Guide to SparkToro Part 4: What The Heck Is All This Stuff? A Reference of SparkToro’s Features
All of the features and screenshots are described as per the state of SparkToro’s product on April 5, 2023.
I often get on calls with other marketers to show them a demo of what SparkToro looks like and how I recommend they navigate it.
It seems that even though SparkToro is my favorite marketing software, many others in our profession are intimidated by how different the interface and the information provided within its results are to the other tools we’re all used to. SparkToro doesn’t look like your Google Analytics dashboard, an SEO research tool (such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz) or a content optimization platform like Clearscope.
Since I get these questions all the time (and because I couldn’t locate a full reference page within SparkToro’s own resources page), I’ve put together this half-documentation, half-guide on all of SparkToro’s features and options. I’ve added screenshots of all the main interface options and explanations of what everything does. You’ll also find some of my personal notes & remarks based on common pitfalls I’ve noticed during my demos.
Feel free to bookmark this page and come back to it as you explore SparkToro in your own time. You can bounce around the sections and search the text on this page to find whatever you need.
Note: If you want to check out the other SparkToro guides in this series, you can find their links and descriptions here.
License: feel free to implement this advice in your own work and link to this page as you wish, but this content cannot be copied or replicated without explicit permission and credit to Mariya Delano and Kalyna Marketing.
Table of Contents
In an attempt to make your life a bit easier, here is a table of contents for every section and feature described in this documentation:
Types of Searches (Audience Research Options)
Interface Options
When you first open SparkToro, you’ll see a number of tabs at the top of your page. Each tab corresponds to its own interface with a variety of features and quirks.
Interface options for SparkToro
As of the time of this writing, these are the interface options I see within SparkToro:
Dashboard - a kind of home base for your searches, displaying a search bar, key information about your plan, your recent search history, and some helpful resources.
Audience Research - the main interface of SparkToro allowing to look up different types of audiences (e.g. “my audience frequently talks about ‘SQL’”) and see a variety of insights about their behavior.
Lists - here you can find specific sources (social media accounts, websites, subReddits, etc.) that you’ve saved from previous audience searches with some additional options and information.
Custom Search - as of the time of this writing, SparkToro’s newest feature and available only on the highest-paid “Agency” plan.
Custom Audiences - as of the time of this writing, SparkToro’s newest feature and available only on the highest-paid “Agency” plan.
We will be diving deeper into each individual interface in the rest of this guide.
Dashboard
SparkToro’s dashboard is your “home base” within the product
This is the first interface you see once you log in. Can be accessed via a button on the website’s menu bar or other links within the app. Includes:
Search Bar to run a new audience search. Includes:
Type of search
Amount of queries run in the current monthly period
Empty text field to enter search value
Option to add a location filter to search results
Option to enter the Compare Audiences interface.
Welcome Message and Plan Information Includes:
Welcome message with your first name
Current subscription plan
Number of search queries remaining until next time period (most plans now have unlimited queries).
Users claimed out of available seats for your account
Audiences tracked out of your total plan allowance
Option to upgrade current plan.
Your Lists of sources you’ve saved while running audience searches. Includes:
List name
Number of sources saved
Owner initials (user).
Free Full Queries that are searches that you can run on a free account with full search results.
Recent Search Queries that are clickable searches that you’ve previously run, arranged in reverse chronological order. See the “Query History” section of this post for more information.
Get The Most Out of SparkToro, a small reference section of helpful resources curated by SparkToro’s team. Includes:
Helpful posts & articles
Video tutorials
SparkToro’s support email (always be nice to Casey).
Audience Research
A visual of the audience research tab before you run any searches
Audience research is where you’ll find the core features of SparkToro, powering most of the features found within other tabs. This is the interface that you should expect to use the most.
When you first open this tab, you’ll see:
Search Bar with the same interface and options as within your Dashboard.
Results Sidebar with types of results you’ll see when running a search. These are behaviors of accounts that match your desired search parameters. Types of results include:
Text Insights – words and phrases used across profile information, posts, and comments.
Demographics – information about your audience’s employment, skills & interests, gender & age, education, geography, and political activity.
