Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century.

Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we’ve got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I’m being intentionally provocative. But it’s because things really have changed in the last decade, yet too many of us are still asked to invest in marketing as though it’s 2014. In just seven minutes, I’m going to try to change your mind…
Data Industry SEO Zero Click

2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360.

Over the past decade, I’ve done several reports with multiple clickstream panels analyzing Google search behavior at scale. The last such analysis was in 2021, and behavior almost certainly looks different today thanks to changes from both Google itself and its search consumers. In past reports, I’ve only been able to look at searches for the United States. This time,…

SparkTogether Comes to Seattle October 8; Tickets are Already 60% Sold Out

It’s Official. On Tuesday, October 8, 2024, SparkTogether will be live, in person, in Seattle, WA for the first time. And we’ve already sold 120/200 tickets available. If you want one of the 80 left, I recommend grabbing one ASAP. What’s SparkTogether? We believe the most valuable professional experiences in our lives happened when remarkable people were at their most…
Data Industry SEO

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

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…
Hiring Industry Team

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

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,…

Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate

“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

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…

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

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

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,…