SparkToro Blog
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Read marketing, entrepreneurship, and the ongoing study of how influence spreads from founder Rand Fishkin. SparkToro is a software company founded by Casey Henry and Rand Fishkin. We believe high-quality market research and audience research should be available to everyone, not just tech giants and those with huge budgets.
SparkToro Blog
1w ago
It’s an exciting, relieving, high-anticipation day for all of us at SparkToro. Today’s launch—which we call “V2″—is the culmination of more than a year of work, including a complete rebuild of the infrastructure and data sources for our product. And though, for many months, Casey, Amanda, and I feared we might lose key pieces of V1’s functionality, the opposite is ..read more
SparkToro Blog
3w ago
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 ..read more
SparkToro Blog
1M ago
“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 ..read more
SparkToro Blog
1M ago
In the era of zero-click platforms, native content, and walled gardens, does anyone still send meaningful traffic to the open web? Is Google responsible for 50% of all traffic referrals? 75%? Is social media sending half what search does? A quarter? Less? Are the major platforms sending less traffic overall than they did a year ago? These are frustrating, hard-to-solve ..read more
SparkToro Blog
1M ago
Ugh, I don’t want to give away my email strategy. Because it’s mine and it’s working really well for us. But since Rand recently wrote about how email is the most consistent, reliable marketing channel — and, well, he’s right — I’d be remiss in not helping you out. Our twice-monthly audience research newsletter goes out to about 60,000 people ..read more
SparkToro Blog
1M ago
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 ..read more
SparkToro Blog
1M ago
Shortly after Amanda Natividad joined SparkToro, she coined the term “Chill Work” to describe the unusually patient, mature, laid-back approach we take to building this business. And for the last three years, it’s become a bigger and bigger part of how I think about not only this company, but everything I do professionally. Today, I want to share a documentary ..read more
SparkToro Blog
2M ago
I’ve only been writing online as a marketer for about four years. And already, I feel like I’m out of ideas. In this photo I am holding a light bulb but it is not obviously a light bulb, and I was not going to purchase a new light bulb for the sake of this blog post. You could say that ..read more
SparkToro Blog
4M ago
Here it is, our fourth annual edition! The first three were just practice for this masterpiece of culinary and imbibable magnificence. Because this year, our food and drink gift guide isn’t just the usual excellent selection — products we’ve used, received and enjoyed, and/or gifted — it’s also chock-full of pithy commentary on important topics like the politics of tiki ..read more
SparkToro Blog
5M ago
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 ..read more