Happy New Year folks! We hope you enjoyed the holiday season. We’re back in full force with a new-ish format to the Daily because the New Year is all about trying new stuff, right?

Before we move on, a big shout out to YOU. We appreciate you and look forward to spending 2019 with ya!

• Amazon advertising in 2019? The e-commerce behemoth is now the third largest ad seller in the US behind Google and Facebook. Amazon’s ad business hit $2 billion for the first time in Q1 and reached $2.9 billion in Q3.
• 2018 marked a banner year in Facebook breaches, and GDPR. Expect data to be tightly regulated in 2019 with oversight from Congress and the FTC. Apparently, they’re going to start enforcing fines for misused data. Be careful out there marketers.

Albacross makes lead generation a bit easier by telling you exactly who is landing on your website and how to reach them.

What we like: It’s pretty dang intuitive and easy to use. It’s also GDPR compliant.

What we don’t like: Sometimes the contact information is slightly inaccurate, which requires a little legwork.

The New Year is a great time to evaluate your current digital assets. Today, we’re talking about website speed. If your site is slow, you’re losing views and hurting your search ranking.

If you’re ready to speed things up, check out these WordPress plugins for your site:

1. Render Faster: WP Fastest Cache: The more traffic your site gets, the more RAM and CPU it uses (AKA: it loads slower). WP Fastest Cache creates a static file for multiple users rather than rendering the same page repeatedly.

2. Big Image Files: WP Smush: That 2MB hero image ain’t gonna cut it anymore. If you’re looking for a simple way to compress your images and not lose quality, download WP Smush for free.

3. Decrease Pageload: BJ Lazy Load. When someone lands on your site, all the content on the page is automatically loaded. If you have a lot of content on the page, the load time is going to be slow. BJ Lazy Load delays loading all of the content until the user is ready.

We’re sticking with our New Year’s theme here. According to Google (sorry Bing users), the world searched for “good” more than ever before.

Our only bone to pick with Google’s Year in Search 2018 video is they left out “good marketing emails.” Other than that, this video gave us the feels.