Category: Marketing

Data Marketing

Marketers Say Most of Google’s Public Statements Are False or Misleading

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In July and August of 2019, 1,589 web marketers completed an online questionnaire as part of SparkToro’s Google Ranking Factors Survey. The survey aggregated marketers’ perceptions of the ranking elements used by Google’s search engine. But… it also asked a set of questions around the level of trust in Google’s public statements. Those results are shared for the first time…
Data Marketing

Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks. Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside…
Data Marketing

How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Source: Google 12/11/2018 Congressional Hearing Notes Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and…
Marketing

An Unpopular List of Marketing Trends for 2019

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This morning, after celebrating Geraldine’s James Beard Writing Award nomination, I foolishly Google’d “marketing trends 2019“. I’m working on some presentations, and was hoping to tie back… blah blah blah… doesn’t matter. What matters is that the results are awful. Nachos-with-fake-cheese awful. Freezer-burned-waffles awful. Gas-station-hot-dog awful. Just like you’d expect, there’s a bunch of lists from the usual suspects —…
Data Marketing

Google’s European Monopoly (& Shrinking Click-Through Opportunities)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In Europe, Google dominates the search landscape even more so than in the United States. In spite of the EU’s regulatory and hefty penalties on the search giant, and despite the anecdotally stronger desire I’ve heard from European consumers to have alternatives, Google runs Europe’s web landscape. Thanks to our friends at Jumpshot, whose clickstream panel covers billions of searches…
Marketing Startups

Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In the last handful of years, I’ve had a creeping sense that blog readership is dropping across the web, even as the quantity of organizations and people producing posts has grown. Stats, unfortunately, are hard to come by. Most all of the readership data is from blogging’s golden era — 2001-2012 (or so) — when several reputable organizations regularly published…
Events Marketing

10 Problems Plaguing Influencer Marketing

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I spoke at SMXL Milano on a panel about where social media and influencer marketing are headed. The moderator, Paolo Zanzottera, did (in my opinion) a superb job, but the questions he posed and those from the audience, reminded me of the big challenges influencer marketing faces in 2018 and beyond. Photo credit: Aleyda Solis on Twitter The…
Data Marketing

Google CTR in 2018: Paid, Organic, & No-Click Searches

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
When Google’s search results look like this, content creators, web searchers, and Google all win. When they look like this (or this, or this, or this), it’s mostly just Google and searchers who benefit. Content creators? Not so much. Some clicks might still flow through to the folks who created the content Google’s scraping and re-publishing (ironically enough, something that…
Data Marketing

2018 Search Market Share: Myths vs. Realities of Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, & More

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For many years, there have been pervasive myths about where Americans search on the web, whether search is dying, whether Amazon (or Facebook, or Bing) is taking Google’s market share, and plenty more. Thanks to new data generously compiled for SparkToro from Jumpshot, a clickstream data provider that monitors more than 10 million desktop and mobile devices in the US,…
Data Events Marketing

On SERP SEO – The Infuriating Reality of Search’s Future

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I was invited to give the closing talk at Brighton SEO, one of the SEO field’s most well-attended events. The host, Kelvin Newman, was gracious, thoughtful, and personally still runs much of the event’s operations, giving it a truly special, authentic, non-corporate feel. My presentation centered on the shift in Google’s behavior over the last few years away…

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