SparkToro

Here's a typical buyer persona: - 57-year-old woman - Born in Southern California - Resides in Los Angeles - Married twice But in actuality, that persona describes... Jennifer Aniston and Gwen Stefani. Would you market to them the same way? Probably not. This is the problem with most buyer personas. They're specific enough to help you create *a* net, but they also make you cast a wide net. That's what Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad will dig into at next week's SparkToro Office Hours. They'll unpack how to create genuinely useful buyer personas (through freely available resources!), and the SparkToro way of doing this much faster with just as much evidence. Sign up or save your seat! https://lnkd.in/gQgd88hD

AI referral traffic might actually be the least compelling way to measure your AI marketing efforts. New data from Brainlabs shows that in 54 of their clients, organic traffic declined 10.5%, while AI referrals increased 163%, and AI-driven events showing high-intent rose 335%. That intent is unsurprising to us — in our recent study with Similarweb, we saw that people who saw brand recommendations in AI answers were more likely to search for and visit those brands. But AI referrals are still tiny relative to organic. And an undetermined number of those AI visits were almost certainly recorded as direct traffic. So if you're measuring AI success by referral traffic alone, you're only measuring what's easiest to attribute — you're only reading what your analytics dashbaord is telling you. Instead of looking at that referral traffic, look at the bigger picture of branded search, direct visits, and high-intent actions. 

Let's say you have a high-priced consumer product. Black Friday/Cyber Monday is on the horizon. What should you be doing now, leading up to then? Our suspicion is that for an expensive product, the most important part of your marketing happens long before the sale. In this example, our audience research supports just that. Check it out — and get the cheat codes for what how we'd build the marketing strategy from here. https://lnkd.in/gu3QeRkN

We just built everything you asked for in our latest update: Buyer Personas. Here's what to know: - Unlike almost every other persona tool on the web, SparkToro’s uses confirmed, passively-collected-at-scale, audience data. - You can even combine up to three audiences. - It’s editable and visually-friendly, with the added bonus that for any particular piece of data in the person, there’s a corresponding graph in the audience research report you can download. - And you can download the finished result as a PDF. Need to wow a potential client at your next pitch meeting? Or explain visually to your boss why you need budget for that new marketing investment? We got you, fam. https://lnkd.in/g72-PcBT

Here's a simple question that can save you a lot of wasted marketing: *What kinds of places does my audience actually spend time online?* Not just which websites or social accounts. Which categories of websites. Maybe your audience disproportionately visits: • News & media sites • Online communities • SaaS/productivity tools • Business publications • Education resources ...or something else. The answer changes what you do next. High affinity for podcasts and media? Look for up-and-coming shows to sponsor, guest opportunities, and potential co-marketing. Communities? Find the specific forums and subreddits worth participating in. Business publications? Build a PR and contributed-content list — starting from the smaller niche publications and working your way up (so to speak). One of our favorite additions to the new SparkToro is Audience Visitation by Category. It's a quick way to get a broad sense of your audience's online world before deciding where to invest. Audience research becomes more actionable when you ask yourself: "What should we do with this?"

It's here! SparkToro has been rebuilt to help marketers move faster from audience data to useful decisions. New visualizations make it easier to see the hierarchy of an audience's behavior: which categories dominate their attention, which ones play a supporting role, and where unexpected opportunities may be hiding. We've also redesigned navigation, Projects, and the broader reporting experience so the product feels clearer, faster, and easier to act on. For customers, the biggest change is simple: less time interpreting tables, more time spotting patterns and deciding what to do next. See the full product overhaul and rebrand: https://lnkd.in/gXADVu6H

New in SparkToro: Brand Affinity! You can now see the companies, products, and brand names your audience is most familiar with — and likely buys from. Use it to: → Understand the broader brand universe around your audience → Research competitors, campaigns, and potential partners → Walk into a client pitch already fluent in their customers' world You'll find Brand Affinity under "Keywords and Prompts" in every SparkToro report, available on every subscription tier. Go see which brands your audience already knows: https://lnkd.in/gutcXpNF

95% of ChatGPT users also use Google. As much as the provocative headlines would want you to believe that search is dead and users are leaving Google in droves for ChatGPT, it simply isn't true. People are using both. And Gemini. And Claude. Similarweb's new generative AI report shows heavy overlap across all those three tools. Discovery has become messy. People bounce between search, AI tools, social, marketplaces, and direct visits depending on what they're trying to do in that moment. No single tool owns the journey. So the marketer's question is not "Google or AI?" It's "Where does our audience discover, research, compare, and remember us — and how do we stay visible across all of it?" AI search is growing fast. Traditional search isn't going anywhere. The win isn't swapping one playbook for another. It's understanding how the pieces now fit together.

Few things are more satisfying than launching a product customers are already asking for. Case in point: our API! We (obviously) can't share what customers are building, but the early traction is validating the reason we made it: audience research shouldn’t have to live in a browser tab. It can live inside your products, internal tools, dashboards, custom agents, automations, and whatever else your team is building. The API gives you programmatic access to the same audience data that powers SparkToro — from demographics and social sources to podcasts, YouTube channels, websites, and more. And every new API key comes with 200 free credits, so you can test it before buying anything. See what you can build: https://sparktoro.com/api

🚨 The SparkToro API is now live! Our audience data can now plug directly into the places your team already works — from CRMs and AI agents to internal dashboards and custom tools. Use tour API to build agency pitch reports, media/influencer shortlists, signup enrichment, audience-fit workflows, and more. 200 free credits to start. No card required. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gqA6zmtK