[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today's episode is one you're not going to want to miss. I'm joined by Rand Fishkin to talk about the one thing too many marketers overlook, and that is audience research.
We've all been guilty of chasing clicks, tweaking campaigns, and fighting for those tiny 3% lifts. But the real wins come from big swings, and those big swings are only possible when you deeply understand your audience.
We get into why most companies don't do audience research and how to come up with ideas that will have a big impact. We also talk about how serendipity plays a role in the best campaigns. And finally, Rand is going to share what he's seeing in Search and AI. This conversation is packed with insights you can take back to your team today. So let's dive in.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Hello everyone.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I'm Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor.
97th Floor is a digital marketing agency designed to build world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the campaign where we talk with marketing leaders about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and at 97th floor.com.
today's guest, Rand Fishkin is is the co founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research platform.
He is also the co founder and CEO of Snackbar Studio, an indie game studio currently working on their first game.
He has dedicated his entire professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday series, his blog and his book Lost and Founder a Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. Rand was previously the co founder of Moz and inbound.org, he's keynoted over 100 events around the world on marketing, technology and startup topics.
In this episode, we're going to cover the need for marketers to invest in audience research to create campaigns that work. Let's get into it.
All right, Rand, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to talk with you.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, my pleasure, Paxton. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: So I want to dive right in. I mean, you've got so much great stuff to talk about here, so I want to cut to the chase. You had an episode of Office Hours a couple weeks ago where you had Tommy Walker on from Content Studio. And one of the things that he was sharing was some data that he had gathered in 2024 about audience research. And one kind of alarming stat was that 41% admitted to not doing audience research nearly enough Combined, over half are very infrequently doing it at, you know, in our work. We. I've learned over the years that like audience, you know, I grew up in SEO and started doing SEO in 2007 and. But I've since learned that like audience research is the key to taking these big swings. And it's the big swings that like make big impact.
So what I think would be great to dive in today is like, in your experience, in your pov, what are some of the things that are holding up audience research both from like an investment of both resources and time? What would you say are like some of the main culprits in your experience?
[00:03:25] Speaker B: I think I would say the biggest culprit is it is no one's job.
Right. So when you, if you look at a marketing position of any kind, or a product design position, engineering position, you will almost never see market and audience research listed as a must have skill.
You won't see any software tools or products that are listed as, hey, you should know how to do whatever. You know, use clickstream data or you should know how to use survey data or you should know how to use SparkToro, whatever it is.
That, that in my opinion is the biggest culprit. I don't, I don't blame individual marketers.
I blame executives and recruiters and people who design job positions, you know, VPs and CMOs.
Those folks, for whatever reason have decided that, yeah, it's really important that you know how to do email marketing and use mailchimp. It's really important that you know how to use Google Analytics or Omniture, whatever it is, but it's somehow not important that you know how to do, how to determine what your audience is doing on the Internet, what their preferences are, what their behaviors are, what their demographics are. Yeah, you and I know that's incredibly valuable, but it has not penetrated the market.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of the things potentially preventing it from penetrating the market that way is what do we mean when we say audience research?
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah, the definition is fuzzy. It's fuzzy for sure.
Look, here's the simplest version from my perspective, which is I want to know who my potential customers are and what they do on the web so that I can target reach them with the best possible messaging in the best places at the right time.
That's like marketing 101, you know, that's fundamentals.
Here's the analogy I always go back to. So Paxton, you mentioned you grew up in SEO. I grew up in SEO too, professionally, at least.
We did Keyword research every day.
Like it would be absolutely mental to do SEO with no keyword research.
Yeah, keyword research is one form of audience research.
It is the, you know, a primary and key form of audience research for SEO. Because you need to know what people are searching for before you go create content and try to rank for it and make your site accessible and all that kind of stuff.
It's pretty weird that in no other part of Internet marketing, right? Social media marketing, content marketing, pr, email, brand CRO, you don't also do the equivalent of keyword research. Like that's, that's deeply fricking strange to me.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I, I, to take that even further, I used to teach SEO at one of our universities here and it was very easy to teach them the step by step of say, keyword research. Okay. So you get here, you download this data, you sort it this way.
But what I found, very challenging. I could only get maybe 1 to 2% of people to wrap their minds around this is to say, what, Tell me about the person who is searching this word.
So when people search for queen matt mattress sizes, what do they want? Everyone goes, they always say like, well, they want to know the size of queen mattresses. And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, why? What's happening in their life that they want to know that?
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Right?
[00:07:10] Speaker A: And it was, it was so hard to get people to think outside of just that one word.
