Category: Advertising

Advertising Marketing Psychology Tactics

The “Marketing is Evil” Problem.

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“I hate marketing.““Marketing is evil.““Marketing doesn’t work.““Marketing doesn’t work on me.““I’ll never buy from a company that markets to me.“ My best argument against those kinds of reflexive, anti-marketing takes is this: people create wonderful things to help one another, to entertain, to make art, and yes, to make money, too. But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean anyone…
Advertising Data Marketing Product SparkToro Team

NEW in SparkToro: Content and Profile Text Insights

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
What does your audience talk about online? How do they describe themselves? What hashtags do they use? Prior to social media aggregation software, answering these questions was a maddeningly manual, lengthy process. Unfortunately, most of those products are exorbitantly expensive, enterprise tools. After SparkToro’s launch last year, we were somewhat shocked to find: A) How valuable these text insights were…
Advertising Marketing Psychology Startups Tactics

When Choosing Marketing Channels, Visualize the Curve

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Business Owner: “We’re launching a new company/website/campaign and want to buy ads that can get us some customers. Once that’s working, we’ll invest in content and SEO.” Marketer: “So, no one’s heard of your brand, and you don’t have any existing digital marketing, but you’d like to start with ads, then invest in content and SEO?” Business Owner: “Yup! That’s…
Advertising Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro Now Has 50% More Podcasts

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The Short Version: Every SparkToro search you perform now contains far more podcasts. That’s because we’ve made more connections between podcasts and their (or their host’s) social profiles, and also because SparkToro’s podcast index has grown substantially, to more than 600,000 unique shows. If you’re building Lists in SparkToro, you’ll also find that more than 80% of the podcasts in…
Advertising Data Marketing Moz

In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In August of 2019, I published research from now-defunct clickstream data provider, Jumpshot, showing that 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results. Today, thanks to new data from SimilarWeb, I’ve got a substantive update to that analysis. From January to December, 2020, 64.82% of searches on Google (desktop and mobile combined)…
Advertising Data Product SparkToro

New in SparkToro: Enhanced Text and Hashtag Insights

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Just last week we released the new Press tab, but we’re at it again with another upgrade for your SparkToro account—albeit a more modest one. Today, we’re excited to announced an upgraded Audience Insights tab with more data available, and new segmentation of text insights. All the details and a few examples of how you might apply this data are…
Advertising Marketing

Something is Rotten in Online Advertising

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
What the #$%* is going on with the digital advertising ecosystem? Where to even begin… Should we start with the upcoming loss of third-party cookies? The bizarre Google & Facebook duopoly teamup against anti-trust action? The rise of online ads as a money laundering & terrorist-funding tactic? Or maybe we should talk about brands’ ever-shrinking ability to attribute ad clicks.…
Advertising Agencies Marketing

What Should Digital Marketing Agencies Focus on in the Year Ahead?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A few weeks ago, I received a lovely email with an important question: what should digital marketing agencies focus on in 2021 and beyond? Via Sebastián Cardozo of Ranker Studio Wait… Why me? I don’t run an agency, and haven’t for more than a decade. Well, SparkToro has used a lot of agency help, we’ve got more than two hundred…

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