Social – social media accounts across multiple platforms that your audience most often follows or engages with online.
Websites – websites that your audience most often visits, links to, or engages with online.
Podcasts – shows that your audience most often listens to or otherwise engages with online.
YouTube – channels that your audience most often subscribes to or engages with online.
Reddit – specific subReddits that your audience most often follows or engages with online and comment text that they most often use on Reddit.
Press – social media information for mainstream media outlets (such as BBC, The Atlantic or TechCrunch).
Database & Interface Information displaying the current number of profiles in SparkToro’s database, a screenshot of sample search results, and some basic tips.
Once you run a search, you’ll be able to click through all of the tabs and see different types of results about your desired audience.
Since the amount of information and options within this interface is so large, I’ve broken it up into two dedicated sections of this post. You can find a detailed breakdown as follows:
Types of Searches section will tell you about all the different search for defining your audience including the format to enter your search value, common pitfalls, and some of my recommendations.
Types of Results section will tell you about the different kinds of data you’ll see, interface options, and audience information provided within them.
Types of Searches (Audience Research Options)
At its core, SparkToro allows you to search for particular groups of online users (audiences) based on some type of defining characteristic and then see how that group behaves online.
You’ll find all of your search options by clicking on the left-hand side of your search bar. Once you do so, you will see a dropdown menu with the following options:
Try playing around with a couple of these search types to figure out what works!
Since conducting searches is the main mechanism for working with SparkToro, I think it’s important to understand all the options you have for defining a particular audience and when to use them.
The types of searches you can make within SparkToro include:
My Audience Frequently Talks About
You can search for people who tend to use a particular word or phrase within their social media posts and comments.
For this type of search, you should simply type in that desired word or phrase without any additional formatting (e.g. “content marketing”).
I find that this option is great when you are looking for audiences interested in a specific topic (as opposed to a more commonly used word) but not in a particular brand or person. These searches don’t work well if you’re looking for things everyone talks about (e.g. “pizza” or “business”) and they can easily give you the wrong information if a particular word is used in multiple contexts (e.g. a word like “cortex” could be referring to a brain structure or a popular cybersecurity software).
You can also use this type of search as a work-around when looking for specific social media accounts or websites that don't turn up any results indexed in SparkToro’s database.
My Audience Uses These Word(s) In Their Profile
You can search for people who use a particular word or phrase within their bio or other fields of their social media profiles.
For this type of search, you should simply type in that desired word or phrase without any additional formatting (e.g. “data analyst”).
This works best for particular types of skills or titles. For example, I track an audience where people use the word “CMO” in their profile. This helps me find accounts who are self-described Chief Marketing Officers and filter out other people who talk about marketing without holding any decision-making power.
My Audience Follows The Social Account
You can search for people who follow a specific social account across the following social networks:
Twitter
Facebook
Github
Linkedin
Instagram
Medium
Pinterest
Reddit
Vimeo
YouTube.
For this type of search, you can paste in the full URL for a social media profile (e.g. “https://twitter.com/JasonRBradwell”) or their Twitter handle (e.g. “@JasonRBradwell”). Don’t worry about the “https://“, in my experience SparkToro handles the formatting on URLs just fine either way.
Warning: SparkToro hasn’t indexed every single social media account on every platform listed above. I’ve frequently run into situations where even seemingly large accounts did not turn up any results. This is more common for platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram, which have weird privacy restrictions in their APIs. Twitter currently tends to provide results most consistently, but I know that SparkToro’s team is working to reduce their dependence on that particular platform.
If you don't get any results for a specific company or individual, try running another search using the URL of their account on another social media platform. Most of the time, I can find at least one platform that works.
My Audience Frequently Visits The Website
You can search for people who often visit a particular site.
For this type of search, you can paste in the full URL for the website (e.g. “https://www.hubspot.com/”). Don’t worry about the “https://“, in my experience SparkToro handles the formatting on URLs just fine either way.
Warning: as far as I’ve noticed, this type of search only works for entire domains and certain subdomains. You will not be able to search for a particular section of a larger site (such as people who visit a site’s blog versus the web app).
