Campaign A drives 100 leads, and Campaign B drives 200 leads, then the combined result is 300 leads. No interaction – just stacking results.
Limitation: This assumes each tactic works in isolation and doesn’t influence the effectiveness of others.
Definition: The total effect is the product of factors, one enhances or scales the other.
Marketing example: If awareness increases by two times, and conversion rate increases by 1.5 times, the combined impact on sales is 2 x 1.5 = 3x. Changes in one variable amplify the other.
Limitation: It still assumes predictable, mathematical interaction, which often oversimplifies real-world marketing dynamics.
Definition: The combined effect is greater than the sum or product of individual parts – a case of “1 + 1 = 3”.
Marketing example (Les Binet-style): Long-term brand building primes an audience emotionally, while short-term performance-focused campaigns convert that primed audience into buyers. Each alone performs OK. But together, they reinforce and amplify each other – leading to non-linear, sometimes exponentially better results.
Since we’re talking about Les Binet, let’s go even deeper and throw in a time-decay element. Binet emphasizes that brand campaigns build the brand through every impression but battle the daily erosion of market share – with DR campaigns funding short-term brand defense as well.
Key insight: Marketing activities often interact in mutually reinforcing ways that can’t be reduced to simple math.
Limitation: Hard to model, and requires additional experimentation.
Dig deeper: Use AI marketing tools to automate and scale your strategy
The concept of incrementality is getting more interest these days as marketing budget distribution is under greater scrutiny.
In general, this is a good thing. For marketing budgets to be spent effectively, brands need to know:
In this way, incrementality casts a keen critical eye on additive effects and some multiplicative effects (especially toward the bottom of the funnel, since brand campaigns likely would produce conversions on their own that direct response campaigns partly cannibalize).
While incrementality testing in a silo is a powerful way to establish causality between a cause and a marketing effect, it misses the point in terms of potential synergies across channels. Yes, it’s an important component of good marketing analysis, but it needs reinforcements to determine optimal budget distribution.
Dig deeper: 3 tools every martech pro needs to turn strategy into action
Advertising platforms (e.g., Google Ads, Meta Ads) use additive effects (mostly). That’s right, advertising platforms generally use simple attribution models like last-click attribution, which assume that the last interaction is the sole contributor to a conversion.
These platforms usually treat the effects of individual ads or campaigns in isolation, assuming an additive effect.
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) uses synergistic effects (mostly). It takes into account the entire customer journey and assigns value to multiple touchpoints. It assumes that the interactions between various marketing channels and touchpoints work together synergistically, meaning combined.
Salesforce uses additive effects. Its attribution models often focus on assigning credit to various touchpoints based on lead or sales data. They tend to follow additive effects, treating each interaction as having an individual contribution without fully factoring in the synergistic interaction between channels or activities.
Shopify uses additive or multiplicative effects (based on the model). Shopify often uses attribution models that can range from simple last click or first click (additive) to more complex models that might include weighted attribution (multiplicative). Shopify’s attribution doesn’t inherently assume synergy but can be configured to weigh different touchpoints more complexly.
Media mix modeling (MMM) is a more sophisticated statistical approach to assessing the overall impact of various marketing activities (TV, print, digital, etc.). It captures synergistic effects, where the combined impact of multiple channels can result in an effect that’s greater than the sum of individual contributions, while not explicitly reporting on those effects. MMM accounts for the interdependence between different marketing activities, capturing nonlinear relationships.
Dig deeper: It’s time to move on from multi-touch attribution
You may already have some of these campaigns set up in isolation, but here’s a quick breakdown of how to assess the campaigns and their attendant effects.
In isolation, without lower-funnel campaigns to influence, branding campaigns won’t show much face value.
The effects of this campaign in a silo are almost purely additive.
In this scenario, branding is expected to take on a multiplicative role when paired with a direct response campaign. The key idea is that their combined impact should be greater than the simple sum of what each delivers in isolation. If the results from Test 3 exceed the combined performance of Tests 1 and 2, that confirms it: marketing effects aren’t merely additive – they’re multiplicative.
With greater scale, I would expect branding campaigns to enhance direct response performance in a non-linear fashion, showing synergistic effects as opposed to multiplicative.