And this is, it's like a problem I haven't solved. Like I don't know how to help people think broader than these like channels that they develop over time. Right. And so I'm curious, do you feel like, is that just a, it's an innate attribute. Is it something that we can learn?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: It is, it is something that we can learn.
This might be the educational process of marketing taking a step back, right? If you go, if you go back to the 20th century, so sort of pre Internet era, and you imagine an advertising agency and a client has come to the ad agency and they've said, hey, we're selling queen mattresses. You know, we want to develop a campaign to reach folks.
The natural question, right, the ad agency is going to say, who's our customer here? Are we talking super high end luxury buyers?
You know, you're charging 3, 4, $5,000 per mattress. Are we talking students at college who are getting their first, you know, queen size mattress? Are we talking about, you know, middle income families in suburbia? Are we talking about rural area buys?
Tell me who we're buying. Oh, maybe we're selling to commercial and industrial use cases where they're buying like tons of beds for, I don't know, like the military is buying, you know, a crap ton of queen beds. So it's bulk orders, very different. Like every one of those is different.
And of course the, the company is going to say, oh, okay, well we make this relative quality, this style, these features, it's for this audience, those kinds of things. And then the ad agency would say, great. With those target customers in mind, we are going to say, let's say it's students. Right. So individual students and their parents almost certainly. So therefore we are going to run local advertising in college towns and areas because we know that people aren't going to want to buy those mattresses before they come to college. Right. Because then they'll have to transport them a long distance.
So all those things are being thought of beforehand. But in the digital marketing era, we go queen mattress. Okay, how do I rank for that?
And all of those other questions, those intelligent sort of thoughtful product and marketing and audience research related questions are not there, but they can be and they'll make you more effective. One of the things I like to, I don't know if I like this but Paxton, when I look back on my career and I say, oh yeah, SEO, that was such a wonderful field for me and it really helped my company ride this rising tide and my personal brand too, I squint and I can see maybe a few dozen companies out of the millions that got built during the Internet era who essentially built dominant market positions because they were great at SEO.
Incredibly few, almost all the companies that had massive success over the last quarter century built it on brand first. They might have also done SEO, but that is not how they built their competitive advantage and their marketplace and their audiences.
Other channels were often more useful than brand being the primary one. But certainly there's a bunch of companies you can point to where you're like, oh yeah, they want on email, they want on sales and relationships, they want on social. Like there's more that one on social, I think than, than pure search. Search is something every company does, but it is not a competitive advantage, let's say.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. I was just thinking recently about like an analogy there where like the search tactic even you know, paid, it's kind of like that's the, you're laying the tracks, you're paving the road, but the success of the tracks is, is both in the tracks and in the cargo that's going down the tracks. And you can't build an entire company on just tracks without sending great cargo down.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: And I think some people interpret that to say, okay, so now SEO or paid search or whatever, these are subordinate to brand or.
But in my opinion, I think they're actually kind of like you need to clear the way still for the brand. Like you need to pave that way. You need to build the track so that you can deliver that brand message, but it's not the entire company. You know, the paid in search.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: I think that's good analogy. Yeah.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: So who do you think should own it?
Audience research. Then if you were, you know, waved your magic wand and say, here's this Fortune 500 company, who this company is, is going to own or maybe let's say even mid tier company, who owns that?
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. The good news or bad news if you're a smaller tier company is that Fortune 500, they all do huge amounts of audience research, like absolutely tons of it.
They tend not to use something like SparkToro. Like they'll go and buy the data, the raw data themselves and then do the analysis and have teams of analysts working on it. They'll buy market research data, they'll commission reports, all that kind of stuff. Right. They might go direct to, we use Dato, which are clickstream data provider, but they'll go to like three or four different clickstream providers and buy millions of dollars worth of data and then analyze that.
You go one tier down from that, maybe two tiers down from that, and you get into companies that are making between you know, 20 to $100 million of revenue annually.
Oftentimes they are doing little to no audience research.
And worse, they often assume that they're in a good place with it because they think that their agency is doing it for them. Right. Or consultants or marketing team. Right. So if you ask the CEO, like, hey, tell me about your audience research, they're like, well, marketing's taking care of that. They'll figure out who our customers are and where to reach them and what channels and tactics and which specific accounts to reach out to and where to target our PR efforts, all that kind of stuff.
And then you go dig into it and you're like, oh, they're not doing that at all.
Like nobody's, nobody's responsible. So I think it's a, gosh, what would I call it? It's when you know you should be doing something because it's good hygiene and good, a good breast practice and you know that it will improve your results, but it's on your important but not time sensitive list. And so you just push into the background, right? Like, I don't need it right now. What I do need right now is my boss is breathing down my neck to get this email campaign out. My boss is breathing down my neck to get our cost per click down. My boss is breathing down our neck to get our whatever number of new SQLs, you know, sales qualified leads up.
