Sparktoro Facebook Ads Hack





SEO Pioneer Rand Fishkin's New Venture, SparkToro, Is on a Mission to Help Brands Quit Google

hough Rand Fishkin famously co-founded Moz and starred in its Whiteboard Friday video series, it’s hard to rule out the possibility that he’s cursed.

Back in 2008, Moz had its first big software launch the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed. “The literal day,” Fishkin told Built In.

Now, 12 years later, Fishkin is launching a new product during the shelter-in-place phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

That product is SparkToro, an audience intelligence tool. Marketers search for the demographic they want to reach — whether that’s architects, CFOs at Seattle-based SaaS companies, or people who frequently talk about The Bachelor — and SparkToro returns a list of the podcasts and YouTube channels they like, the websites they visit, and the social accounts they follow.

The underlying goal: To help marketers forge direct relationships with influencers and ad-supported media outlets, without Facebook or Google brokering the relationship.

“We think it sucks that so much of web marketing today is ‘buy ads on Facebook and Google.’”

“We think it sucks that so much of web marketing today is ‘buy ads on Facebook and Google,’” Fishkin and SparkToro’s CTO more info and co-founder, Casey Henry, wrote in the company’s vision statement. “That duopoly makes marketing less creative, less interesting and less fruitful.”

Facebook and Google require ads to fit a hyper-specific specific format, and can be “incredibly expensive” for small businesses hoping to reach in-demand audiences, Fishkin said.

SparkToro isn’t the first market research tool to tackle this issue, but it’s one of the first accessibly priced ones. Historically, enterprises have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build tools like this in house, Fishkin said. Small businesses can’t afford that. SparkToro costs orders of magnitude less, though — even the priciest subscription, for unlimited searches for up to 50 users, costs under $500 a month.

The tool also relies exclusively on public social data. Rather than relying on third-party cookies, it tracks who reads which websites through implicit logic: If someone shares a link to a website on social media, they probably read it. This makes SparkToro well-positioned for the decline of third-party cookies.

It could have all added up to a straightforward launch.

“What make SparkToro so great?” Fishkin joke-pitched. “It exists.”

The pandemic adds some complexity to the situation, though.

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