Sparktoro

In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden. Their financial and stock performance suggests that these changes boosted both ad revenue and investor confidence, and thus, it’s&he...

How do you market to developers? Developers have a reputation: they block your ads, they smell marketing-speak from three sentences away, they trust a random GitHub repo over your whole campaign, and if they’re reading this, they are rolling their eyes (hi Casey!). So most teams either throw money at LinkedIn ABM, or they decide developers are “unmarketable” an...

For 25 years, Google told websites to “just make great content,” and they’d sort out the rest. This advice was incomplete, problematic, and reductive, but also… sorta true. If you made 10X Content in 1997, 2007, or 2017, it often worked (at least, so long as you *marketed* that 10X content). But, no more. Google’s future is no longer index...

At last week’s SparkToro Office Hours, someone asked about how to incorporate audience research into a marketing strategy for a double-sided marketplace. That has lived in my head rent-free since. A double-sided marketplace, what’s that? That’s a marketplace that supports both vendors and end users. Think of TheKnot, which provides resources for people planning their own wedd...

But seriously, how does audience research inform your marketing strategy? I often say audience research is the heart of it all. And in a sense, I don’t think most marketers would disagree. We use different words for it — customer insight, positioning, voice of customer, ICP development — but a lot of it comes down to the same questions: What…