Category: Industry

Hiring Industry Team

Embrace the High-Level Individual Contributor: How to Hire for This Unconventional Role

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
I’m SparkToro’s VP Marketing and here’s how I spent a recent afternoon: I sifted through our Google Analytics dashboard. I was looking for our most popular pages and copying them into a spreadsheet so that we can keep track of what needs to be updated for the public launch of SparkToro V2. I included the title of the page, link,…
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…
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…
5-Minute Whiteboards Agencies Industry

Why Digital Marketing Agencies Have it Tough in 2023 | 5-Minute Whiteboard

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
3 months ago, a dear friend’s agency closed for good. 2 months ago, another close friend had a round of layoffs at their firm. And in just the last two weeks, I talked to four agency owners who reported their first revenue-declining year in the last five. It’s rough out there for a lot of digital marketing agency owners. My…
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,…
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…
Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

“High Quality Content” is the Most Useless Phrase in Marketing; We Can Do Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Did you watch the television program Ted Lasso? You probably did; it has the ubiquity of the 1980s’ The Golden Girls in an era of deeply fragmented viewership. I enjoyed the first season quite a bit, but after watching the second season, was so repulsed by the folksy, smarmy, saccharine shallowness that I stopped. Season 2 somehow made me feel…
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…
Hiring Industry Psychology Team

You can’t hire ambitious people and then ask them to stop being ambitious.

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Hiring managers, executives, CEOs—especially those in tech—are proud to say that we only consider applicants with an unrelenting drive for success and a track record of impressive accomplishments. These qualities often correlate with what we perceive (accurately or not) to be our own reasons for success, and we want to find people like us: individuals with intrinsic motivation, constantly striving…
Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

Too Few Marketers Grasp the Difference Between Strategy vs. Tactics; We Need to Fix That

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Look, I get it. For (at least) the first decade of my career, I, too, foolishly conflated strategy and tactics. I’d say things like: “we need to be strategic with our paid search spend,” or “let’s get tactical with the pricing tiers.” Did I sound smart? No. Did I *think* I sounded smart? Yeah, probably. Here’s the short version: Strategy…

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