Dig deeper: How AI flipped the funnel and made GTM tactics obsolete
Any attribution method assuming additive effects is mostly inaccurate by design. Advertisers should make sure they use more advanced models accounting for multiplicative or – even better – synergistic effects. Capturing synergistic effects will require some additional experimentation. However, optimizing your media mix is well worth it.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
A lot of Brooklyn-based graphic designer and visual artist Rebecca Wilkinson’s work is about “making visible, the oftentimes invisible labour of design”, she tells us – something that she explored at length in her MFA thesis: Perform—Produce. That’s why you’ll sometimes see her make an appearance in her projects, revealing the person behind their production. “I believe strongly that the work of design is increasingly devalued as a result of its increasing detachment and disembodiment from its producer (the designer)”, she shares, “seeing the person making the work is key to reimagining the structures and material conditions under which this work is produced.”
This subject of work itself is central to Rebecca’s practice and is often what the designer is exploring across a range of digital and analogue mediums: self-published books, video essays, workshops, experimental publications, and performances. This fieldwork has seen her not only interrogate her own tools and techniques in playful and imaginative ways but also turn to other designers for their two cents — such as her incredibly thorough research project on all things chairs: Common Dimensions manifests as a platform and series of self published works that present interviews with a range of furniture designers and makers on their practice.
At the outset of a project, Rebecca usually finds herself writing a set of instructions before settling in – a preoccupation with rules and parameters as springboards for creativity that’s loosely inspired by the Fluxus artists, especially Sol Lewitt’s famous instructions for wall drawings. This methodology has its roots in the designer’s belief that “most ideas can be communicated visually through simple intentional moves”, she shares, which sees her work with minimal means to design entire visual systems “in one single typeface”.
The goal is always to have as little surrounding noise as possible: “I believe my work is most successful when I can make the least amount of visual elements possible and can still communicate a strong idea,” she says, “to me, one smart, legible move is better than ten unnecessary flourishes.”
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, arguably because of its ability to become virtually any kind of website users want it to be.
This flexibility is made possible by thousands of third-party plugins that add the features needed to turn ideas into functioning businesses and platforms.
The WordPress plugin community is what really brings the platform to life and enables publishers and developers to build websites that enhance the experience for site visitors and publishers.
Based on my own experience and from others in the WordPress community, the following is a list of high-quality plugins that provide essential functionality for building a successful website.
All the WordPress plugins evaluated and selected are created by trustworthy developers according to the following criteria:
There are nine categories of plugins on the list:
SEO plugins handle critical tasks that every WordPress site needs to rank well in search engines.
They automate essentials like generating sitemaps, adding meta descriptions and title tags, and inserting schema.org structured data.
They also provide a way to manually add article excerpts and centralize on-page optimization by managing internal linking, rank tracking, redirects, and integrating with Google Search Console for performance insights.
These are the five most widely used and trusted SEO plugins, listed by number of installations:
Yoast SEO is a go-to plugin for handling the basics of on-page optimization.
It has a measurably imperceptible impact on site performance and a long track record of providing fast updates in response to changes at Google.
It also deserves special mention for its trustworthiness in terms of security.
WordPress site security is sometimes overlooked in favor of focusing on sales or SEO, but all it takes is one security incident to understand the severe impact a vulnerability can have on sales and search performance.
Top 3 WordPress Security Plugins
Wordfence is one of the most widely used WordPress security plugins, trusted by over 5 million users.
The free version protects websites against external threats by locking down commonly exploited areas and running a malware scan that checks for intrusions.
It also blocks malicious files from executing in sensitive folders, sends alerts when plugins and themes need updating, and provides an option to enforce strong passwords.
Its standout feature is a built-in firewall that automatically detects and blocks suspicious activity and user agents. These blocks are temporary and automatically lifted after a preset time to prevent database bloat.
Wordfence also allows users to define custom firewall rules, offering precise control against malicious bots (learn how to use Wordfence’s custom rules).
It is authorized by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program as a CVE Numbering Authority, which means it contributes vulnerability discoveries to the official CVE® database and underscores its credibility in the security space.
For most users, the free version offers strong baseline protection that makes Wordfence an essential plugin. The Premium version adds real-time threat signatures to protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Sucuri, which is currently owned by GoDaddy, is a security auditing, malware scanning, and website hardening solution that complements other security plugins.
