Show Transcript

Noah:Rand, it's amazing to see you. How you doing today?

Rand Fishkin: I'm good Noah, yeah, great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Noah: Here, there we go. Okay, let's do this. Very exciting. So Riverside FM is awesome, but it's also super frustrating for one thing, which is like, let's start the room. It's like super frustrating. So welcome everybody for our third edition of Campfire Chats. We have with us the one, the only My North Star in terms of like how to behave in public. I've learned so much about communicating.

Reading so much of the stuff that you've produced whiteboard Fridays were my steady diet for years when I just worked in a bike shop. I spent the winners working in a bike shop, consuming anything I could find on Moz.com while we waited for customers to walk in once an hour on a cold Island called Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts.

like first conference, MozCon local, second conference, MozCon local, MozCon, MozCon, MozCon.

Rand Fishkin: Wow.

Noah: Just you've meant the world to me and to so many of our members. So it's just, it's amazing to have you here. And it's just amazing. So before we jump in, I just want to say hi and thanks to all of our sponsors really quickly. We just got a brand new community partner, which I'm super stoked on. We got Ahrefs, which is super, super rad for us. I just feel like having them as a community partner, having you on as a guest just kind of feels like we're

finally hitting a crazy stride and we're just doing so much good stuff. Dryfly Digital is another community partner. We also have Citation Labs run by Garrett French.

We also have Bento who handles our email for us, which is amazing. You should check them out for your transactional stuff. Aerox is just an amazing community partner too.

So without further ado, Rand, it's just so great to have you here. I know you want to walk us through demystifying the internet.

Just for everybody at home, we're gonna do two chunks here. Rand's gonna give us a deck, and then after that, we're gonna have an organic conversation where I get to ask him a bunch of questions I've been noodling on for a couple weeks now. Rand, take it away, it's all yours.

Rand Fishkin: All right, my friend Noah, thank you for that incredibly kind intro. And since we have got a lot to share, I am gonna kick off. All right, great. You guys can see my screen there. Looks beautiful. And I am gonna fly through this deck. Noah, I'm gonna make sure that you have a copy of this and you can distribute it to anyone who's on your list and in your community.

That way, folks who are thinking like, oh no, I didn't get it. I missed that one. Don't worry. No one's going to send it to you. All right. So basically what I'm going to walk through today, seven different theories, 50 different charts, five takeaways, try and explain what the heck is going on in digital marketing right now.

And I warn you, there'll be references to 2024, but obviously still relevant in the very first part of 2025 here. So.

I have this theory that maybe one of the big challenges that's going on in digital marketing and sort of the landscape of people trying to find jobs and clients and, you know, boost their sales was around this spike, kind of, kind of spike and then slump that happened from COVID. And you can kind of see it here. This is a timeline of internet use.

You see that slowing growth in internet adoption.

that happens, this is global internet adoption. Essentially what has happened is we've kind of tapped out, the developed and many developing countries, we've tapped out in terms of growth. And so the web use is just not growing.

We're at the slowest adoption of web growth in 30 years. You can see the number of people using the internet and where that growth is coming from is mostly, most of the growth is Asia and Africa at this point. Percentage of people using the internet.

This is quite exciting actually.

folks might be familiar, the Biden administration launched this big infrastructure program. It was sort of the hallmark of their administration. And it helped the last 70 % of folks in the United States who still didn't have internet access.

A lot of rural and suburban communities here get internet access. And now high speed internet penetration is at 97 plus percent, which is just incredible in the US. Obviously this is quite life-changing for a lot of folks who previously didn't have it.

Internet adoption.

Rand Fishkin: Well, you like you look at the developed countries here and you gotta be thinking to yourself like, man, you know, that is 90, we're talking about 95 % plus. Like there's just not a lot of room for growth that there used to be. And so this is also true. Also true when we get to time spent using the internet, like there's not a lot of opportunity for more time in our days.

So during COVID, we had that.

Riverside is giving me a little message that it's having some struggling device stuff. Okay.

Noah: Your audio is great. Your audio is great in this and your deck is great. You're bumping around, but we're good.

Rand Fishkin: Okay, well, I'm not. All right, I'm not going to worry about Riverside. If my video gets a little choppy, don't don't worry about it and we'll be we'll be fine from there. So yeah, not a lot of opportunity in terms of growth of time spending online either. Right. Like COVID was sort of the hype. I don't think we're getting back there anytime soon. So those of Plateau, you can also see this in terms of e-commerce spiking during COVID and then not

not slumping, right? It didn't go down. It's just that the growth rate is no longer what it was. And a lot of companies predicted that their growth rates would look like they did during COVID.

So my verdict on this first theory is that it's true. The plateau is real. Future growth, especially in wealthy countries, is zero sum. Meaning, if you're winning, someone else is losing in your market, generally speaking.

Obviously, there's GDP growth.

like raw economic growth, but those tend to be in low single digits. And as most of the sort of financial institutions in the US have estimated, obviously the tariffs and other economic decisions from the new administration probably gonna harm GDP growth in at least the United States, although it could help grow places like China, Russia, Brazil, other countries outside of the US domain.

But that may be where opportunity comes from in the future as the US sort of self tanks. I don't know how to describe what's going on. right. Theory number two.

Maybe the problem is the economy is the economy. Why marketing feels so hard right now. Well, I want to be clear that the last three weeks are very different from the sort of six months prior to that.

And I don't have data on the last three weeks to present to you, but I can show you kind of up until January of 2025.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin: what was going on. And that is, I don't know, business spending rising at historically record breaking rates, GDP growth, quite incredible, especially starting in Q4 2020 to about until Q4 of 2024. Like we had really, really impressive GDP growth. US unemployment rates are at historical lows.

At least until January, we'll see what the January figures look like. But, we had essentially that one COVID year of nasty unemployment, but then employment just remarkable. Wages outpacing inflation.

know that to many Americans and probably many people around the world, it doesn't feel like wage growth outpaces the rate of inflation, but technically it did.

I think it would be more reasonable to complain about inflation versus wage growth from like 2001 to 2010 versus the last few years. But, you know, I think one of the challenges that we have to deal with, especially in the United States, Noah, is media, right? And the media sort of creates this sense that inflation is outpacing wage.

And I think a lot of people feel that way, right? Because the products of the store cost more.

You don't think that's because of inflation. You think I did a better job. Like I deserve this promotion. I got this raise. I'm making more money. So it's kind of this weird, weird sentiment thing.

And the statistical data can help us fill in those gaps. Bankruptcies, right? So maybe lots of companies are going out of business. Maybe that's the problem.

And well, it doesn't look massive compared to historical norms. So...

I'm not sure. Maybe it's 10 % higher than kind of the prior 10 years, at least the 2024 data was. So possible, possible. I think, you know, most of the media and sort of pundits have noted that the new administration, new presidential administration in the United States is inheriting one of the strongest economies that an American president has ever inherited and certainly well above the rest of the G7.