Warning: SparkToro hasn’t indexed the audience for every single website on the internet. Some websites don’t get enough public engagement to analyze, others simply don’t match the profiles in SparkToro’s database. Sometimes, I’ve been able to email their support to get a particular site indexed. But often, a site is niche in a way that doesn’t overlap with the social media accounts that SparkToro analyzes, so even if you ask their team won’t be able to index it.
You might be able to improve your results by searching for that website’s social media accounts instead.
My Audience Frequently Uses The Hashtag
You can search for people who often use a specific hashtag.
For this type of search, you should simply type in the text of that hashtag with or without the hash itself (e.g. “#cybersecurity” or “cybersecurity”).
I often find that this type of search is a great workaround when you’re looking for people who talk about a specific topic or engage with a particular industry that, for one reason or another, didn’t work well with other searches.
For example, searching for people who use the word “marketing” is not very useful because most business-adjacent accounts even if they aren’t marketing professionals. But the hashtag “#digitalmarketing” tends to give much more targeted results.
Analyze A Specific Website Or Social Account
This type of search is not like the others.
When you enter a URL in this field, SparkToro won’t give you full audience information like for all other types of searches.
If you analyze a website or social account, you’ll get a shortlist of key details about it and its audience
Instead, you will see an overview of key information about an account/website and a snippet of results for their audience’s behavior. This includes:
Associated social media profiles and websites
Social followings for particular platforms (Warning: certain social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, have finicky APIs that don’t allow SparkToro to crawl the number of followers for a particular account.)
Frequented social accounts
City-level geographic distribution.
Types of Results & Audience Information
This is the section you’ve been waiting for. You understand what kinds of searches you can make, you’ve clicked around your dashboard, and now you are ready to begin analyzing your own audiences.
But wait… what is all that stuff? What are these results?
As you might have gathered, the data SparkToro gives you is very different to most marketing tools. You won’t see keyword difficulty or backlink profiles. Instead, you’ll find out what certain groups of people share and talk about on their public social media platforms.
This section of SparkToro is probably the most scary and overwhelming, so I’ll help you break down your results one section at a time.
The types of results you’ll see when running searches in SparkToro include:
Overview
Don’t you want pretty bar graphs like these in your own reports?
The first tab you’ll see when running a new search is the overview. This is where SparkToro provides you with the highlights of all the results from other sections.
I also find that this section is the most photogenic and when I’m trying to quickly send a client or another marketer a snippet of my SparkToro results, the Overview is the interface I most often take screenshots of.
The information you’ll see here includes:
Number of People found within your desired audience who are indexed in SparkToro’s database.
Search Ideas related to this audience based on the top results. These are often a great jumping off point if your initial search yielded an audience that’s too small or too generic.
Behaviors and Demographics this is the highlight reel across the “Text Insights” and “Demographics” sections of full results. Here you’ll see the top 5 results (together with the percentage of your audience that they apply to) across:
Words in Bios
Hashtags
Phrases
Gender Distribution (only 4 categories here, not 5)
Job Roles / Fields
Mentioned Skills.
What This Audience Follows, Visits, Engages With this is the highlight reel across the “Social” and “Websites” sections of full results. Here you’ll see the top 3 results (together with the percentage of your audience that they apply to) separated out by most popular accounts / websites and hidden gems.
What This Audience Watches, Listens-To, and Reads this is the highlight reel across the “Podcasts”, “YouTube”, “Press”, and “Reddit” sections of full results. Here you’ll see the top 3 results (together with the percentage of your audience that they apply to) per category.
Text Insights
If you look at the tabs under “Text Insights”, you’ll notice there are 4 different types of text results
This section is actually 4 different sections wearing a trench coat. Text insights include information for:
Words in Bios used by your audience to describe themselves within their social media profiles. These often include a lot of nouns and titles (e.g. “Strategist”) or specific skills / software (e.g. “Shopify”).
Hashtags Used within your audience’s social media posts and comments. These can be very similar to the other results within Text Insights, or extremely helpful in pointing you into a more specific (or completely unexpected) direction for more fruitful searches.