But my boss is not breathing down my neck saying, hey, are you making sure that the channels and tactics we're investing in are the best ones that match up to our audience's real behavior?
What's crazy is you can get your lunch eaten by your competitors if they do that and you don't.
You're right.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Right. I mean, it's often overlooked, I think, because it is so basic. It's what we learn in school when we first take our first marketing classes. You have to understand this audience.
I think a big transfer. I would. On the, you know, Fortune 500 companies that you're saying, you know, they invest a lot. Yes, absolutely. However, I feel like a lot of people would be surprised to learn the number of times like we meet with a marketing team at these giant organizations and they, they don't have that data or they have it in a deck that they never look at.
And you know, and so like you, you're still competing with barriers around like data silos. And now what do I do with this? Or it's so much information that I don't know how to process it.
So I think that's another area where people get stuck.
You know, I'm looking at all this information that has been provided to me. These are like dots. And then I have to figure out how do I connect them. Do you have any tips for people as they're staring at a sheet of data? How do you connect them in creative ways to better reach an audience?
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Oh, you know what I actually recommend now rather than, you know, rather than trying to like fight the tide and hey, you know, you should, you should get this data before you need. What I recommend now is do you have the problem that this data will solve?
So, for example, maybe your boss comes to you and says, hey, we've been thinking we need to do some more, you know, YouTube investment. Like we think that some of our customers. Can you like, go figure that out.
Okay, now your job is what percent of our audience is using YouTube, which channels are popular with them, what videos should we. What are, what are the options for tactics? Like, can we get on people's shows. Can we.
Should we do comment marketing in there? Right? Like old school type of stuff. Should we try to create our own YouTube channel? Should we buy like specific, you know, one to one advertising where we can sponsor a show and be mentioned by the host and talked about kind of like podcast advertising? Great, so now that's your job.
Now you should go do audience research. Like, now that you have the problem, go, go solve it with data rather than.
Well, boss, I spent a few hours watching some YouTube videos and like, here's what I learned. No, please, please don't do that.
Please, please get data at scale. Right? That is informative. The other thing, unfortunately, people are starting to do Paxton, they're starting to ask ChatGPT, like, hey, what percent of student mattress buyers in whatever the Salt Lake City area are using YouTube and which channels they subscribe to. And if you know anything about how large language models work, you know that what it will do for you is give you stereotyped answers, you know, spicy. Autocomplete these words.
Yeah. Very confidently. It will say, students in the Salt Lake, Greater Salt Lake city area use YouTube 84% of the time for their mattress research.
Like, where did that come from?
It came from, here's a bunch of documents on the Internet.
The word. You know the number 84% followed, you know, some research report that had the words YouTube and like students and mattress somewhere on the, on the document. And so ChatGPT presents that, and then you're like, oh, can you give me a source for that? And then you start clicking links and you're like, yep, none of this is, that's not true or accurate. Very few people unfortunately do the follow up to figure out, like, where does that come from? It's like asking ChatGPT for keyword research in SEO.
You know, it's a terrible idea. It's easily provable. You can say, how many times do people in Salt Lake City search for mattress variants and what are the most popular variants? And then you compare that actual cured research data. You're like, oh, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Because ChatGPT doesn't have the data. Right. It just, it's just giving you words that frequently come after other words on the Internet.
So you should go gather data from sources that collect it, you know, in a real way. And then you can upload that to your LLM of choice and get some interesting stuff. But I just, I just worry that, yeah, man, this, this research, if you need to do it, can go way off the rails if you don't, if you don't know what you're doing.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Anecdotally, I had a, I was in a CMO roundtable just last week and the question went around, what's, what's your favorite AI tool? How are you using it? And I was blown away at how many times people just said, chatgpt, that's just my only tool. And it does everything for me. It writes all my ads, it writes all my content. And, and on the one hand I was like, oh man, I'm kind of, I'm dubious about the output of that.
But on the other hand, too, so many of them are so strapped for resources and time. That's like, I get it, I get, you know, why you ended up there. But I think, and you know, this is not intended to be a commercial.
Yeah, yes, it does, it does.
But, you know, but to your point, it's like, whoever has the best data wins. And we are in a time now where there's so much data, great data, but spending that time like, again, I don't intend for this to be commercial, but SparkToro, we use SparkToro at 97th floor. And the amount of data that you get from that is so great and it's also so fast that I think is if you can take an extra two to five minutes and then work with AI, you know, you're going to be light years ahead if you're providing it with better data.