Rand Fishkin: So yeah, a sort of a great, great time. It was a great time to become president because I think you can take credit for a great economy. Global ad spend. So this is going to the marketing world. I looked at Warp Media, who I think puts together a really excellent report on this. Gosh, you media spend and advertising spend is not just up. If you look at the slope of those curves, it's really impressively high. So.

I don't know. I really have trouble finding truth to the it's the economy problem. I think there's there's absolutely a challenge where the sort of bottom 25 to 30 percent of wage earners and workers and citizens living in rich countries are suffering quite a bit.

And generally, governments, especially in the United States, are doing a very poor job of serving those folks.

But if you're looking at sort of the overall GDP, overall business spending, overall advertising spending, marketing spending, yeah, it sure looks to us like this is in a good spot. Theory number three. Maybe one of the biggest challenges going on in digital marketing world is that opportunity that we historically associated with social platforms is flat or declining. Like a lot, you know, a ton of us got a ton of value from

whatever it was, Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit or YouTube over the past, you know, 10, 15 years. And perhaps something is going wacky with those. So I tried to look at this.

This is from Sensor Tower who monitors app engagement. I really like their data. I've worked with them on a few studies over the years. And you can see here that, well, you know, Facebook...

Instagram, TikTok, like the only one that really is down in terms of usage substantially is Twitter. TikTok is actually quite down, I think, because a lot of the fears around the US banning them. But the other ones have relatively steady, you know, we had that spike during COVID, now we're a little plateauing.

So maybe that's what's going on. Obviously, the Twitter drop is massive. Anyone who's been on Twitter can see that.

Rand Fishkin: of the engagement is gone, people are not as active there. I myself am no longer active there except really to sort of post links to our blog and Facebook. Engagement is certainly lower generally speaking than it has been historically for most brands. You can see the median engagement per post is just pathetically low. unless you have millions of people following your brand, you're probably not getting a ton of benefit.

out of Facebook.

Noah: That was that was point six zero

That's six.

Rand Fishkin: 0.063 % I mean just wild and that's not the worst right so like you know Twitter is half that 0.029 Instagram you know still almost half a percent which which feels decent at this point but yeah I know you probably remember years ago when we complained when Facebook dropped from like 5 % to 1 % now it's just just pathetically low

Noah: You

Noah: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: By the way, rival IQ produces this report every year. I recommend going and checking them out and subscribing to the annual report from rival IQ. think that they do a really excellent job. have sort of tens of thousands of brands that they monitor. And so they're able to get this data across all of this. TikTok is an interesting one. Media and engagement there is much higher than almost any other platform. We'll see whether and how this lasts as the platform sort of goes through some political and other changes.

YouTube engagement is not great, but if you are a top performing channel, it is excellent. So you can see like anything above 1 % in the social media sphere is just remarkable. And yeah, if you have the right type of audience, right type of growth, you can do really well on YouTube.

Reddit is another really interesting one. That's been growing massively.

TikTok has grown users faster, threads has grown users faster, blue sky is growing users faster, but Reddit is growing engagement per user the fastest. So that's what we're looking at, growth of average time spent per day with social networks in 2024. Pinterest is an interesting one.

They're kind of like the tortoise and hare model. Like they've just had this slow, steady, nice little like growth rate year over year.

And they're an interesting place. you're in the right sector, I Pinterest can be quite an opportunity. I shared some of that on Blue Sky recently and some folks who are Pinterest marketing specialists replied and had some great tips.

So you can check that out. Threads and Blue Sky, think both really interesting growth platforms. Blue Sky just crossed 30 million users and they've only been live a year.

Very, very impressive for a non-venture backed upstart, you know, all remote company.

25 or 30 employees. So quite impressive, but let's be realistic. Threads grows by a blue sky almost every month. So threads is just a hugely, hugely powerful and dominant platform and they're going to surpass Twitter's usage this year, almost certainly.

So if you're looking for a place to sort of maximize your reach threads is a place to potentially go. I like blue sky a lot in the marketing sphere.

Rand Fishkin: Great marketers are on there, they engage there. That's where I found kind of my community. So, okay, verdict, I think, kind of mixed here, right? Like, reach keeps falling, potential reach is higher, but only maybe threads, Reddit and Pinterest, I'd add Blue Sky to this, are growing fast enough to outweigh the competitive volume that's going on. So yes, I think it is harder to stand out in social than before, harder to get traction and engagement.

For anyone who is getting a lot of value from Twitter, which includes Spark Toro, that was where 40, 50 % of our customers used to come from. That really, really hit us hard when Elon bought that platform and kind of tanked it a few years ago. And we have experienced a lot of pain from that.

if you're a big Twitter sort of value getter, you probably experienced something similar. By the way, side note, important side note.

There's one channel where engagement has it falling off a cliff. Noah, do you want to take a guess what it is?

Noah: LinkedIn.

Rand Fishkin: Good guess, but it's email. Email, email for 25 years, a quarter century, emails engagement rate has not budged. This number over here, you see this 34 % number up in the top part, that is not sort of a real growth. That's because iOS devices and Apple's mail changed how they preview open rates. And so it's not a real change. Basically,

Noah: Nah.

Rand Fishkin: We've hovered around 22, 23 % for 25 years in email. Email marketing just keeps working despite all these predictions that every new generation, oh my God, know, millennials, they never have email. Oh no, Gen Z, they never get email. Guess what? People turn 21, they graduate from college or they get their first job or they have to register for the DMV. Like people get email and they use it and they open it and by your 30s, email becomes...

Adopted by everyone so I don't buy the generational argument hasn't been true the last Quarter century probably won't be true in the future There you go theory number four Could it be possible that LLMs are challenging search market share and like that's really causing this this huge up upheaval in the marketing space so I looked at this with dados who's our clickstream data provider for spark toro You've probably seen a bunch of studies for me with them

We looked at perplexities growth. looked at chat GBT and its competitors as growth. You can see the chat GBT kind of outweighs everybody else on this list.

We looked at sort of visits per month and how these things are growing. Absolutely. There's no doubt about it that these things are growing. Almost everyone who uses an AI tool, however, also uses Google, also is using traditional search at nearly the volume of everybody else.

So best I can tell.

This is a lot more like the adoption of, I don't know, Google Analytics or the adoption of Excel or the adoption of Google Docs or something like that than it is a competitor. 99.8 % of AI tool users are also using traditional search engines, similarly to how non-AI users are using them.

So this, I just don't buy it. I know I see it in my LinkedIn feed every day. I'm sure you do too. Just not going on.

So we looked at kind of like the estimated visits from similar web and estimated search volume from Dados and tried to map this out. And you can see just how hugely dominant Google and also YouTube are. Facebook, this is visits, right?

That blue line, the pink line is what we think might be searches. So this is a generous interpretation of searches. ChatGPT has some recent data from...