It doesn’t duplicate the features in Wordfence, so the two can be used together as a layered security strategy.
Sucuri includes a file integrity scanner that alerts users to changed files, secures the website against intrusions, and provides security notices, such as when someone logs in.
The paid version includes a firewall that actively blocks threats, but even the free version adds meaningful protection.
When combined with Wordfence, Sucuri offers a highly effective and essential level of WordPress security.
Patchstack helps secure WordPress sites by detecting vulnerabilities in themes and plugins.
It provides email notifications and real-time alerts, including a dashboard for monitoring up to 10 websites in the free version and up to 50 in the premium solution.
WordPress plugins and themes can contribute to unnecessary code bloat and render-blocking scripts, which negatively impact website performance.
Caching and web performance plugins address these issues by applying the latest speed and optimization techniques, helping sites load faster and perform more efficiently.
Recommended Caching Plugins
This is the official WordPress performance plugin developed by the WordPress Performance Team, composed of WordPress core contributors.
It offers advanced performance optimizations that take advantage of the latest technologies and browser capabilities, some of which may be included in future versions of WordPress.
Its modular design enables users to activate only the performance features most relevant to their websites.
The purpose of the plugin is to allow users to provide feedback on how the performance improvements work with their websites.
While there is a small possibility of unexpected issues, the plugin is generally stable and safe to use.
Some of the latest performance improvements offered are:
WP Rocket addresses core performance challenges that affect most WordPress websites, offering everything a site needs to improve speed and load times, plus compatibility with other plugins and themes.
Virtually every recommended optimization, from lazy loading to delaying JavaScript, is included.
The attention to detail is top-notch. For example, one of the most recent updates was to preload fonts that show above the fold.
The solutions provided by WP Rocket reduce the need to hand-code performance optimizations, resulting in lower development and maintenance costs.
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves website speed by offering extensive caching options, including database objects, and minification of JavaScript and CSS resources.
It also handles deferring non-critical resources and converting images to the WebP format, helping websites meet modern performance standards.
Backing up and archiving a WordPress site is critical to protecting it from catastrophic failure due to a server issue or site hacking.
Backups are also invaluable when unintended changes are made and need to be reverted.
Using a dedicated backup plugin is the most reliable way to ensure regular, complete backups are available when needed. The importance of website backups cannot be overstated.
Recommended Backup Plugins
The UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin is trusted by over 3 million users.
It provides a reliable, easy-to-use solution for creating full backups and restoring a site to a previous version when needed.
In addition to website recovery, UpdraftPlus supports site migration between servers, making it a practical tool for both maintenance and server changes.
Backing up and restoring a WordPress site with this plugin is straightforward, even in urgent situations like accidental file deletion.
BlogVault offers real-time incremental backups that include free off-site storage and a 90-day archive.
The plugin backs up the WordPress database, themes, plugins, settings, and images, covering all critical components of a WordPress site.
The official WordPress repository page for the plugin states that BlogVault is the official site migration plugin for Cloudways, Flywheel, Liquid Web, Pantheon, and WP Engine, further reinforcing its reliability.
BlogVault also provides a free staging environment. The paid Pro version offers automation features, one-click recovery and migration, plus priority customer support starting at $149. Higher tiers offer built-in malware scans.
The free version provides many of the backup and storage functionalities that most websites need, and its staging capabilities are a strong bonus, allowing users to safely test changes before deploying them to a live site.
Jetpack VaultPress Backup is a component of the Jetpack plugin bundle that starts at $9.95/month. It’s by Automattic, founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is the co-founder of WordPress.
VaultPress Backup provides daily and real-time backups of WordPress and WooCommerce stores, including all customer and order data, making it especially well-suited for websites where uptime and data integrity are crucial.
It creates multiple redundant encrypted backups to ensure recovery is always possible.
Because VaultPress Backup is developed by Automattic, it’s coded to the highest standards and tested for compatibility with all major plugins and themes.
While a theme’s built-in contact form provides basic contact functions, third-party plugins are necessary for sites that rely on lead generation, marketing campaigns, or advanced features like multi-step forms.