And I, I'm, I was interested to see how you, because you've, you know, I, you've made it clear how, you know, you're dubious of AI, and I think rightfully so.
So I was interested when you guys released the AI component into SparkToro, but you did it in a way that I think was very counterintuitive or how, like, it wasn't what I assumed it would be when I first read the headline.
Do you want to describe, like, your thought process into, like, having it be more about the search than it is about the data?
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what, you know, when, when we've been talking here, right, we basically said like, AI produces words that frequently come after other words. And if you need that, it's awesome for that. If you need to know, like, hey, what are the concepts and topics that are most associated with student housing in my, at this college, AI is going to do the absolute best job of, like, any product for that. It's really, really good where, where things fall apart is where you say, hey, give me information that, that this that it doesn't have. Right. So, like, privately collected, you know, clickstream data or my analytics data, or keyword research data, or, you know, any of those kinds of things in the marketing world, you need to send it that stuff first. Like, you've got to tell it, hey, here's all these things. So when we were designing this, we're talking about a feature called conversational queries that Paxton's referring to very kindly. It's something we just launched at SparkToro. Basically, the problem was lots of people have an audience that is hard to describe in, you know, as just people who visit a particular website or people who search for a particular keyword, or people who have a particular term in their bio or profile, job description, whatever.
And so Casey and I were always struggling with this. Casey is my co founder at sparkdorle. We were always struggling with, like, how do we make it so that people can describe exactly the audience that they want to go after? Like, if, you know, hey, I don't want everyone who visits my mattress website, or, for example, like, we're Ikea, like, people visit us for a bajillion reasons. Like, analyzing the IKEA audience is useless.
What we really want are students in Utah going to this university. They're in the greater Salt Lake City area. They're looking for their first mattress. They want a queen.
Tell me about that group of people.
Like, I. I want information about them. I want their demographics, I want their behaviors. I want to know what YouTube channels they subscribe to. I want to see which subreddits they're on. I want to know what podcast they're listening to. I need to know what websites they're visiting. I want to see what search keywords they're using, all that, all that stuff, so I can target my marketing.
And Casey and I were like, okay, actually, AI is a really good tool for you. Write a long description. It can be rambling, it can be short, it can be in bullet point forms, it could be sentences, it could be a few phrases.
You describe it, however, like your brain works.
The AI can then turn that into.
We essentially ask it for, hey, from whatever the user entered. Give us behaviors specifically like website search, keyword behavior, that kind of stuff. And then we will take the set of outputs, the sort of stereotyped outputs that it's given based on this, and we'll turn that into a group of audience behaviors, and then we'll analyze the audience that does those overlapping things.
That produces very accurate results.
Because AI is really good at stereotyping it's really good at saying commonalities of a set of words and turning that into this stuff.
So what's nice now is you can go to SparkToro and you can say, hey, my audience is software engineers in the UK who are heavily using, I don't know, Pearl, like from 15 years ago or whatever and tell me about that group. Or you can say, hey, my audience are early content creators who are buying their first high resolution digital camera.
They need to use it on the go.
They have these sorts of requirements. Great. You just describe the whole thing to us and we'll give you audience, like actual audience data about that group of people based on this translation layer that LLMs can do. We're not, we don't promote it as being like very AI centric. Like, yeah, sure, it uses a large language model, but it's not, you know, we're not an AI powered tool or anything. We're just using AI to make this one process that it's good at easier, which in my opinion is how all software companies should be using AI. Do your, do your customers have a real problem?
Is that problem best solved by a large language model? Great, do that.
If the answers to those are no, you don't need to adopt AI.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Right, yeah, there's some parity there, I think, between that view and what you had stated earlier about how to and when to employ audience research where it's like, I'm not going to just do it randomly and all the time I'm going to say, I have this specific use case and this thing that needs to be solved. Is this the right answer, like, way to solve it?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Right.
Yeah, yeah, I think that there's.
Look, is there value in doing, you know, sort of some research ahead of time where you're like, hey, I want to understand how AI works. I want to not be behind the curve. Great, yeah, do that. I'm not saying you should stop that. Same thing with audience research. Do you want to, like every year do a few reports to like get a sense of your various different audiences? Okay, like, what's changing with them? Oh, gosh, you know what, they're using more Reddit than I thought or hey, these people are starting to adopt AI tools. My audience starting to adopt AI tools at much faster than average.
Great. But like, yeah, it does not, it does not need to be.