Rand Fishkin: SEM rush came out, I think yesterday, the day before, my king was promoting that on blue sky and 70 75 % of, you know, searches or prompts in chat GPT don't have a correlated search intent like they do in Google. So I, I just don't think, I think you can basically say maybe 2 billion searches happen on chat GPT, but most of it is productivity types of stuff.

You were to assume that every single prompt, every single prompt entered into chat GPT was the equivalent of a Google search. This is what market share would look like. Oops.

So please don't take this chart and send it around and say, Rand Fishkin says chat GPT has 4 % market share and search. No, Rand Fishkin says, if you were to treat every single prompt on chat GPT as like a Google search, Google would still be, you know, 20 times bigger. So.

I want to I want to catch that We also looked at searches per searcher over the course of time in 2024 It's not shrinking like it's not going down if AI tools were replacing You know search we would expect these numbers to be going down and I I have I haven't published yet I hope to publish it next week. I have data showing 2023 compared to 2024 in terms of Google searches per searcher

Noah: Okay.

Rand Fishkin: And that number has gone up by 20%, which by the way, is exactly what Sundar Pichai said on the earnings call on Monday. Right? So Google out of their earnings call, I think Monday or Tuesday. Yeah.

Noah: That mobile, the mobile in both EU and US is catching my eye. The shrinkage in both those stacks.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so apparently in warmer months people search less on their phones. So as it gets warmer, so year over year, it's not, there's not a big difference. But yes, I think once I have the full graph for the full years, I'll point those out and try and show those. Yeah, you're right. The May decline looks severe, but apparently that's happened every year. So just FYI.

Noah: Heh.

Noah: I just got caught up in seasonality.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, it's an easy mistake to make that I make it too. All right. Another thing to think about with LLMs is that this is a great analysis from similar web here looking at traffic sent out. ChatGPT sends out less than 2 % of all its sessions to any other site, including the openai.com by the way. And Gemini, know, the open web just is not getting traffic from these. Don't get me wrong, some is going out, right? Like people are looking in their analytics, especially in B2B.

in seeing some referrers from AI tools, but as a percent of use, it is nothing like Google or Bing or even some of the social ones. So, best we can tell, LLMs are not making a dent in Google search usage. They are growing.

So, I think this is additive, not competitive. Theory number five, are clicks dying? Maybe no one's sending traffic anymore, and this is really hurting digital marketers.

and what we do. there's no good quality studies on this one. And so we had to do it ourself, which means I need some really good data. I have recommended dados to a lot of people.

I love what they do in terms of clickstream. Their panel is very good and high quality. I worked with their data team a whole bunch and we go back and forth a lot.

I often find things in there where I'm like, wait, why is this happening this way? And they always have a really good explanation for me.

I trust their data, that's why we use them and pay for it. Why are we using Clickstream here? Because it gives us every URL visited by a consistent panel of users.

So we can see like the same million people, 10 million people, whatever it is, over time and every URL that their browser visits, which means every keyword that they search for. These are real humans, not bots, because it's a constructed panel. And there's no sample bias except for the panel itself.

which admittedly there can be some bias in the panel. There are some problems in here. One is it can't capture app usage. So we can't see what happens in the TikTok app, mobile app.

We can't see what happens in the Facebook mobile app or the Instagram mobile app or the Google search app on Android, which we think is responsible for somewhere between 50 and 60 % of all searches that happen on an Android device. So mobile web, yes. Mobile apps, no.

Rand Fishkin: Whether anyone still sends clicks, and here is the data. Google essentially is sending two thirds of all the outgoing traffic on the internet. If you combine the other search engines, which is essentially Bing, DuckDuckGo, et cetera, we get to about 75%. So three quarters of all traffic sent on the internet comes from traditional search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, et cetera.

The 22 sites that send the most traffic to the web's long tail. These are like not the top few hundred sites, but everybody else. It's almost all Google.

If traffic is your metric, Google is kind of your only solution. And bad news, Google continues to send, Google and the other search engines continue to send less and less traffic to the long tail versus sort of the top few hundred sites.

So Google is sending more traffic to YouTube, more traffic to Reddit, more traffic to Wikipedia, more traffic to Microsoft and to chat GPT and opening up to the big domains and less and less to all the rest of us. And that is pretty disheartening. 75 % of traffic referrals from search, 14 % from social.

So social is still the sort of second largest and 11 % is everything else on the internet.

and that's what you care about.

We got to look at Google, right? That's where it's all coming from. So we did this analysis and looked at what happens after Americans searched Google in 2024.

41.5 % click on something. That something can include unpaid organic. It can include another Google or Alphabet owned property, or it can include a paid ad.

And that 1 % number is important. We'll come back to that 1 % number in a sec.

Rand Fishkin: This this combined 58 % zero click searches that that number keeps rising It is almost certainly actually higher than this because in the Google mobile app Google's mobile results and their mobile app results are the rich among the richest and those ones get the lowest click-through rate to anything so I would probably guess that this that the true number is 66 percent like two-thirds of all searches and without a click

According to our data here, all the clickstream data from Dados for every thousand US Google searches, 360 clicks are going to something not owned by Google. Right. That's that's kind of a good way to think about it.

By the way, paid ads appear on 20 % of searches. Right. So that's what according to Google's right statements. So average paid ad click through rate is about 5%.

If you're doing better than 5 % with your PPC ads, you are.

winning, and if you're lower than that, you're a little under average. Europeans, not that different a story, even though the European Union, as you know, has put in lots of restrictions around what Google can and cannot do. For every thousand EU Google searches, 374 clicks, so barely more, right?

Like, if you're in the EU and you search Google, you don't get the maps at the very top, you don't get Google hotels at the top, you won't get, you know, the packs where Google self-preferences, they have rules against that.

And yet that is not dragging down these numbers that much.

There you go. We looked at this over time, at least over the first half of the year, and clicks per search relatively stable. So if you're looking for kind of the charts of zero click versus searches with one or more clicks, that's what those pie charts look like in 2020.

Rand Fishkin: Bad news, we did this before the more aggressive, I think it was late September rollout of the AI overviews. And if you've seen the data from, I believe, Seer Interactive, Tracy from Seer released yesterday or the day before, put out some data on usage of, or on click through rates when AI overviews appear. And those showed that these numbers are even worse. So.

Prepare yourself. I expect when I do this study again with Datos this year, these numbers are going to get more depressing, not less. Verdict here, are hard to come by, right?

Verdict is clicks are getting worse. The clicks that do exist on the internet come from a small number of players and they go to a small number of players. I think this is a real thing and it's a real challenge.

I think there's this constant struggle of marketers being told we have to focus on traffic.

and traffic being a harder and harder thing to come by. Influence maybe is not. Theory number six, therefore, is that maybe we should just build on rented land.

