SparkToro is run by Rand Fishkin and publishes audience research and data on search, social media, and online advertising.
HN commenters cite its data on rising zero-click Google searches and its estimate that about 20% of active Twitter accounts are fake or spam.
Last month, there was a significant buzz among those involved with Google Search (which includes almost the entire modern internet and all its developers). "Erfan Azimi," the owner of an SEO firm, suddenly began sharing leaked documents revealing how Google's ranking system works. It's more complicated than just the search itself; it involves various APIs around it. Nonetheless, these APIs reveal a lot. The leak happened when a Google developer wrote a program to convert API calls into his preferred programming language but accidentally published everything (if you're interested, I've included a link to the commit with all these descriptions [1]).
Multiple confirmations from reputable sources, including former and current Googlers, have verified the authenticity of this leak. It's not a hoax or a joke but a genuine breach of information that has piqued the interest of all SEO researchers. Here's a reliable summary of the findings:
– Google has allowlists of manually optimized sites, at least for certain topics, such as the 2020 elections or COVID-19.
– Domain names and subdomains are significant factors (despite Google's previous claims).
– There's a sandbox for new sites, which Google has always denied.
– Google directly uses data from EWOK (a system where paid users rate the quality of search results).
– User behavior on sites is actively used for ranking.
– Click data is collected not only from Google Analytics but also directly from the Chrome browser.
– Sites…
This is a topic near and dear to my heart.
First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/
That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribution-is-not-incrementality/
That is also a must read.
The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for.
Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget.
There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.
It doesn't matter, it's still an ad. Adwords aren't the only form of ads. See the reviews and purchase links in the screenshot? That's how Google is going to profit from this.
Adwords is only a small part of the modern day Google's monetization efforts. Today, they're doing everything they can to prevent users navigating away from Google property[1]. They plagiarize content from other websites and put it above search results. By 2020, less than 2/3 of Google searches ended in a click to traditional search results [2]. Why would they do that? So that they can show you more ads, of course.
This is yet another attempt to direct users away from the websites they were browsing to Google's ad platform. It's particularly egregious because it's disguised as the website's own doing.
[1]: https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors
[2]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/
You can read about some of that in previous posts on Rand's own blog over the years. There's "My Complicated Relationship With No Longer Being CEO" from late 2015, written 2 years after he stepped down as CEO, where he admits regretting stepping down and his "displeasure and frustration" with ways the new CEO was running things:
https://sparktoro.com/blog/my-complicated-relationship-with-no-longer-being-ceo/
Somewhat complicating things, he originally published that post on the company's own website, as evidenced by this link:
https://moz.com/rand/my-complicated-relationship-with-no-longer-being-ceo/
[I do hope Rand will be happier in his new startup - it feels like he has been heading in a different direction to his former company for a while, at least from reading his blog.]
For context, an analysis estimated 70% of Elon Musk's followers are fake [0]. It suggests the following reasons:
> Very large accounts tend to have more fake/spam followers than others
> Accounts that receive great deals of press coverage and public interest (like ex-President Trump and Mr. Musk) tend to attract more fake/spam followers than others
> Accounts that Twitter recommends to new users (which often includes @ElonMusk) tend to get more fake/spam followers
No doubt this is also true for Biden.
Seems to me that Musk et al should be less concerned about overall percentage of fake accounts than of these big numbers encountered on population accounts.
[0] https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-twitter-analysis-19-42-of-active-accounts-are-fake-or-spam/
Because you increasingly don't leave Google:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2020/01/09/three-effective-strategies-to-combat-zero-click-searches-on-google/
https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/
When users stay on the Google and Facebook platforms then news media companies are for practical purposes forced to have a presence on both, but that also means Google and Facebook will capture most of the advertising revenue and the news media companies producing the actual content will see less. Hence the regulation.
Google has already done deals with various news media companies in Australia. Facebook is in the process of doing the same. The Australian government got what they wanted.