You can have the problem and then get the solution.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So one thing that I, as I reflect on, like our work as an agency over the years, they're like the, our biggest, best campaigns, all of them have some connection with an insight into this audience and that allows for innovation or twisting something on its head or doing something they haven't seen before, all in the name of like converting. So I'm interested in, you know, as we like finding that insight faster and finding more unique insight ends up then being the name of the game if that's the genesis of every great marketing campaign.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: And so I'm curious one thing we've been stuck on and this maybe you've, you've, we've already touched on this, but I do want to hit on a little bit more. There's a degree of serendipity both in the research and the execution.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: Recent data shows that brands are seeing a 30 to 50% decrease in traffic because of Google's AI overviews. That's an enormous traffic loss. If this is something you're thinking about, either because you need to recover traffic or stay ahead of all the changes in AI search, I want to offer you a completely free AI overview audit. I'm Brittany Dillard, a senior SEO strategist at 97th Floor, and our teams use this exact audit for our clients to discover where brands sit in AI Overview results compared to competitors.
This AIO audit informs our strategy for how to drive more conversions as AI continues to develop in search. And we've been able to help brands maintain conversions and therefore revenue even while search traffic drops. If you're interested in getting this comprehensive AI overview audit done for your brand completely free, head on over to 97th floor.com AI audit and fill out the form on that page so our team can get started. A link to that page will also be in the show notes. And trust me, you want to take advantage of this one.
[00:29:06] Speaker D: Hey everyone, it's Emma Lammy here. I produce the campaign and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing and AI news. There's been a lot of hype about LLM traffic and whether it converts better than organic search. Some in the industry claim it accelerates the journey, delivers more qualified leads, maybe even outperforms Google. But when will Guevara and his team dug into the numbers? The story turns out to be more nuanced. Looking across 54 websites, both B2B and B2C, here's what they found.
Organic traffic converted at 4.6%. LLM referrals converted at 4.87%. That's only a 0.27 percentage point lift and statistically it wasn't significant even after filtering for high traffic sites. The slight edge for LLM didn't hold up, but both channels performed about the same. The kicker is scale Organic search drove nearly one third of all sessions and conversions. LLM traffic drives less than 1%, so the takeaway is clear. Organic still leads the pack. Yes, LLMs are emerging as a real channel, and some industries like financial services or travel are seeing glimmers of higher conversion.
But for most sites, LLM referrals remain a rounding error. For marketers, the best move right now is to track and monitor LLM traffic, learn which pages are surfacing and treat it as a growing but still secondary piece of the search landscape. Here's a stat that might surprise you. Nearly one in ten people in the UK who receive a piece of mail will go on to visit the advertiser's website. That's According to fresh Q2 data from JIC Mail, and it's the highest engagement rate we've ever seen since the pandemic. The average piece of direct mail now holds someone's focus for about 145 seconds. Compare that to the fleeting scroll of a social feed and as JIC Mail's Mark Cross puts it, mail prompts up to 80 times more undivided attention than a social Some more numbers 76.5% of recipients at least read or glanced at the mail 5.3% went on to make a purchase, half of those online.
And time spent with mail is up year on year. Door drops alone now get about a full minute of attention per item. All of this points to a bigger Trend. Even in 2025's hyper digital marketing landscape, physical mail is proving itself as a high attention action driving channel.
Retail media has been the fastest growing channel in advertising, projected to hit 177 billion globally this year. It's been built on a simple better returns in search and social. But what happens when AI delivers even better results without retailers in the loop? That's exactly the question raised by new research from Microsoft. For the past two years, they've quietly tested ads inside Copilot, their AI assistant. The results 73% higher click through rates, 16% stronger conversions and journeys that are 33% shorter than traditional search. In other words, customers trust the agent, not the website. Think about it. Instead of going to Walmart.com, you just tell your AI I'm making tacos for Stix tonight. Give me the best deals. The agent compares prices, applies coupons and completes the purchase without you ever seeing a single sponsored product listing. That's a nightmare scenario for retail media because the highest margin revenue streams on site ads vanish overnight. Even off site targeting loses power when AI agents hold the transaction data too. The one area that might survive in store media and physical displays. Now it's not all doom and gloom. Consumers aren't there yet. 57% of US shoppers haven't even heard of AI shopping. And Giants like Walmart and Amazon are taking opposite approaches. Amazon is opening up its AI interoperability while Amazon is building walls with its own closed ecosystem. But the writing is on the wall. AI advertising is proving itself more performant than anything retail media has offered. The question isn't if this disrupts retail media margins, it's when. For brands and retailers, the playbook might look like treat AI agents like VIP customers, invest in authentic reviews and get ready for outcome based pricing where you pay for results, not impressions. Bottom line is that retail media may still be booming, but Microsoft's copilot experiment shows us the future. And if retailers don't adapt, AI could kill the golden goose.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Now back to years ago you talked about like investing in serendipity, which is like, you know, I'm gonna invest in some things. I'm not sure if I'm gonna get ROI on that. We'll see.