Even though for years, right, folks like you and I know have recommended against building on rented land and said, always build stuff on your website, right? Put it on your blog, on your list. I'm not sure.

I think influence is happening in other places.

The big argument against this, right? The big argument against building on rented land is, man, Rand, you had close to 500,000 followers on Twitter. This was huge.

It drove half of Spark Tauros customers. It drove a ton of revenue and engagement for you. And then Elmo buys it and it just tanks. I doubt we get 5 % of our customers from Twitter today.

So very frustrating. But I'm gonna say, I think we have to do it anyway.

Noah: Hehehehehe

Rand Fishkin: And if that means migrating to the next platform and the next platform and the next platform, I was frustrated too, right? thought, you know, Twitter was initially dying. I thought mastodon might be the place. I spent a bunch of time on mastodon. That did not take off. I invested a bunch in LinkedIn that did take off. I've invested a lot in threads. That seems to be going well. Now I'm investing in blue sky. That is slow, but maybe turns into something. But I think this is just, just how it's going to be. Like we have to go platform to platform.

I am going to be investing a bunch in YouTube as well. And that's because when I post stuff on LinkedIn, right, some of you are watching this on LinkedIn live right now. If I post that same thing or this presentation on the SparkToro blog, I might reach a thousand people, maybe two or three thousand.

Maybe if I have an incredible, you know, my biggest blog post of the year, 10,000, 20. And on LinkedIn, I can reach a hundred thousand people regularly with my posts.

That is an extraordinary ability and I would be a fool not to take advantage of it even though it's building on rented land. And I know this is the right audience because I can see it in the data. So, you know, all this stuff, this is all rented land and still I'm going to recommend it.

I even think, by the way, this is rented land.

Noah: Hmm.

Rand Fishkin: Here's this data citing Spark Toro. You know, people are using this without clicking through Google's overviews, Google's instant answers, their rich results. That's kind of like building on rented land. And I don't mind doing zero click marketing and zero click content so that I can appear in searches that'll almost certainly never send me a visit in order to gain the brand exposure and get the information that I want to get to the people who care about it. So look.

I showed you this graph earlier, right, with traffic refers and who's sending all of it, but that is not where people spend time. This is a graph of where people spend time on the web. Social, productivity tools, news, e-commerce, and then search.

Search might send 75 % of the traffic, but is only the fifth most traffic category overall. Social, news, productivity, video, that's where people consume content. That's where they discover brands.

That's where they learn about problems.

I think you have to be present in those places. think building on rented land, unfortunately, is something we have to do. My wife does this, by the way.

Geraldine builds almost exclusively on rented land. She does some stuff on her blog everywhere. But man, she just, she has an audience that will follow her wherever she goes.

And I think that is the future for a lot of us who want to influence people in the places they pay attention. So look.

If you care about influencing an audience, traffic is probably not the metric. But if your boss, your team, your client is telling you, traffic is all I care about, I don't care what you say about influence, I don't care about RAND's data, get me the visits, well, you're gonna have to do search because search is where traffic comes from and a little bit social. All right, my last theory here before we wrap up.

Buyer journeys don't work the way they used to. This is a theory I...

I cannot quite prove with data, but I'm going to do my best to try and show you where I'm thinking here. So my thesis is that for the last 20, 25 years, most buyer journeys, organic buyer journeys look like this. You search for something, you compare options, right?

I want some new health insurance in Washington. I'll go visit these websites and then I'll figure out which one I want to do based on all that. And I convert this, this journey from about 1996.

Rand Fishkin: to 2016, I think it was a pretty solid journey for 60, 70 % of people. Yes, there was other things in here, but most of that was happening. The last five to 10 years, I think it's different. Now, I will say, I'm going to show you what I think a search-assisted journey looked like too, because I think that that happened a lot too, which is a search and then you have some behavior around that. Like I did the search for health insurance, but then I...

go and visit and compare things other places, and then I get targeted with ads, and then I convert, and those ads definitely biased me. Retargeting behavior biased me, other things biased me. Sure, I grant that.

I'm not saying that the organic way is the only way. Unfortunately, what happened is that execs and a lot of leadership teams locked in this mindset of how digital marketing works, which is someone searches, then our brand appears there.

We show ads, we capture them. And that meant that according to all these guys, our marketing job was invest in these channels and measure with, you know, the platform reported return on ad spend for performance, visit assistant conversions for content, search traffic, direct search traffic conversions for organic and social traffic conversion was the dumbest one, of course, as everyone knows, but this was kind of how it was.

Even the folks who built sophisticated econometrics models kind of started from a basis of thinking this way. So my theory is that in 20 sorry, go ahead.

Noah: Can I ask you a quick question there? So my friend, Renee Bigelow, would call all of this attribution crack. Are you saying that basically the C-suite smoke and attribution crack?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, and they're addicted, right? Like it's so easy to justify more spend. And so the CMO has no incentive to tell the CFO or the CEO, hey, let's change our behavior. And that, you know, that kind of sucks. no, my theory here is that in 2024, discovery, navigation, information, buyer journeys look way more like this.

We consume content across social media and YouTube and podcasts and new sites and email newsletters and webinars like all these different places. We consume information. We search mostly still Google and Bing, but plenty of social and LLMs are in there too. We do comparison in a lot of like asking our friends and family and our networks and groups and Slack and Discord and

WhatsApp and plenty of Reddit is in there. Reddit obviously is kind of dominating a lot of the Google searches around comparison and discovery. And then we convert sometimes on the company site, but also often on third party sites.

And this makes, you know, all the attribution modeling that used to be useful, much less useful, not impossible. Unfortunately, still it is the case.

that you can do enough attribution modeling to convince the CFO that attribution works, even though it doesn't really. All right, so how the heck are you going to figure out whether this is true? Yeah, sure.

Well, we can't really use methodologies like these ones where we take a bunch of keywords and we try and figure out from the keyword set. What we really need to do is I asked Dados for every Google search from every US device over last two years.

And they said, no. They're like, what? You can't handle the data. They jacked Nicholson to me. And they were right. And there's privacy reasons around this too.

But what they did give me is all keyword searches, all keywords with more than 100 searches over the last 21 months from 130,000 active US devices. So not their full panel, but like a smaller subset. And they treated multiple searches per day from a single device as one search.

Rand Fishkin: This is pretty cool data set, like absolutely incredible. And then I took every keyword, not every keyword, I took a bunch of keywords and I manually classified them about a thousand keywords and classified them into brand versus generic, into intent, navigational, informational, commercial, transactional, into categories, and then volume buckets. didn't have to do that manually. And then I tried to see if an LLM could accurately classify the keywords and after a bunch of work and some help from Brittany Muller,

I was able to get 96 % accuracy versus my hand classification. Meaning, I could take this giant data set of hundreds of millions of keywords, plug it in, spend a few thousand dollars with, I believe, GPTs. I can't remember which model I used.