The following contact form plugins offer greater flexibility and control to meet those needs.
WPForms is a visual contact form builder that can be adapted for accepting feedback, serving as subscription forms, and forms for accepting payments, integrating with Authorize.Net, PayPal, Stripe, and Square Payments.
The plugin offers over 2,000 templates to make it easy to create a form and offers easy customizability, exceeding the functions and adaptability of default contact forms typically found in themes.
There are different paid version levels, each providing increasingly sophisticated features and capabilities, but the free version is a reliable option for websites that need more than just basic contact functionality.
Gravity Forms is an advanced contact form plugin that offers conditional logic that can hide fields or pages depending on user answers, and can be configured for payments, product sales, and donations, all done with the highest levels of security.
Form configuration is done within a drag-and-drop visual editor and includes dozens of add-ons that can be used to make it integrate with a customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, or anti-spam solution, or add an autocomplete to increase conversions.
These capabilities make Gravity Forms particularly well-suited for websites that require flexible, advanced forms to handle complex data collection, transactions, and lead generation.
Gravity Forms is a professional-level plugin that can do virtually anything related to capturing user-provided data.
Ninja Forms is an easy-to-use contact form builder, but with increasingly complex functionalities that can be added according to need.
What makes Ninja Forms stand out is its modular system, which allows users to purchase add-ons to extend its capabilities. Paid add-ons include features like multi-step forms and conditional logic for advanced workflows.
The free version includes options that are premium features in many other form plugins.
For example, it is Akismet- and Google ReCaptcha-friendly, and can accommodate uploads, accept payments via PayPal and other gateways, and integrate with MailChimp, Constant Contact, multiple CRMs, and more.
It’s a practical choice for websites that need a reliable form solution right away, with the flexibility to expand as requirements grow.
Formidable Forms is an advanced custom form builder that is easy to configure, with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder interface that makes it easy to create a custom form.
It’s engineered for fast performance and is WCAG/A11Y compliant, making it suitable for sites that need accessible, high-performance forms.
The Pro version enables forms to be adapted for payments, calculations, surveys, quizzes, and dozens of integrations with CRMs and email marketing platforms, making it a strong choice for websites that need flexible, feature-rich form capabilities.
Image optimization plugins address one of the most common performance issues by compressing images and converting them to more efficient formats for faster loading.
This helps reduce page load times, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
EWWW Image Optimizer uses a server’s image optimization apps to optimize images, converting them to the appropriate format for each one.
The plugin is compatible with major plugins and handles optimization automatically.
The premium version offers higher compression rates and uses their servers to reduce the user’s server load. It’s a reliable tool trusted by over one million users.
Smush is a free, no-limits image optimizer plugin that doesn’t run on a user’s server, which avoids slowing down the website.
The free version includes a wide range of features, and the premium version adds background optimization and conversion to advanced image formats like WebP and AVIF.
Image optimization is automatic, with support for resizing, lazy loading, incorrect image size detection, and no monthly limits other than a maximum image size of 5 MB, making it a strong choice for improving site performance with minimal effort.
In addition to optimizing images (including WebP) and PDFs, ShortPixel can automatically add alt-text and block AI bots from downloading images, features that support both accessibility and content protection.
The plugin can also convert images to modern formats like WebP and AVIF, which significantly reduce image file sizes for faster page loads.
Since the free version uses ShortPixel’s servers for compression, it helps maintain site speed by reducing the load on your own hosting environment.
Akismet is an easy-to-use anti-spam solution that automatically filters spam comments and allows site owners to review and restore them if necessary.
It’s easy to implement for protecting comment sections and contact forms that integrate with it. It’s a useful plugin for any site that has comments enabled or accepts form submissions.
Akismet is developed by Automattic, founded by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress.
Advanced Google reCAPTCHA adds Google’s reCAPTCHA to contact forms, registration forms, and password resets, and integrates with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and BuddyPress.
By blocking brute-force login attempts and preventing spam registrations, it mounts an effective defense against two of the most common threats faced by WordPress sites, making it a practical security solution for websites that accept user input.
The advanced Google reCAPTCHA is published by WebFactory, core contributors to WordPress and creators of many popular plugins.
WordPress, by design, offers only basic search functionality.