I also find that like with research, a lot of our best ideas come from serendipitous insight where we weren't necessarily looking for it, but we were looking for learnings. But we learned, hey, there's this weird thing about this audience that they do this. You know, we just did this with a pickleball paddle company and we learned, you know, what is a really big deal in the pickleball world is who your partner is. There's like a partner appreciation day. And like it's actually a really, it's almost like another relationship, who your partner is. And so can we do some campaign on that? But we didn't go looking for that insight. It was just kind of, we were just looking around and it's hard to tell a marketer. Just keep looking until you find something. And I can't tell you if that's going to come in five minutes or five days.
Right.
So I'm just curious, like the serendipitous nature of research and those big ideas, what would you tell a marketer today? Like should they be investing their time in that or with how it being unpredictable, is there more methodical way to look at it?
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, man, there's, there's so many threads to pull on this. Okay, so what one thread to pull for sure is that serendipitous marketing has never been more valuable because almost every channel and tactic where you can, you know, hey, I'm going to invest a dollar here. I know I'll get a dollar and a penny back.
Almost every channel like that is completely saturated, incredibly competitive. Think Google AdWords or, you know, meta ads or LinkedIn ads or whatever.
Like those spaces where you just pay to play.
Those are filled with every single company you're competing against. Everyone.
The Fortune 500, the startups with tons of VC cash to burn, the AI companies. Like everybody is pouring dollars into those channels and as a result, it's very, very difficult to have any kind of competitive advantage.
But the inverse is also true, which is any channel where you can't quickly prove ROI, right? And you don't have great metrics around it. CMOs hate it, CFOs hate it. So nobody invests money there. Which is why people are like, oh my God. You know, we did some billboard advertising and we saw a crazy lift in branded search, for example, in our area. Or we did some guerrilla campaigns with like, you know, posters and like, you know, just tacking them up on telephone poles around our city.
Oh my God, like we saw a 15 lift in month over month sales from this weird thing that cost us like 500 bucks to have some neighborhood scamps like run around and you know, tack these things up like, oh my God. Or, and, and the thing is, you can't prove that the 15 lift came from that. You can't prove that anybody saw, you know, your ad on a telephone pole. Same thing with, oh, we can't prove that because, you know, a bunch of Reddit threads in this subreddit started talking about our brand and company.
We had more sales. We can't prove it because there's no direct link. The referral strings missing on, on mobile. Reddit doesn't even pass referral link even if there was a link. Redditors hate links. They hate sales. Like all that kind of stuff. You were mentioned on a YouTube video. Great. And then what happens? Somebody goes to Google and searches for you and the CFO is like, yeah, put more money into Google.
You know, like just everything comes right, comes back to this. So those channels and tactics, those serendipitous ones, the hard to prove, hard to measure, huge opportunity, your competitors are not putting dollars into it. And that's dumb. It's just, it's just dumb. Like anybody who's, there's no one who has this conversation with me who's like, well, I don't believe that. Everybody agrees and yet nobody puts their money where their mouth is.
So you can be the exception and win that way.
The other thing I'd say about serendipity in terms of ideas is that it's frustrating. Almost nobody does this. But yes, there is a huge amount of value in gaining a deep understanding of your audience and customers and being open minded to opportunities that come from that understanding. I'll give you an example.
We so at SparkToro after, you know, sort of. So Elon bought Twitter, what was that? Like, like November of 22 from like maybe March of 23. SparkToro was, was initially built like our key data source. Our primary data source was Twitter. Yeah, we had to get off of that, rebuild our whole system. We built it on top of clickstream data instead of, which has lots of benefits and I like it better for a million reasons. But it's also extremely expensive and hugely time consuming, which is why we didn't start with it.
So fast forward 18 months and SparkToro had basically had declined about 15%.
And we were kind of cruising, plateauing, flatlining. In terms of growth.
Casey and I were looking at each other like, this sucks, man. Like, we were on this great growth trajectory. Everything was going gangbusters. And then this, you know, like big data change.
We commissioned Asia Orangio from Demand Maven to do some research for us. Basically customer research. Like, hey, her process is she goes and interviews like, you know, 20 of your best customers for your SaaS product. Interviews 20 people who are, who, who look like, right, they have like all the, all the attributes of those best customers but are not yet using or tried the product but didn't adopt it.