The mini, I used Omini. And get 96 % accuracy, which is awesome. Really powerful. So this is what the big old data spreadsheet looks like.

Noah: Thank

Rand Fishkin: local intent, how many searches, blah, blah, blah, blah. This was about 60 hours that it took to run the LLM calls just by themselves through the API. But now we can answer what percent of searches are branded versus generic, right? So Yahoo Fantasy Football is a branded search, Fantasy Football, a generic search. Darn Tough Socks, which I'm wearing right now, versus Socks. Navy Federal Credit Union versus Credit Union. Rick Steves versus Flights to Italy.

What percent of all US Google searches are for brands? Well, if we were live, I would make you guess, but instead I'll just show you. Branded keywords are only 31%, but branded searches are 44%.

By the way, recently, like in January, the folks from Ahrefs, Tim Sulo, Noah, who's a sponsor, right? Ahrefs are sponsor. So they published data about this.

Noah: Hmph.

Noah: Yeah. Yep.

Rand Fishkin: a keyword database, which is keyword based, not clickstream based, but theirs was only 2 % off of mine, which I think means we can really confirm this and say that very close to half of all searches in Google are for brands. That's the reality of Google search. So if you're thinking like, man, Google search is this huge opportunity, yeah, huge opportunity, but it's half as big as you think it is because...

Half of those searches are for specific brands. Okay, what about navigational, informational, commercial, transactional? So you can see examples of those.

Google is by keywords still very informational, right? It's people looking for things like the weather and driving conditions and flight times, all that kind of stuff. But navigation makes up almost 33%, almost a third of all query volume is navigation.

So that that means a third of all people are just using Google to get to a website that they already knew they wanted to get to. They're typing in YouTube. They're typing in Amazon.

They're typing in Gmail. They're typing in chat GPT. Right. They're typing in Sony like whatever it is. What are the topics that people search for the most?

Well, I really good news. I think either adult content is not as popular as it historically was on the Internet or people are smart enough.

to use not Google to search for the adult content that they want. And so you can see here that arts and entertainment is the biggest one. You know what?

It's just everybody searching for how old is Paul Rudd? How could he possibly look that beautiful at whatever his age is? I think there's so much for actors, movies, television shows, media, YouTube channels like arts and entertainment.

Noah: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: is 20 % of all Google searches, which is pretty damn remarkable. And you can see volume as well. So these ones generally are of little commercial value outside of CPM ads. I think that's a little tough pill to swallow. But this was my 17 and 1.5 % of all Google searches, just people that that's not a true stat, right? That's all arts and entertainment.

It is kind of unbelievable that he's 55.

Noah: Wow. Damn.

Rand Fishkin: And I love this stat. is Geraldine's favorite stat, Noah, that Paul Rudd was in 0.00184 % of all Google searches performed by Americans last year. Seems tiny, but still impressive. All right. Since we have this dated, do you want to see the volume of Google keywords and volume two? Yes, of course you do. I do too. Pretty amazing to see that distribution. I did a whole blog post about this, so I won't belabor the point here.

Noah: Nice.

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: but I'm quite impressed by basically how huge the long tail remains. Like, but huge, the long tail remains in terms of volume of keywords and how huge the head of the demand curve is in terms of volume of searches. So 150 query terms make up 15 % of all search demand. That's things like just people navigating Netflix, Google translate, chat, GBT, Facebook.

That's what's going on there. And then the top hundred queries, they have as much demand as the bottom 210,000, right? That's, that's kind of crazy. Like we're moving in a direction from, you know, that long tail number that Google kept quoting.

Do remember many years ago it was 20 % of all searches we've never seen before. Then it was 15%. The last number I heard from Google was a few years ago is 12%.

I don't know what it is today, but the long tail is shrinking a little bit. and.

75 % of all demand is the top 20 % of search terms. So, you know, we're moving to this world. I don't think this is just Google, by the way. I think we're moving to a world where big brands, big, the big players are dominating in every sector and the long tail of the internet, which is what I loved about the internet, you know, that's kind of getting left behind in the modern era.

Single search keywords represent 59 % of unique query terms.

only 2.2 % of total demand. So yes, there's a huge long tail, but it's only 2 % of demand. All right, so I think the verdict is true. I can't go back in time 10 years to tell you what changed, but I can tell you that a massive amount of Google today is navigational, it's branded search, it's art and games and EDU and not directly commercially valuable or commercially valuable, but to the brand or navigation that's already being searched.

All right, what does all that mean? If you are exclusively focused on traffic, you're stuck with search, right? There's not a lot of channel diversity options here.

And traffic and revenue are not the same thing. I keep harping on this lately over the last couple of months. I keep talking about examples of traffic down, revenue up.

There was just another published study this morning showing that Walmart's traffic has fallen significantly in the last quarter. And what did their revenue do? It went up 6%.

Rand Fishkin: Traffic down, revenue up is the story. I think that's going to be the story of 2025. Traffic down, revenue up. If you choose channel investments based on referral data, you will become Google's fool. Why is that? Because everything that happens here in all of these categories turns into one of these. And then who gets credit in the analytics? Google does. Not the social team, not the PR team, not the content team, the people who are distributing all this stuff, the people who are working hard to...

Make sure that you're in all these publications and places and that your YouTube channel is synced. Like, no, they are not getting the value. If you, after this webinar or during this webinar, if you search for SparkToro, Google gets the credit in our analytics.

And that's pretty dumb because Google had nothing to do with how you discovered SparkToro or, you know, wanted to learn more about it. Very frustrating. And that's happening over and over again.

If you want to win at socials, you better invest in zero clicks.

You've to build on rented land because the social sites, right? They do not drive traffic. They're all of their algorithms bias against clicks. You include a link in your LinkedIn post.

It will perform one 10th as well as if you don't. I have tons of data to show this week. Amanda and I keep experimenting with it. It's just what happens, right?

10x the reach with zero click content.

You know, other social posts don't include a link anymore. Facebook too, right? Same story. 10x through each with zero click. Number four, if you want to determine your prioritization, really encourage you, whatever tool you use, I'm showing you SparkToro here, but I would really encourage you to do audience research and find the sources of influence for your audience.

It is so important to know where they pay attention so that you can be there instead of your competitors.

even if it doesn't send traffic. I think, you know, for us getting our content, ads, brands like on these sites might actually be more valuable than trying to drive traffic directly to our website. I know that's weird, but this is the modern reality of the zero click universe.

Similar webs competitors, by the way, I showed you a bunch of spark toro stuff. another way to do this similar webs competitors is a good way to see what an audience, a web audience at least is visiting.

Rand Fishkin: They have a nice panel. I've worked with them before. I like their stuff. They're expensive, but quite good. And John Chahada, by the way, launched this tool called Discover Pulse to see where people are consuming news and which sources around which topics. That could be another good one in the year ahead to check out. I like to think of it this way. Where is my audience influenced? And where do I allocate budget? And if you are putting budget, right? So.

