Category: Marketing

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:…
Marketing Tactics

Your Burning Questions About Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) officially launches July 1, 2023. If you’re here, it’s probably because you’re not quite ready for it. Fear not, friend! We’ll get you up to speed. We recently hosted a SparkToro Office Hours crash course with our friend Steve Lamar, GA4 expert and founder of ReallyGoodData. (Eagle-eyed readers will recall we partnered with Steve on our…
Marketing Tactics

Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
Rand hates the phrase “high-quality content.” Quality is entirely subjective. And because it’s subjective, it’s impossible to measure, let alone find agreed-upon standards. Here’s an example: Remember that Ted Lasso Season 2 episode, Beard After Hours? Rand thought it was art while Casey thought it was drivel. (I have the least helpful opinion here which is that I thought it…
Marketing Startups Tactics

How Being Customer-Led Can Double the Impact of Your Traffic

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
This is a guest post by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop of SaaS educational and growth consultancy Forget the Funnel. They are the co-authors of Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Predictable, Recurring Revenue. Customer acquisition in 2023 is not like customer acquisition in 2013. Why? The competition is much greater. We now have 16x the competitors we did…
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…
Marketing Startups

The Power of Word of Mouth: How to Find What Influences Your Customers

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
Customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased significantly over the past decade. This is true for both B2B and B2C companies, with CAC across both industries being up about 70%, according to subscription software company ProfitWell. In other words, it’s becoming a lot more expensive to acquire customers. What to do? At our recent SparkToro Office Hours, Asia Orangio, Founder &…
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 Marketing Startups

Maybe You Need a Fractional Marketing Director — Not a Fractional CMO

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
I recently blurted out during a webinar that company leaders should think beyond the role of fractional Chief Marketing Officer (fCMO) — and instead consider other fractional roles. Someone followed up to ask me about the downsides to fCMOs, and then I suddenly remembered my past experiences in working with a few of them. They were definitely pleasant, talented and…

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