And she asked them a bunch of questions about their usage and their behavior and what are they doing. She came back to us with this like bunch of research, a bunch of videos. Like she has video calls with everybody so we can watch the videos and stuff. And she's like, here's the reality. You think, you being Casey and I, you think that people are using SparkToro to say, Hey, I need to do some YouTube marketing, which channel, you know, which YouTube channels do I need to do that on and where? And let me get the email addresses of the people running those channels so I can do outreach to them or you know, plug them into my Google Ads account or whatever it is.
She was like, that is, that's like 20, 30% of SparkToro use. Most of the SparkToro use is people go to the report, they download the CSV and then they make A pretty chart or graph which takes them forever that they can put in a spreadsheet or in a presentation and show their boss or team or client to try and get budget to do the investment.
That's the like SparkToro is way more strategic, high level. Prove that a channel is worth investment, way less tactical. Find the channel. And we were like, oh crap. We've been building all these like things to help the 20 or 30% and nothing to help these people. You know, we should do, we should make customizable pretty graphs right in the product for every single section so that when you get the report, it's super visual. We launched that in May and then we had like our best three months in a row, you know, tons of people using it and like it was, it was great. Like it was very serendipity, right? It's like, it's like go do the research, find this opportunity and then like build the thing that people want.
Oh my God, look at that. A bunch of growth even in a really rough time for the SaaS market.
So geez, I mean, to your point, I can't recommend that enough, but so few people are willing to do it.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, so true.
You cut up at the very end of that.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Oh, it's so frustrating that it's. Yeah, yeah, it totally works. But so few people are willing to do it.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
I want to get into just very quick to towards the end here, your thoughts. I mean you've been quite prolific on your thoughts around Google and AI and the future of search as a channel. And I know you just held a webinar with datos sharing some of your findings there. I'd love to. Would you mind sharing some of the, the highlights from that?
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Oh, sure.
So there's lots of speculation, Paxton, I'm sure you've seen it, that AI is replacing search or reducing the amount of search activity if you squint really hard at all the numbers.
So we use desktop numbers, which is way friendlier to AI, right? Like AI tools are far more used on desktop than they are on mobile.
If you squint really hard, you cannot find the narrative in the numbers.
AI is absolutely growing and during the last two years where AI has gone from 18% of Americans using it to almost 40%, like 38% of Americans visiting an AI tool once a month or more.
Search has not declined like visits. Number of searches per searcher, number of total searches, Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo.
There's no slope to those graphs.
They bounce around a Little bit.
Maybe you could look at one month and be like, oh, but look, it looks a little down here. No, you can't find it.
And when people say AI is taking my traffic away, I agree with them 100%. But it is not in the way you think. It is not people are switching from Google to ChatGPT or perplexity or Deep Seek or Claude.
It is people using Google and Google instantly answering results using AI or AI overviews or whatever and zero click searches rising.
That's the reality. And rising far more on mobile than they are on desktop. Like I think we looked and it's Maybe, you know, zero click searches are 10% up, 5 to 10% up on desktop, but on mobile, you know, it's off the charts, right? And so look, the, the media narrative is really powerful. Like if you want to get clicks, as a journalist, you should write a story about how ChatGPT is decimating Google. People will click on that shit, right? They will read your story and you will get some money. And so, and that is why that media narrative is so prevalent. Same thing with AI taking people's jobs. Like if you look at the big Stanford study that was done a little while ago, you can be like, oh, okay, for entry level jobs and like these five roles, you can see a 13% decline, you know, since the AI era, ChatGPT is taking like, you know, less jobs than tariffs are.
Like, it's just, you know, it's so, it's just so obvious in the data. But journalists aren't going to write about that because that doesn't get clicks. Your, your Aunt Sally is like, oh my God, Paxton, you're not going to have a job next month. I just read in the New York Times, you know, like, yeah, it's fear that sells. And so that, that fear, that newness that like you should be scared of the new thing, that narrative is all over the place and the data does not support that. So that was one of the biggest findings. I think one of the other interesting findings going down in the details is there is a little bit of a decline of YouTube's dominance in desktop visitation. So like YouTube, I think a lot more YouTube activity is switching to mobile devices and the mobile app people are watching less YouTube on their desktops. This is true in both the United States and the EU and uk.
That's an interesting behavior change from years past where, you know, more than 75% of all devices were watching lots of YouTube videos every month.
Reddit, on the other hand, the reverse, we are seeing, you Know, it's, it's now over a quarter of US devices are active on Reddit every month.