Phrases Used within your audience’s social media posts and comments. I often spend a lot of time here, as phrases of 2-3 words provide a lot more context that individual words do on their own. (e.g. “founder” vs. “female founders”).
Words Used within your audience’s social media posts and comments. These results can either be so generic that they are not useful, or completely unexpected (e.g. “late” seems like a surprisingly deep insight into an audience’s concerns).
The specific details you get for each word or phrase are similar across all 4 subsections:
Search Options that allow you to search for that specific word, phrase, or hashtag on a selected number of platforms. These include:
Google Trends
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Search
Reddit
Instagram (hashtags only).
Percent of Audience within the larger group that you’ve searched for who use that particular word or phrase.
Demographics
Demographic data for your audience, ready for reports & strategy planning
Demographics are one of the most familiar sections if you’ve done any market and customer segment analysis.
Much like “Text Insights” this section is actually 6 sections wearing a trench coat:
Employment including information on job roles / fields, employer industries, and years of experience.
Skills & Interests including a very extensive list for both aforementioned categories going from general results like “Education” to granular hobbies like “Golf”.
Gender & Age including gender distribution across 4 categories (Male, Female, Nonbinary / Other, Unknown) and age ranges across 6 categories (18-25, 26-35, 36-50, 51-65, 66+, Unknown).
Education including degree name (e.g. “Bachelor of Commerce”), degree type (Masters, Bachelors, Doctorates, Associates, etc.), majors (e.g. “management” or “political science”), and schools (e.g. “University of Toronto”).
Geography including breakdown by city, state, and country.
Political Sharing Activity including breakdown of social media sharing & following activity broken down into categories across the political spectrum (Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, Right) with a helpful benchmark of average distributions for all accounts in SparkToro’s database.
Warning: smaller audiences will show results across all sections except demographics. If this happens, you might want to find another search to extrapolate from.
Social
Social results will give you both individual and company social media accounts
The bread and butter of SparkToro, social media accounts often have some of the most robust results. Funnily enough, this is often the section that I spend least of my time in.
This section shows you all of the social media accounts that your audience tends to follow, respond to, and share posts from.
At the top you’ll find options for filters, exporting a CSV file of your results, and adding specific accounts to a list (you can create new lists without leaving this interface).
Some of SparkToro’s filter options
The filters are quite robust and include the following options:
Hidden Gems these are accounts with a decent amount of engagement but on the smaller side in terms of their following. I often filter for “only gems” when the top results return accounts that are too mainstream to be helpful (such as “Jeff Bezos” or “Shopify”). Hidden gems help you locate influential but niche accounts that other tools would have missed.
Popular Accounts are excluded by default, since these are accounts that almost everybody follows on any given social media platform. This includes political figures (e.g. “POTUS”), large celebrities (e.g. “Elon Musk”), and mainstream outlets (you can find these in “Press”, which is a whole dedicated section of results!). I never toggle this switch except out of pure curiosity. The popular results have never been useful.
SparkScore is SparkToro’s proprietary metric measuring how well-engaged any given account is compared to others of a similarly sized following. This score is given out of 100, and you can filter to see only accounts with high engagement, low engagement, or anywhere in between.
Location can be searched for by city, state, or country. For smaller audiences, this might not work so well. Once you start typing a location’s name, SparkToro will provide you with a list of options that start with those letters. Saves a lot of typing!
Social Accounts lets you pick between accounts on any of SparkToro’s indexed platforms. You can choose to search for accounts on one platform or multiple.
Account Type helps you pick between accounts that belong to individuals or businesses. This doesn’t always work with 100% accuracy, but I have had pretty good luck in the past.
Audience Size helps you look for accounts of a certain scale. For some use cases, you might only want to see large accounts of over 1,000,000 followers. For others, you might want to find small but influential voices and search for results that have between 1,000 and 50,000 followers.
Each social media account within your results will include the following information:
Account Name display name on that account. Usually this is their Twitter username.
Account Display Picture is shown in a cute little circle on the left-hand side of each result. Helps navigate things pretty well.
Account’s Associated Website URL is listed underneath the name. If you click on it, you will be taken to that website in a new tab.
