Category: Data

Data Industry Marketing Tactics

Email is the Most Consistent, Reliable Marketing Channel on the Web and I Can Prove It

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This is a very short post to say: If you’re not investing in your own email marketing list, you’re making a bad choice. Social media engagement rates have plummeted the last 15 years. Ad engagement, too. Google CTRs have fallen massively the last decade with the rise of zero-click searches. The visibility of TV and print advertisements have died off…
Analytics Data Industry

We Analyzed Millions of ChatGPT User Sessions: Visits are Down 29% since May, Programming Assistance is 30% of Use

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Generative AI, and ChatGPT in particular have been catnip to the tech press, the mainstream media, and the conversations of professionals in nearly every field. How is it going to disrupt your work?! Will AI replace you? Are Hollywood writers, real estate agents, dog walkers, and anesthesiologists even useful anymore? In concert with the fine folks at Datos, whose opt-in,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Analytics Data Marketing

5-Minute Whiteboard: Measurement vs. Attribution

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Howdy SparkToro fans and welcome to the first edition of a new series we’re experimenting with—short, whiteboard style explainer videos. This inaugural video covers a concept that’s crucial to the future of marketing: measurement vs. attribution. For the last 20 years, we’ve lived in the golden age of attribution. Measuring the kinds of metrics I talk about in the video:…
Data Industry Marketing

New Research: Dark Social Falsely Attributes Significant Percentages of Web Traffic as “Direct”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
When site owners and marketers log into their analytics tools to determine how visitors discover and reach their properties, they expect accurate information. Unfortunately, that data is often massively flawed. SparkToro partnered with Really Good Data in a recent experiment to drive 1000+ visits across 11 major social networks and observe how Google Analytics categorized these referrals. Special thanks to…
Data Industry Marketing Predictions

AI-Generated Content is the New Floor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Anyone can make it. Most of it is at least OK. Some of it’s pretty good. A few folks are already sharpening their skills at prompting AIs to generate increasingly high-quality material. But, the core problem with content created by large language model (LLM) outputs is that it’s so cheap, so accessible, so ubiquitous—it’s not merely table stakes; AI content…
Data Product SparkToro

NEW: Custom Search & Custom Audiences Offer Incredible New Ways to Use SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Updated April 10, 2024: We relaunched SparkToro with new data sources. In that update, we also renamed “Custom Search” to “Advanced Search.” If you have a paid SparkToro account, you can access Advanced Search in your dashboard. — Three years ago, if you wanted to uncover which podcasts Data Scientists listened to, or find out which social accounts were most…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro Tactics

NEW: Audience Tracking is Now Available in SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Since our launch in 2020, SparkToro has helped thousands of marketers uncover the most popular demographic and behavioral attributes of their target audiences. Emphasis on “most popular” 😉. That data is undoubtedly valuable: it helps folks know where and how to reach their customers online. But, in the two years SparkToro’s been active, we observed a handful of our smartest,…
Data Marketing

Which 3rd-Party Traffic Estimate Best Matches Google Analytics?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In July and August of this year, SparkToro solicited (via Twitter, our email newsletter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) voluntary sharing of Google Analytics data from the web marketing community. Over 1,000 participants shared their websites’ traffic (through GA’s oAuth function) with us. We then acquired metrics from four providers of traffic estimate data—SEMRush, Datos, SimilarWeb, and Ahrefs*—and compared these against…
Data Marketing Tactics

How to Measure “Hard-to-Measure” Marketing Channels

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve ranted endlessly about how marketing leaders refuse to invest in hard-to-measure marketing channels like PR, media, native social, events, many types of content, and word-of-mouth. But, never stepped up and made clear how to use metrics, imperfect though they may be, to turn impossible-to-measure into difficult, but possible. Sadly, I’ve never seen a high-quality offering to reliably point-to, either.…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro

Which Subreddits Does Your Audience Follow? What Do They Talk About? Starting Today, SparkToro Has the Answers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Today, we’re launching a new “Reddit” tab in SparkToro. It will show you the Subreddits to which the audience you search for most-heavily subscribes, and the text content of their Reddit posts. This feature is briefly available for all paid subscribers. In a few weeks, SparkToro is updating our prices & packages, at which time it will be exclusive to…

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