Ecommerce stores, content-heavy sites, and sites with knowledge bases and documentation rely on advanced search engine plugins to help users quickly find products and information.
These plugins improve user experience by handling misspellings and using stemming to deliver broader, more relevant results.
The following plugins are highly recommended for WordPress websites where search plays a key role.
Recommended Search Engine Plugins
Relevanssi is a free WordPress search plugin that brings advanced capabilities often found only in paid tools.
It improves on the default WordPress search by offering sorting by relevance (instead of date), partial word matching, and support for advanced operators like “and,” “or,” and exact phrase searches using quotation marks.
These features make it easier for visitors to find the right content, especially on content-heavy sites or stores.
Relevanssi can display excerpts that show the search term in context and highlight those terms when users click through. It also integrates with WPML and Polylang, making it useful for multilingual sites.
One thing to be aware of is that Relevanssi increases database usage. The developers recommend checking the current size of the wp_posts table and estimating triple that amount for storage needs.
The Pro version adds features like the “Did you mean?” suggestion tool, support for indexing PDFs, taxonomy filtering, and weighted results.
A standout feature in the Pro version is stemming, which matches results to the meaning or topic of the query, not just the literal keyword. This improves result relevance and can reduce the size of the search index.
This plugin replaces the default WordPress search box with a more capable search tool that works across posts, pages, and custom post types like events, portfolio items, and WooCommerce products.
It can search in titles, descriptions, article excerpts, and custom fields, improving how users find content on the site.
It also offers useful options like excluding specific categories or posts from search results and can integrate with Google Analytics to track search behavior.
The plugin is multilingual-friendly and compatible with Polylang, QtranslateX, and WPML, making it a good fit for global audiences.
The paid Pro version expands support to popular page builders, additional content types like PDFs and Events Calendar, and includes advanced WooCommerce search functionality.
This paid search plugin is a widely trusted option among developers and publishers who need more advanced search capabilities than WordPress provides by default.
Its algorithm can prioritize frequently clicked results, apply custom weighting, include an include/exclude feature, and index content from custom fields, PDFs, media files, and custom post types. These features make it suitable for content-rich or complex sites that rely on internal search.
Ecommerce features include support for product attributes and taxonomy searches, with compatibility for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and BigCommerce plugins.
Pricing at the time of writing is on sale for $99 per year.
Website staging is a feature offered by several WordPress plugins that allows users to create an exact copy of a site for safe testing.
They’re valuable for previewing changes before updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes.
Staging plugins also help with debugging, trying out new templates, and customizing the site without affecting the live version.
Recommended Staging Plugins
The free version of the plugin enables users to clone their website to a subfolder of the website, including the database.
The clone can be used for staging a website, as well as for backup and migration.
The pro version of the plugin enables users to back up the website to third-party cloud providers and offers advanced site migration capabilities.
The free version of the plugin advertises that it’s so lightweight that it can even be used on a low-powered shared hosting environment. The paid version of the plugin is on sale at the time of writing and starts at $103/year.
WP Stagecoach is a paid premium solution that offers an easy way to stage a website safely on the WP Stagecoach servers and then push it to the live production server when it’s ready.
I’ve used WP Stagecoach and found it to be simple and convenient.
Pricing starts at $149/year.
While plugin needs can vary, certain plugins have proven useful across most types of WordPress sites.
The WordPress ecosystem offers thousands of plugins that extend website functionality.
The plugins on this page are trustworthy, widely used, and essential for increasing search visibility, increasing sales, improving the user experience, and supporting what makes WordPress the most popular CMS in the world.
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Featured Image: Biscotto Design/Shutterstock
Condé Nast execs are pressured to retain ad dollars after Anna Wintour announced last week that she will no longer oversee the day-to-day operations of Vogue, the luxury brand she has led as editor-in-chief since 1988.
Wintour will remain in her broader roles as Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director for Vogue. And while it’s too soon for the ad industry to record a change in brands continuing to advertise or not, one agency exec acknowledged to Digiday the weight of Wintour’s moves: “[ad money] flows to Vogue because of Anna.”
Wintour has become synonymous with the Vogue brand. But the fashion media landscape has changed since Vogue’s print-dominant heyday. Brands are contending with shrinking referral traffic, ad dollars are shifting to search and social, the creator economy is booming, and generative AI technology is curating fashion and summarizing content in search engines.