Account’s Description / Bio this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out if you are looking at the correct account when the name and profile picture can be mixed up with someone else.
Account’s Associated Social Media Platforms, these are little buttons under the account description shaped like the logos of those platforms. If you hover over them, you will see the name of that platform and some stats like the following count and number of posts.
Percent of Audience, the percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
SparkScore as described above, this is SparkToro’s proprietary metric measuring how well-engaged any given account is compared to others of a similarly sized following. This score is given out of 100.
Social Followers the amount of followers aggregated across all of this account’s indexed social media accounts.
Websites
SparkToro’s website results
The interface for website results is quite similar to the “Social” tab. You will also see options for filters, export to a CSV file, and a button to add specific results to a list.
The filter options include:
Hidden Gems, these are websites with a decent amount of engagement but on the smaller side in terms of their visitor numbers. I often filter for “only gems” when the top results return websites that are too mainstream to be helpful (such as “Amazon.com” or “Zoom.us”). Hidden gems help you locate influential but niche websites that other tools would have missed.
Linking Websites the number of other sites linking to this domain as indexed by Moz. You can filter for any range from a particular minimum number of linking websites to a particular maximum.
Domain Authority a proprietary score developed by Moz to show how well this website is predicted to rank on search relative to others (out of 100). You can filter for any minimum and maximum value on that range.
Popular Websites are excluded by default, since these are sites that almost everybody follows on any given social media platform (such as “Instagram”).
Each website within your results will include the following information:
Website URL which you can click to visit that particular site.
Website Favicon is shown in a cute little circle on the left-hand side of each result. Helps navigate things pretty well.
Website’s Description, this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out if you are looking at the correct site or helps you get a quick idea of what kind of website a result might be.
Website’s Associated Social Media Platforms, these are little buttons under the website description shaped like the logos of those platforms. If you hover over them, you will see the name of that platform and some stats like the following count and number of posts.
Percent of Audience, the percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
Linking Websites the number of other sites linking to this domain.
Domain Authority a proprietary score showing how well this website is predicted to rank on search relative to others (out of 100).
Podcasts
SparkToro’s podcast results
Podcast results have less information than the “Social” or “Websites” tabs, but this section should still look pretty familiar. Like before, you will see options for filters, export to a CSV file, and a button to add specific results to a list.
Here you only have one option for filtering results: “Last Episode Date”, helping you view shows that were last updated within the past 30, 60, 90, or 120 days.
Each podcast within your results will include the following information:
Podcast Name full name of a particular show. You can click it to see the podcast’s page in Apple Podcasts.
Podcast Display Picture is shown in a cute little square (not circle!) on the left-hand side of each result. Helps navigate things pretty well.
Podcast’s Description / Bio this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out what a particular show is about.
Percent of Audience, the percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
Number of Episodes total amount of episodes available for a particular show through Apple Podcasts.
Last Podcast date of the most recent uploaded podcast episode as per Apple Podcasts.
YouTube
SparkToro’s YouTube results
YouTube channel results once again have a familiar interface. Like before, you will see options for filters, export to a CSV file, and a button to add specific results to a list.
Your filter options include:
Subscribers Count helps you find channels of a particular size. You can select a desired range with a specific minimum and maximum number of subscribers.
Average View Count helps you define a particular range of views that a channel gets on average across all of their videos.
Last Video Date helps you find channels that most recently uploaded a video within the past 30, 60, 90, or 120 days.
Each YouTube channel within your results will include the following information:
Channel Name full name of a particular YouTube channel.
Channel Display Picture is shown in a cute little square (not circle!) on the left-hand side of each result. Helps navigate things pretty well.
Channel Description / Bio this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out what a particular channel is about.
Percent of Audience percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
Subscribers number of people subscribed to a particular channel.
Average Number of Views average number of views that a particular channel gets per video.
Last Video date of most recently uploaded video.
SparkToro’s subReddit results
Reddit results are kind of like a combination of the “Podcasts” and “Text Insights” interfaces.
The first tab is called “SubReddits” and it shows you which Reddit communities your audience most often engages with.
Like before, you will see options for filters, export to a CSV file, and a button to add specific results to a list.
