Category: Data

Data Industry SEO

An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Update: We are diving deep into the Google API leak and what it means for marketers in our next episode of SparkToro Office Hours on June 27. Join Michael King, Founder & CEO, iPullRank, and Rand Fishkin, Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro, to learn more. RSVP for the free webinar. On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person…
Analytics Data Industry Marketing Tactics

Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Most of our site’s traffic comes from Google, so most of our digital marketing efforts and spending should be on Google, too.” – An absolutely terrible way to invest in marketing On Monday of this week, I published a comprehensive look at how traffic flows on the American web. Unfortunately, some folks in the social feeds where this research was…
Analytics Data

Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much? New Research from Datos & SparkToro

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the era of zero-click platforms, native content, and walled gardens, does anyone still send meaningful traffic to the open web? Is Google responsible for 50% of all traffic referrals? 75%? Is social media sending half what search does? A quarter? Less? Are the major platforms sending less traffic overall than they did a year ago? These are frustrating, hard-to-solve…
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,…

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