You know, you see that Google search keywords in dark blue down at bottom there with, okay, 90,000 people are whatever searching for the unbranded Google search keywords. But a third of my ad spend is going there. A third of my marketing budget is going there.

Well, it's kind of unbalanced. Like I might want to rethink some of those things. And this, I see this unbalancing happening a lot. Number five, if you need to prove value to your boss or client, you're going to need a dashboard with all the data.

You've got to build some kind of correlation dashboard that shows where all this stuff is happening. LLM tools can be helpful in analyzing some of the correlation numbers here between the metrics to be able to show you kind of, hey, at the top of our funnel, when we get lots of engagement on LinkedIn, that turns into more branded search traffic and higher conversion rates for us in the middle of the funnel. And then at the bottom of the funnel, that turns into good customers, whatever it is.

It's sort of a lift-based measurement world that we're moving toward or back toward, like the 20th century.

Noah: Yeah.

Noah: I love the correlation dashboard rather than causation and having a whole mind shift around that.

Rand Fishkin: Yes. Yeah. You need a correlation dashboard instead of an attribution dashboard, right? You basically have to say, Hey, these are the places where we're getting engagement, not these are the places where we know we got a click from that turned into a customer. And so we're only going to invest in those. In my opinion, future of digital marketing has to be more than search and it's got to be inclusive of KPIs that aren't just traffic or clicks.

Noah: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: Instead, we have to focus on influencing audiences in the right places where they pay attention with the right messages. Thanks very much. gonna, I know we're, we wanna do some Q and A, so I'm gonna throw it back to you.

Noah: Okay, so I want to throw up a whole bunch of links for you so everybody knows all your links because we're not going to get to all this stuff. But like snack bar studio, who would have thought that you would turn into a video game CEO company CEO, right? If you guys haven't read Rand's book yet, Lost and Founder, it's absolutely amazing. And if you go to this link, I highly encourage you to hover over the purchase now.

and it shows all the different platforms. And I love your affiliate link that you used on Amazon. I think it's an affiliate link because you're using every where is affiliate link.

I thought that was hysterical. then Spark Tour, of course, is just kind of like how to get into your site. But there's just a couple of things that I wanted to dive into really quickly based on your deck.

Rand Fishkin: Exactly, yeah.

Noah: kind of take away worse a couple intersecting things of, there's 170 huge sites. How many conglomerates own those 170 sites? And it's probably like 10 to 15 conglomerates own the vast majority of all the traffic. And then if you're those conglomerates and you're lucky enough to have that brand search, you're just going to keep leveraging and winning and winning. Like that stood out to me a ton as you were talking.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah.

Noah: I wanted to learn a little bit about what you learned during the pandemic about communication. Like when I think of you, think of you as the best communicator in our industry. You're the best storyteller. Like if I threw you up on stage and you had a deck and the deck broke, I think that I could then tell you, Hey, there's 13 different stories that one could tell. I want you to tell.

this story with this deck and you could probably execute it. You could go from, hey, I'm gonna take you on a journey to, hey, here's everything you know about X and this is why you're wrong. There's so many different ways you could tell a story.

But what did you learn during the pandemic about storytelling? Because your medium changed, right? I mean, I know you've been doing Whiteboard Friday Forever, but like.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, medium changed quite a bit.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I mean, I think two of the biggest trend changes over the last maybe five, six years, one is that short form video outperforms almost everything else. There's this, you know, I think we've talked about for a long time, attention spans being killed by the internet or by video games or by, you know, television or whatever. And this is the only time in history where I actually think it's true.

I do believe that, and I don't think it's just true of younger generations. I think it's true of every generation, like every age group. Our patience for slow media and slow content is much lower.

That's not to say some of you don't listen to slow moving audio books or read cozy fantasy or watch movies from the 70s anymore.

in 2025 short form outperforms everything else. think, know, Tik Tok and to a certain degree Instagram reels have shown us the kind of way, right? The way things are. The second one I would say is that, gosh, it's tough to, this is one that I feel a little uncomfortable talking about, but it's essentially that,

Historically for you know, kind of last few hundred years there was a an agreed upon truth like everyone agreed that these were the things going on and and part of that was because the gatekeeping of media ownership meant that You know if whatever, you know, Richard Nixon said something in 1968 every newspaper would report that that was the thing that was said and this is what it meant and

There's sort of broad agreement around that. That is no longer the case. And so there's this fragmentation of what is true. Obviously this has political implications, but we don't have to go deeply into that.

But for marketers, it matters quite a bit too, because different communities can have wholly different beliefs about what's going on in the world, about what is true in some brand segment, what's true in their niche or space.

Rand Fishkin: there's no more agreed upon reality. And therefore storytelling and messaging and positioning and branding have to choose either one of two things. One to segment and speak to these different segments of reality believers in your different group. This is especially true in consumer behavior. Or choose to focus. And I think for many folks who don't need to become multi-billion dollar brands,

Focusing is more powerful. You kind of choose your audience choose your story and focus on that I I like that quite a bit too because I also think it serves what's coming next Which is kind of this AI and large language model driven future even in Google search And and that looks very much at words that are next to other words So if you can get your words next to or your brand next to the words people associate with you I think that's a big win

Noah: When I think about content marketing, I think of it as like top of the funnel and yeah, can be middle of the funnel too, but like is video the new top of the funnel for you? I mean, that's what I saw when you showed that slide of all of the different social platforms and rented land and how they're leading to the funnel, which leads me to this part B, which is like, where are your leads coming from and how is that changing?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so on the A question for us, video content, research content, so sort of charts and graphs and research studies, and then highly opinionated think pieces are the three best performing formats of content for us. Amanda's really good at that third one. She's written a few pieces that have sort of gone.

Nicely viral in our industry that were either on spark toro or in her social feeds And I think that that that type of pointed even though it's written purely written content Can do quite well in the opinion space In terms of leads for us We use the correlation model. So I can't tell you exactly where they're coming from, but I can tell you that our highest engagement channels are number one email

Number two, LinkedIn. Number three, probably a combination of threads and blue sky. And then sitting behind that is our own blog and website.

Noah: I wanted to just say thank you for sharing that, because that's information that most folks wouldn't. We've got a bunch of great questions coming through from the community. I'm going to start with, and this is close to my heart because it comes from a friend of mine who I actually used to work in the bike shop with, and then we worked in a digital marketing agency together. This comes from Brett Woodward.

How would you recommend smaller SEO, SEM agencies adapt their thinking and strategies on search engine marketing? And do you have any advice on how they should shepherd their current clients to be on board with that direction?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, think, so this is a, I think a choice for every agency owner or consultant or even professional, right?

It's like you decide, you decide whether you want to be putting your eggs in the, think things are going here basket. And this is what, this is the kind of work I like to do. It's very forward facing.