Your filter options include:
SubReddit Members helps you find communities of a particular size. You can select a desired range with a specific minimum and maximum number of members.
Popular SubReddits are excluded by default, since these are communities that almost everybody on Reddit is a member of (such as “Ask Reddit”).
Each SubReddit within your results will include the following information:
SubReddit Name, the display name for a particular community. Can be very long or very short.
SubReddit URL formatted as “/r/subreddit”. Click on it to open that community in your browser.
Reddit’s Favicon is shown in a cute little circle. These are the same across all communities, but they are visually appealing.
SubReddit Description, this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out what a particular community is about.
Percent of Audience percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
Members number of users who joined a particular subReddit.
SparkToro’s Reddit comment results
The second tab within Reddit results shows you “Comment Text” most commonly used in your audience’s Reddit comments.
Here you will see:
Search Options that allow you to search for that specific word or phrase on a selected number of platforms. These include:
Google Trends
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google Search
Reddit.
Percent of Audience within the larger group that you’ve searched for who use that particular word or phrase.
Press
SparkToro’s press results
This section is basically a subset of the “Social” results showing you exclusively press and media outlets.
The filter options here include:
Popular Accounts are excluded by default, since these are accounts that almost everybody follows on any given social media platform.
SparkScore is SparkToro’s proprietary metric measuring how well-engaged any given account is compared to others of a similarly sized following. This score is given out of 100, and you can filter to see only accounts with high engagement, low engagement, or anywhere in between.
Social Accounts lets you pick between accounts on any of SparkToro’s indexed platforms. You can choose to search for accounts on one platform or multiple.
Audience Size helps you look for accounts of a certain scale. For some use cases, you might only want to see large accounts of over 10,000,000 followers. For others, you might want to find small but influential voices and search for results that have between 50,000 and 500,000 followers.
Each press account within your results will include the following information:
Account Name display name on that account. Usually this is their publication name.
Account Display Picture is shown in a cute little circle on the left-hand side of each result. Helps navigate things pretty well.
Account’s Associated Website URL is listed underneath the name. If you click on it, you will be taken to that website in a new tab.
Account’s Description / Bio this field is auto-populated and cropped to the first couple of words, so some results might not show up correctly. Often helpful in figuring out if you are looking at the correct account when the name and profile picture can be mixed up with someone else.
Account’s Associated Social Media Platforms, these are little buttons under the account description shaped like the logos of those platforms. If you hover over them, you will see the name of that platform and some stats like the following count and number of posts.
Percent of Audience, the percentage of your total audience who engage with this particular result.
SparkScore as described above, this is SparkToro’s proprietary metric measuring how well-engaged any given account is compared to others of a similarly sized following. This score is given out of 100.
Social Followers the amount of followers aggregated across all of this account’s indexed social media accounts.
Compare Audiences
The search bar for SparkToro’s “Compare Audiences” feature
Sometimes, you might want to see how much certain audiences actually have in common (or what their differences look like). Lucky for you, SparkToro has a feature for exactly that use case!
If you select “Compare Audiences” in the bottom right corner of SparkToro’s search bar, you’ll find an interface letting you run a search on two different audiences at once.
The types of searches you can run are exactly the same as when looking for one audience at a time. But now, you can also compare audiences across two different types of searches! For example, you can compare people that use a particular hashtag (e.g. “#mechanicalkeyboard”) to people who visit a particular website (e.g.
“keychron.com”, a popular manufacturer of mechanical keyboards).
I often end up running comparisons between my original search query and one of the results that I found interesting.
Sample results for an audience comparison within SparkToro
For example, a couple of weeks ago I was looking up people who visit the website datanami.com (a data science publication) and saw that a significant percentage of their audience followed the Twitter account for Gartner Peer Insights (which has since been renamed to “Gartner Peer Experiences”). I also noticed that a lot of the results for data science related Google searches would land me on Gartner’s website. So I decided to run a comparison search between the two.
A sample of results that you might see when running an audience comparison search
That helped me figure out that both audiences share a surprising amount. Even looking at their differences, we notice that both groups interact with a lot of Gartner’s own content (even those who don’t follow that Gartner account!) and that Gartner’s audience goes to cybersecurity and IT specific sites.
