Data Marketing Tactics

How to Measure “Hard-to-Measure” Marketing Channels

I’ve ranted endlessly about how marketing leaders refuse to invest in hard-to-measure marketing channels like PR, media, native social, events, many types of content, and word-of-mouth. But, never stepped up and made clear how to use metrics, imperfect though they may be, to turn impossible-to-measure into difficult, but possible. Sadly, I’ve never seen a high-quality offering to reliably point-to, either.…

Zero-Click Content: The Counterintuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World

Update: We hosted a SparkToro Office Hours webinar about Zero-Click content on August 23. Sign up free to watch the replay. It could be a chicken or egg situation: Maybe the platforms have made us lazy, or we’ve trained their algorithms to reward platform-native content — as in, content that keeps people on the platforms’ sites instead of sending them…
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…