I think my clients will come along with me or you know what? I'm going to focus. I'm going to say laser focused on driving traffic from search engines the way we did for the last 20 years.

And that's going to be what people buy from me. Both of those are fine specializations. I think there will continue to be a market for the drive traffic from unbranded search terms in search engines.

I think there absolutely will be a market at some point that will take off for zero-click searches and influencing people through social media and AI tools and platforms. I think there's a huge future in kind of digital PR.

getting your brand name associated with something in the minds of consumers who consume content on these places where they pay attention and from publications in their industry. But it's not about everyone should do one of those. Everyone should choose which one is right for them and their business and their clients.

Noah: So we got another another question that I can by the way, how's your calendar? Because I know it's always tight. How much time do you have?

Rand Fishkin: I think I have 20 more minutes here. So yeah, I'm good.

Noah: Okay, cool. So we can get through a couple. Awesome. So we got a great question. What should the new key metrics be?

Rand Fishkin: I still...

Noah: Takes me back to your clip folios dashboard from back in the day, by the way.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah. still actually really like, at the very top of the funnel, I like number of impressions and engagement across all my sort social platforms and feeds. So how many YouTube video watches and subscribers, how many LinkedIn followers and how many engagements did I get last week and how many hours of video watched.

Impressions on places like threads and blue sky That those types of vanity metrics I think are actually really useful at the top of the funnel if I see them take a Six to ten weeks later. I will see a correlating dip in our signups And I think this is true for a lot of people the other one The next one is kind of middle of funnel and that is visits to the website. I Would encourage you to look particularly strongly at direct traffic

because and branded search, right? So like searches for your brand name that led people to your site. Those two really are really capturing influence you've had in other places that led people to your site.

And unfortunately, it's super under counted by most marketing teams. And then at the at the kind of bottom of the funnel, I love watching conversions and conversion rate.

hey, all that content you're producing, all that messaging you're doing, all that brand stuff that you're doing across all those channels, is that turning into things that inspire people to just consume your content and check you out? Or is it turning into customers and how long does that take? So for us, it usually takes a good little while, like I said, six to 10 weeks for someone to turn from a, I engaged with you into, I signed up for the free version of SparkTorrent.

It's not instantaneous. It's not like people hear about SparkTorrent for the first time and they immediately go try it. But that's gonna be different for every different business.

Noah: I was watching your deck and I was blown away by all of the slides that you're just sourcing so much data from so many different places. What can we learn from you about becoming a better data consumer? How can we, like how wide an array of sites are, do you have bookmarked? Like walk us through how you find and consume information and glean meaning from it.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I bookmark a lot of stuff and I copy and paste a lot of graphs and URLs. I think it's mostly through this behavior I've built up over the last 20 years of just, you I have people that I follow, have sources that I follow. One of the more unusual ones that I do that I don't think very many people do is I look at almost everything that's submitted to Hacker News and TechMeme.

And those two those two sites There's a ton of noise like way way too much noise But the signal when I find it can be both really good and very unique So I I think those are two unusual ones

Noah: I love.

You got me there because I was going to frame the question around signal versus noise and I didn't. But I think I warned you via email. Like one of the things that I always love to drill into when we talk with folks is like learning about how people think.

And like when we talked with Dana De Tomaso, she was able to like walk us through how she performed analysis in GA4 or any other data source.

I'd love to drill into that a little bit. Like, I have no idea how you think. I have no idea how you navigate decisions. I have no idea how you kind of think through stuff.

Can you share anything about that with us?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, let's see. So it depends on the kind of decision that we're talking about, but I would say on big forms of decision making. I don't know, things like hiring and firing or strategic business direction decisions.

branding and positioning decisions that kind of stuff I I start from a place of Absolute bias like fully a hundred percent biased by my Beliefs about what the world should be and how I want to exist in that world who I want to help who I don't want to help what I think is kind of right and honorable and

You know that type of stuff that that's an unusual place to start. I think for a lot of business owners and full disclosure, I absolutely think it probably limits the raw financial success and outcomes, but My belief around that Noah is that if you exclusively prioritize financial success over kind of everything else that is

definitely the Dictionary definition of evil Right like people who put money over all the other things that might be important to a person That that's what makes you a bad person like a bad human being you are making this planet and life for everyone else worse and I think you're

I think you should not do that. I'm sad that evolution has not yet produced an incentive for us to stop doing that. I think maybe if capitalism were a little better regulated, we'd be in that place.

And I'm a capitalist. I like being able to invest in other people's companies and support them. And I think it's beautiful when new things are created in the world.

And I'm generally a believer that the...

Rand Fishkin: Spread of capitalism from a data perspective has produced the largest gains in life expectancy and health outcomes and Sort of happiness and that sort of stuff around the granted. There's tons of problems with it. Like I'm not arguing that I just Anyway, yeah I think when you say you're a capitalist you should you should defend that opinion with why? And I do but so I start my decisions from there. The second thing I do is I'm a very

Like, I'll give you an example. I don't know exactly how to describe this, but like a stats driven person, I am afraid.

Noah: What a process, like do you have a process that you like to employ too?

Rand Fishkin: No, I'm pretty Impulsive is the wrong word, but I'm very intuitive around decision-making. I I Don't like analysis paralysis. I don't like spending a lot of time to things I would rather and Casey and I talked about this when we formed spark toro I would rather be wrong four or five times before I get it right then spend weeks or months Analyzing to try and make the perfect decision because I don't think you get there anyway

So I am not a, yeah, I bias toward action. I don't make data-driven decisions. I make data-informed decisions, but I'm not someone who will spend weeks or months, even days, gathering data to back up an opinion.

I'd rather move fast and get it wrong and then do it right. I think that there are other types of companies where you can't do that, but...

Noah: I'm definitely biased towards action.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin: This is Sparctoro for sure. You we released the wrong feature. It doesn't hit with our customers. Okay, great. Let's release a different feature, roll it back. Like that's not a big deal. Yeah.

Noah: Yeah, keep going.

Rand Fishkin: I was going to say the next kind of step after the emotional driven stuff. Like, for example, I'm...

I am very afraid of statistical danger. So like, you know, when people are like, oh, what are you afraid of? I'll be like, well, I am quite afraid of driving over 70 miles an hour on a highway in the United States.

Because statistically speaking, that's like leading, you know, is 10,000 times more dangerous than getting on any commercial flight in the world.

Central Asia. I'm also quite afraid of heart disease. That's a like that's gonna kill me. I'm not afraid of sharks. no, sharks. That's like winning the lottery, man.

You know, it's not gonna happen. It just doesn't doesn't scare me. But man, heart disease. Yeah, I watch out.

Noah: You and I are pretty aligned, man. It's pretty funny because we both spoke at Searchlove in Philly in June of 22. There were three of us in that conference who were masked. You, and I had masked on the entire time. I still got COVID. I still got COVID at that damn conference. I know, it's crazy.