“Having [Wintour] step back from day-to-day but still overseeing things is the best of both worlds. Vogue can still benefit from her influence and connections but they can also infuse the brand with new energy,” said a former Condé Nast editor, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely. “If they play their cards right, it can also signal to the advertising community that there’s something new and exciting in the air.”
Condé Nast (and Vogue) aren’t immune to the shifting media landscape. Vogue lowered its audience rate base to its advertisers in the past month from 1.2 million to 1 million, according to an agency exec, who requested anonymity. It now puts the publication’s circulation at a similar level of competitors like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, they said.
A Condé Nast spokesperson declined to comment on this story. But they shared digital performance figures with Digiday, including how its most recent Vogue cover featuring Lauren Sanchez Bezos performed, claiming 1.6 million visitors and 3.4 million TikTok views.
Vogue’s next editorial leader will need to have a more platform-centric approach to content distribution and monetization, to continue attracting an audience that is increasingly less inclined to come to a publisher’s owned properties, according to a former Condé Nast exec. That means giving up more control.
“Whoever comes after her next is going to have more autonomy to be able to think about the evolution from print and websites to third-party distributed platforms and AI, LLMs,” said the former Condé Nast exec, who requested anonymity due to their personal relationship with Wintour. “The day-to-day content creation and audience strategy is going to be run by somebody else. But the aura connected with [Wintour], and the cultural gravity — I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere for the foreseeable future.”
Creators are increasingly taking larger shares of marketers’ budgets, said Kim Harrison, group media director, connections strategy at Fitzco. Vogue as a brand has become more influential than Vogue as a magazine, said Tricia Logan, managing partner of global consumer & retail practice at DHR Global, executive search and leadership consulting firm.
Being associated with Vogue “still means something,” the former Condé Nast editor said. “Yes there are creators, but what do those creators want? They all want to be in Vogue. That’s powerful,” they said.
That’s also apparent in how Condé Nast is selling inventory. “It’s not like you’re selling one deal across five [Condé Nast] brands on Instagram. You’re selling Vogue on Instagram, Vogue on TikTok, Vogue on YouTube,” the former Condé Nast exec said.
Condé Nast went through rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting last year, merging Pitchfork into GQ in January 2024 and letting go of senior executives in December. Legacy media companies have pared back on spending executives were once afforded, under pressure from audiences and marketers shifting to social and video platforms, and economic headwinds.
However, the sheen of Vogue remains intact, according to ad agency and publisher execs alike. That goes for the majority of Condé Nast brands, said one senior agency exec at a holding group agency, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to appear to either disparage or elevate any particular publisher. They believe that Condé Nast, and Vogue, are well-positioned to tap the creator economy more effectively than they have done to date.
“Anyone writing for a magazine [like theirs] is influencing culture. And those [writers] are sought-after talent in this new world where creators and influencers are super important,” said the agency exec. “But I don’t think they’ve leveraged it nearly to the degree that they should have. There’s been ways that they’ve been able to monetize it in small ways, but, like, not scalable. I think there is work to be done there,” they said.
The hiring of Elizabeth Herbst-Brady as chief revenue officer at Condé Nast — having led revenue and advertising teams at tech companies like Verizon, Snap, Viacom and Yahoo — last year signaled the media group’s intention to shift gears, the exec added. “That, plus the access they have — whether it’s Hollywood talent, you can go across the board — those brands are still adored. And they’ve got the attention of pockets of influencers, no matter what property we’re talking about. With Anna changing roles, I think it will help folk reimagine it in this new way.”
Wintour’s move hasn’t spurred a notable ripple effect among advertisers — at least not yet. Vogue’s grasp on the luxury market remains strong. Vogue is still valuable for advertisers looking for a safe, trusted environment and to reach an audience interested in luxury brands, two agency execs told Digiday.
But those ad dollars are intertwined with Wintour. With Wintour still at the helm, it’s unlikely a new Vogue editorial leader will have a completely different vision from their predecessor. And maybe that’s the point.
“It’s hard to separate the two,” Logan said.
—Jessica Davies, Digiday senior media editor, contributed to this story.