Profile Information
Profile information for people who belong to either of the two comparison audiences
This section gives you a pretty Venn diagram showing audience overlap and some general information about the two groups, including:
Number of Profiles within each audience and shared between the two
Behavior Similarity on a scale from “diverse” to “homogeneous”, measuring the degree of shared characteristics between both audiences
Audience Size on a scale from “small” to “very large”
Audience Confidence on a scale from “low confidence” to “high confidence”, combining “Audience Size” and “Behavior Similarity” to determine an approximate margin of error within SparkToro’s comparison results.
Comparison Results
Here you can see the social accounts and phrases in bios that both of these groups have in common
Here you can see detailed comparisons, accompanied by more Venn diagrams and a sample of results. This includes:
Types of Results that you see are similar but more limited than the main audience search. Includes:
Overlap Data these are the characteristics per type of result that both audiences have in common (e.g. social accounts that are followed both by audience A and audience B)
Distinctive Data, these are characteristics displayed only by one audience versus another (e.g. social accounts followed by audience A but not audience B).
Lists
I often delete my lists after a project, so this was the only list on my account at the time of writing
Once you begin running searches, you can start saving useful results for your campaigns. Note: My lists have recently gotten cluttered after months of using SparkToro, so I deleted all of them and made a new list while working on these guides.
Main View
The main interface simply shows you all of your current lists with options to create, edit, share, or delete each list and some basic information, including:
List Title
Number of List Items (or “sources”) saved
Owner (shows “Me” if you’ve made the list)
Access with initials of users able to view that list.
Viewing Selected Lists
Results within a list look nearly the same as when running audience searches
Once you click on a list, you will see a simplified version of the “Audience Research” interface with the selected list’s name at the top. Includes:
Results Sidebar with categories of results. Shows the number of sources saved per category and an option to export all data within that list. The types of sources are listed in the following modified order:
Social
Websites
Podcasts
YouTube
Press
Text Insights
Reddit.
Source Options within each category of results with buttons allowing you to perform the following actions for each source you’ve saved:
Export Data as a Microsoft Excel file.
Filters for viewing sources within your list. Same interface and options as filters within the main “Audience Research” interface. You can find a detailed breakdown of filter options within the “Types of Results” section of this post.
Add to List for adding the same sources for other lists created on your account.
Remove from List for removing sources from the current list.
Source Information structured very similarly to the main “Audience Research” interface. Here you’ll see:
Source details such as display picture, name, bio, additional links.
SparkScore (social accounts and press) displaying a fraction with value out of 100. Measures the amount of engagement relative to other accounts with a similar following count (i.e. if an account has 100,000 followers the SparkScore is comparing that account’s reach with other accounts followed by around 100,000 people).
Social Followers (social accounts and press) total following across all platforms indexed in SparkToro’s database.
Contact Info (social accounts, websites, podcasts, YouTube channels) when you click on this button you’ll see all of the URLs associated with this source and any available emails sourced through Hunter. Available only on certain paid plans.
Linking Websites (websites only) other sites linking to this domain as indexed by Moz.
Domain Authority (DA) (websites only) a proprietary score developed by Moz to show how well this website is predicted to rank on search relative to others (out of 100).
Number of Episodes (podcasts only) total amount of episodes available for a particular show through Apple Podcasts.
Last Podcast (podcasts only) date of most recent uploaded podcast episode as per Apple Podcasts.
Subscribers (YouTube channels only) number of people subscribed to a particular channel.
Average Number of Views (YouTube channels only) average number of views that a particular channel gets per video.
Last Video (YouTube channels only) date of most recent uploaded video.
Members (Reddit only) number of users who joined a particular subReddit.
Custom Search
I don’t have access to this particular feature, so this is the message I see
I am not on SparkToro’s highest paid plan (Agency), so I don’t actually have access to this feature. As far as I’ve seen in Rand’s blog post about this feature, Custom Search allows you to search for an audience by combining search queries with boolean logic.
