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
Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality
By 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
How Being Customer-Led Can Double the Impact of Your Traffic
By 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? As a result, many products are experiencing a
New Research: Dark Social Falsely Attributes Significant Percentages of Web Traffic as “Direct”
By 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
The Power of Word of Mouth: How to Find What Influences Your Customers
By 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
“High Quality Content” is the Most Useless Phrase in Marketing; We Can Do Better
By 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
AI-Generated Content is the New Floor
By 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
Maybe You Need a Fractional Marketing Director — Not a Fractional CMO
By 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
NEW: Custom Search & Custom Audiences Offer Incredible New Ways to Use SparkToro
By Updated April 10, 2024: We relaunched SparkToro with new data sources. In that update, we also renamed “Custom Search” to “Advanced Search.” If you have a paid SparkToro account, you can access Advanced Search in your dashboard. — Three years ago, if you wanted to uncover which podcasts Data Scientists listened to, or find out which social accounts
A Crash Course in Speaking at Conferences
By Out of curiosity, I Googled, “public speaking tips” and the first piece of advice I saw was: “Breathe.” After my eyes rolled out of my head and I plopped them back into their sockets, I started typing this. This isn’t an “ultimate guide.” This isn’t going to be 5,000 words containing every single thing you