That platform looks like it's on the rise. On desktop, their mobile app installs have been huge. They've been in the top 10 on the Apple Store and the Google Play Store.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:46:04] Speaker B: I think, yeah, there's some interesting changes that are happening around that stuff. Another big one that I think is really interesting is about 20% of Americans now are heavy AI users. So meaning they visit one or more of the AI tools 10 or more times each month.
20% heavy users, and yet those same people perform more searches on average than the average Google searcher.
So you know what that tells me? It tells me that like, this 20% of heavy AI tool users are also heavy Google search users. These are not cannibalistic. That group of people are just heavy Internet, like, researchy type people. I bet it's people like you and me, right? Like, I do a lot of chatgpt. I do a lot of Googling, I do a lot of redditing, I do a lot of YouTube. I'm, I'm probably a terminally online person, right?
And like a fifth of American devices are that.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: I think we've potentially made a mistake in conflating the two to say, like, ChatGPT is the new Google.
When it's like, I mean, someone else could say, hey, Facebook came along. This is going to eat up Google. It's like, not necessarily.
[00:47:23] Speaker B: Those are two different tools.
Yeah.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: And I'm curious, the flight from YouTube, do you have a theory as to why? Like, do you think advertising and like, increase in ad, like ad interruptions versus the quick answers of Reddit, or do you have any theories as to the flight from YouTube?
[00:47:44] Speaker B: I, if I had to guess, especially over the last two years, I would say it's TikTok. I think, I think TikTok and short form video, you know, Instagram reels, I think that's taking some of it. YouTube shorts for sure is doing well also.
But yeah, I don't think there's a death knell for YouTube at all. Like, you know, we're talking about a maybe 5, 6% drop on desktop, but my guess is a lot of that is just switching to mobile. So people are like, oh, I, I like watching YouTube on my mobile device more than I like watching it on desktop.
That's my theory.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
Well, I am so grateful to you for your time on the show. This has been a really great conversation. I just want to Wr up with one call to action for actually probably a couple. One from a, like, marketing philosophy perspective would be invest in audience research.
Too many marketers have channel blinders on and they're fighting for incremental improvement. But the way you're going to put your company on the map is going to be through big swings. And the big swings become less reckless and less risky when you have solid audience insights and you know it's going to resonate. So you got to take those risks, got to take those swings. And to be honest, it's more fun. It's way more fun than fighting for an extra 3% here, an extra 4% there.
So, like, have fun. So that's my call to action for, for people listening today. Rand, you've got so much stuff going on. You have Spark Together coming up. What would you like to call attention to and like, how. What would you like people to engage with?
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Gosh. So we, we talked today about this.
The status report. You can find a bunch of those charts and graphs. If you want to, like, prove this to your boss, your team, your client on the SparkToro blog or dados has their first half of 2025 state of search research from all their clickstream data that I worked on with them that is also published. You can grab that report bagel PDF.
The thing I would say is these macro trends are interesting, they're fascinating. I care about them, they're fun to discuss.
But what you care about is your audience.
You care about whether your users are adopting AI tools at greater than average rates. You care about whether your users are using more AI, more YouTube or more Reddit or more Pinterest or TikTok or whatever it is.
And to figure that out, you need data at scale that is passively collected. You know, and monitoring this stuff, you cannot ask people in surveys and interviews to give you this information.
It's like asking people, hey, what did you buy at the grocery store last year?
What? No, just look at the receipts. Like, like go look at the receipts. And, and clickstream data is looking at the receipts. You can use SparkToro for this. There's other products out there you can use. Certainly you can do custom buys with the clickstream providers. But I would, I would urge you to find out what your audience pays attention to, where those opportunities are, not just the macro level. Just because AI tools are on the rise doesn't mean they're on the rise with your audience. Just because YouTube is declining slightly on desktop doesn't mean they're declining with your audience. Just because Reddit's getting adopted doesn't mean your audience is on there. And if they are, which subreddits are they on and what are they talking about? And like, what do they care about? You should know those things. That's. That's part of your job as a marketer, even if your CMO didn't tell you.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it and thankful for everything that you do in the industry to share your knowledge.
[00:51:27] Speaker B: Yeah, my pleasure. Paxton. Thanks for having me, man. Take care. Okay, take care.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: Bye.
That's all for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Huge thank you to Rand Fishkin for joining us today. Be sure to check out Rand's study with Datos on the impact of AI in search and check out his upcoming event, Spark Together.
You can find past episodes of the campaign and marketing tools and
[email protected]. You can also learn more about the agency and get in touch with a marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns. That's all for now. Thank you for listening and we'll see you back here next week. Until then, keep innovating, keep converting.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: It.