Rand Fishkin: That's right!

Rand Fishkin: Uhhhh

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I mean, I flew to Vegas a day before yesterday to speak at Affiliate Summit West. And I wore a mask like the whole time except when I wasn't on stage, except when I was on stage because I was like, I cannot bring sickness back. My grandfather just turned 97 and he lives in a community with a bunch of other folks in their 80s and 90s. And I was like, I'm gonna see him. I cannot get him and his, you know.

apartment made sick that would just be horrible. So yeah.

Noah: What are you cooking these days?

Rand Fishkin: Good question. Last night I made an anchovy pesto, anchovy parsley pesto, which is really delicious. I recommend checking out that recipe if you haven't seen it. I'm gonna make some tacos al pastor next week. So I'm looking forward to that. Get some pork shoulder, put the pineapple in between, roast the thing, slice it off there. That's gonna be...

Delightful. think some friends are coming over in a few weeks and we're going to try and make some Indian curries together. So that's going be a new challenge for me.

Got to order some ingredients on Amazon or something.

Noah: Tell me about...

What have you been paring back and what have you been letting go of over the past couple years?

Rand Fishkin: You know if anyone followed me on social media over the last like decade you probably saw me posting a good amount about social and political issues and Those are issues that I still care very deeply about You know, I think I was pointing out earlier right I'm not taking down this Black Lives Matter sign. I'm not taking down the trans flag

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin: When I was on stage yesterday, was wearing my LGBTQ pin. I care about these issues incredibly deeply. And it breaks my heart that not everyone on the planet does. I think that's like a really sad and depressing thing. But I am not as loud about them on social as I used to be because I no longer believe that I can reach people who don't share those beliefs.

So it's, it's basically in it. I no longer believe that my social posting is effective in reaching an audience that might be convinced like for, you know, from, from 2015 until probably 2022. I believe that people who followed me for my marketing or entrepreneurship or content ideas might also be swayed when I had.

Noah: Mmm.

Rand Fishkin: Social or political opinions because they'd be like, yeah rant. He's a smart guy. He's trustworthy I know him like, you know, sort of like his stuff So if he says something maybe maybe I'll pay attention to that but unfortunately the political sphere at least in the United States I think most western countries got kind of bifurcated into sports teams and so there's no longer that opportunity to kind of cross the aisle and have a conversation

and try and convince someone who maybe thinks that all immigrants are evil or that whatever, that the Gaza Strip should be filled with Trump casinos or whatever it is. I don't think we can have those conversations anymore and impact people. And so I don't try that as much.

I think sometimes I'll do it one-on-one, right? Like if I meet a person or hanging out and they have an opinion, like, yeah, we'll have a...

Noah: Yeah.

Noah: No.

Rand Fishkin: an in real life conversation, but I don't think it works on social.

Noah: Yeah, that's been my shift too. wanna shift, speaking of shifts, there was one slide that you showed that showed where your audience is and where your budget is allocated. I don't know if that's a view in Spark Toro, but what I think what would be really neat about that is like when I think of your tool, I think about insights, right? And I've built a product.

called Branch Explorer, which is like an amazing view of like search console data. But the problem with insights driven tools is that it's not tied to workflows. And when I think about like a budget planning tool, like that's kind of cool because it's tied to an actual workflow that people need to do that's tied to money.

It's tied to like actual money.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so Dana DiTomasso, who you mentioned earlier, is the person who suggested that visualization. I built it first for this presentation and I talked to Casey and Amanda about how we could potentially someday get all the data in SparkToro that you would need to be able to look at one of those, at least the influence kind of view of it for an audience. And that is something that we are long-term working toward.

There are more types of data that we need to do and more requests that we basically need Spark Torch to grow financially so that we can afford to buy the data that we would need to build that deal.

Noah: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Rand Fishkin: But yeah, do I want to do it? Hell yeah.

Noah: Yeah, I mean, that's where my brain is like, man. I mean, how few people have that level of insight? Like, my God, I'm spending 70 % on Google ads, but by the way, those ads are only appearing in 20 % of searches, which are only sending 65 to 70 % of the traffic. mean, it was really interesting. A couple more questions and then, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then let's do your soapbox moment.

Rand Fishkin: No, I apologize. I gotta go in like two minutes, but yeah.

Noah: Is there anything you want to talk about to tie it up?

Rand Fishkin: Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I think the story of 2025 in digital marketing is traffic should stop being your primary KPI. I think that people who are driven by how many visits to our website get and then how many of those converted and all that kind of stuff, that is old style thinking and you need to be thinking of essentially your

Noah: You be you,

Rand Fishkin: Your presence on the web is being much bigger than your website. What happens when people search for your brand in Google? What happens when they talk to LLMs about your brand? What happens when people visit your social channels? What happens when people are exposed to information about your space, the problem you solve, the products that you sell without your brand on the internet? Are they getting nudged toward you? Or are they getting nudged toward your competitors because you're not present?

in the places where they pay attention. What's in their email inbox? What's in their promotions tab? What's in their feeds on social? What are they subscribing to in terms of podcasts and YouTube channels?

Who are they following on LinkedIn? What subreddits are they subscribed to? All that stuff is influencing your audience.

This is the it's not just the future. That's the now like that is already what's happening. You know, it is a consumer You know that this is your life.

This is how you engage with brands. It doesn't all happen through search anymore It doesn't all happen through traffic to a website So we got it.

And maybe that conversation ends with, yeah, too bad. We're not considering that. In which case, okay, hey, go get your money and get paid and like do what your client wants.

But our job is to have that hard conversation with the people who need to hear it. And that's what reality is. Just like in 1999 and 2000 and 2001, we had to tell businesses, yo, people are using the internet.

You need a website.

People are using Google and you need to figure out how to show up there. And today we have to have that conversation again.

Noah: All right. This is a fantastic time for us to wind up. Two quick announcements. Our next Campfire Chat is going to be either on January 19th or 20th. We're finalizing schedules with Jess Schultz. And then the one after that I'm super excited about also, which is Eli Schwartz. He's going to be on March 5th, I believe. So we've got a great lineup. And Rand, I'm just incredibly grateful that you joined us today.

And I'm really looking forward to hanging out with you somewhere in real life this calendar year. I'm not sure if it'll be at Brighton, maybe in Asia somewhere, hopefully if we're lucky. That would be super rad.

But thanks so much for being with us. And for everybody else, if you've been struggling with video quality for Rand, I believe once we upload this to Riverside, I'll replace the live feed with YouTube.

We'll have a much higher quality stream for everybody to watch. Awesome. Thanks, Rand. You rock. I'm going to any, yeah, anytime. Stay in Riverside for just a minute, because we need to upload your stream.

Rand Fishkin: Thanks for having me, Noah. Really appreciate it.

Noah: Bye everybody.