Data

SparkToro & Followerwonk Joint Twitter Analysis: 19.42% of Active Accounts Are Fake or Spam

TL;DR – From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of five datasets including a variety of active (i.e. tweeting) and non-active accounts. The analysis we believe to be most compelling uses 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90 days. These accounts were randomly selected, by machine, from a set of 130+ million public,…

Provable Marketing Attribution is a Boondoggle; Trust Your Gut Instead

You’ve heard the marketing analytics spiel before. It goes something like: Marketing journeys are long, complicated, multi-channel paths. Tracking them is always imperfect, but if you employ an extensive, expensive, difficult-to-configure combination of tools, tracking systems, and deeply talented statistics professionals, you can build a high-quality, predictive attribution modeling structure that approximates reality with relatively minor gaps. My counterpoint: don’t…
Advertising Data Marketing Tactics

What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam?

“What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson.” – Brian Chesky (via Campaign) In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales. They continued this ad-slashing practice…
Data Product SparkToro

NEW in SparkToro: Demographics (also, our pricing tiers are changing tomorrow)

Friends, I’ve got great news. If demographics data is valuable to your market research, targeting, persona-building, or marketing tasks, SparkToro just became your best friend. Much of the information you might have relied on in Facebook’s old Insights tool (before the Cambridge Analytica scandal) or Twitter’s Analytics (before they inexplicably pulled it) is now accessible in SparkToro in a fully…

There Are Four Kinds of Keyword Research; Make Sure You’re Doing the Right One(s)

Keyword research is broader than you might think, friends. If you’re in a rush, just click below to jump to that section: Keyword research for SEO/PPC(to learn which terms have search volume in Google and how much)Keyword research for social media marketing(to uncover hashtags, topics, phrases that get used/earn visibility on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, et al.)Keyword research for…

NEW in SparkToro: Content and Profile Text Insights

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…

SparkToro Now Has 50% More Podcasts

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…

One Customer Feedback Email Changed Our Startup’s Trajectory

Building a new company means constantly managing one’s emotions. The high highs of days when everything’s golden inevitably give way to the low lows when you’re certain it’s all doomed. At the end of February, Casey (my cofounder) and I were in that latter boat, nervous about how signups for our 10-month old startup had slowed to a trickle. Here’s…
Advertising Data Marketing Moz

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

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)…