SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Data Industry Marketing Research

New Research: 20% of Americans use AI tools 10X+/month, but growth is slowing and traditional search hasn’t dipped

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The media hype may be overblown, but the data doesn’t lie: over 20% of Americans are now heavy users of AI Tools (employing them 10X or more each month), and nearly 40% use one AI tools 1X+/month. Despite this massive growth, traditional search engines aren’t going anywhere: 95% of Americans continue to use them each month, and 86% are heavy…
Data Product SparkToro

How to Find Hyper-Specific Audiences with SparkToro’s New AI Features

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s time we pulled back the curtain on one of SparkToro’s newest superpowers: Conversational Queries (a.k.a. audience descriptions), powered by AI. Instead of analyzing specified-parameter audiences like “Wix.com visitors” or “people with architect in their bio,” you can now zero in on groups as broad or specific as you like — small law firms seeking to improve their websites or…
Data Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Graph Visualizations Make Copy/Paste/Present Easy as Pie

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Starting today, there are customizable graph visuals in almost every section of SparkToro’s reports. Because why the heck should you have to be an Excel visualization expert on top of the 500 other things your boss/team/client expects of you? Friends, we’ve got your back. When you need to make the case for an investment in a particular social channel you…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Zero Click

Exactly What to Measure with Lift Based Marketing Investments

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel begins. Weirdly, it’s less precise,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing

In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year. The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every source of referral traffic —…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Product SparkToro Tactics

How to Use SparkToro + LLMs to Do Marketing Magic

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Most folks who follow me know I’m a bit of a late adopter and skeptic of AI. Yes, it can do some impressive things that takes humans a long, painful amount of time to replicate. But, they’re also stereotype machines whose reasoning and capabilities, especially in the creative and novel needs that marketing demands, isn’t replacing even 1% of jobs…
Hiring Industry Predictions Startups

“AI will replace all the jobs!” Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn’t exist. Worse than that, actually, there’s hundreds of years of evidence and sophisticated analyses from hundreds of sources showing the opposite is true: AI will almost certainly create more jobs than it displaces, just like thousands of remarkable…
Industry Marketing Psychology SEO Tactics

Seriously, please stop with the new acronyms. It’s still SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization.

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s a day ending in Y, which means my social feeds are filled with people attempting to rebrand the acronym “SEO.” Look, I ain’t here to rain on your parade, so if you love calling it AIO or GEO or EIEIO, be my guest. I haven’t been an SEO for more than seven years, despite what all the “top SEO…
Events Seattle SparkToro

A Marketing Conference That Actually Changes Your Mindset

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There are tons of marketing conferences. Most follow a familiar formula: slick slide decks, broad-strokes keynotes, case studies you’ve seen before, and maybe a tote bag to take home. But when you’re deciding where to spend your budget, time, and energy, the real question is: Which event will actually make an impact on me? That’s the question we asked ourselves…

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