I can access a “test query” interface where I can set the parameters of a customer search and see how many accounts match them (but not see any of the results), so this is what I can gather:
You can combine search queries with operators “and” or “but, does not”
Search Operators: let you combine multiple queries with either:
“AND” - both of these searches have to match every single account within your results (e.g. “frequently visits the website contentmarketinginstitute.com” AND “uses the hashtag #ecommerce” would get you information about people who visit the site and are frequently posting that hashtag)
“BUT, DOES NOT” - your resulting audience does the behavior within your first query but does not engage with the behavior in your second query (e.g. “frequently talks about payment processing” BUT, DOES NOT “follow the social account for @coinbase” to get results about people who are interested in financial technology but not web3).
Custom Search lets you define very, very, very specific audience parameters
I’ve also tried to see how many queries I can combine here, and the interface lets me add 11 separate search parameters! I doubt most searches beyond 3-4 queries will actually return large enough audiences, but it would be fun to test it.
Note: as of the time of this writing, custom search is in beta testing.
Custom Audiences
A screenshot from SparkToro’s instructions about custom audiences
I am not on SparkToro’s highest paid plan (Agency), so I don’t actually have access to this feature.
As far as I can tell, this interface allows you to upload a CSV file of your own list of social profiles (15,000+) and then view SparkToro results for that specific audience.
Settings
Billing
SparkToro’s billing settings
Your billing information including:
Payment Method used to pay for SparkToro subscription with an option to update card on file
Account Subscription current plan (current or legacy) with options to change plans or cancel subscription
Billing Contact with billing address and email on file
Next Billing date & amount of upcoming payment
Invoices history of invoices generated including:
Invoice date
Invoice number
Amount due
Amount paid
File download.
Account Settings
SparkToro’s account settings
General account information (the organization with a SparkToro subscription). Includes:
Account Name with current value and option to change name. Mostly used to identify accounts in settings.
Account Usage broken down by month, showing:
Start date of time period (MM-DD-YY)
End date of time period (MM-DD-YY)
Number of queries run
History of past searches (60 days).
Query History (60 Days)
SparkToro can show you the history of all searches you ran in the previous 60 days
Audience Research Queries
History of searches for audiences (e.g. “Frequently talks about: sql” February 28th, 2023 22:23:25 - Mariya Delano”). Includes:
Type of Search (talks about, follows the social account, visits the website, etc.)
Search Query (phrase, hashtag, social account, website, etc.) used to define audience
Date & Time of Search (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) in PST.
Name of User who carried out the search
Filters Applied (e.g. “Section: Social; Filters: Follower Max: 300,000, Sparkscore Min: 66”).
Profile / Website Queries
History of searches for “Analyze a specific website or social account” (e.g. “Social Search: @randfish; February 28, 2023 21:52:44 - Mariya Delano”) Includes:
Type of Search (website or social)
Account Analyzed (social account name or website URL)
Date & Time of Search (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) in your current timezone
Name of User who carried out the search.
User Settings
Individual user settings within SparkToro
Information about you as an individual user (as opposed to “account”, which is your organization). Includes:
Name with an option to update
Password with an option to update
Account Deletion with no clickable options while you’re on an active paid subscription. Instead, displays the following message: “Your account currently has an active paid subscription. Please reach out to support@sparktoro.com for help deleting your account.”
Email with an option to update
Email Subscriptions with all of SparkToro’s email lists, their descriptions, and a toggle to turn those emails on or off. Email lists include:
Product Announcements
Onboarding
Newsletter (This option kept turning off once I left the page. I’m not sure if this is a separate existing list or a bug.)
Events
Blog Subscription
Sales and promotions.
Switch Accounts
If you own accounts with multiple organizations, this is where you can switch between them
If your email is attached to multiple organizations with SparkToro subscriptions, you can use this interface to switch between accounts. Includes:
Type of Account (if you’re an owner or a user)
Name of Account
Current Plan.
Help Center
SparkToro’s support and help center
This section is pretty similar to the right-hand side of your dashboard. Here you can find some support resources curated by SparkToro’s team, including:
Funnily enough, I’ve never clicked on SparkToro’s Help Center before writing this guide.
Go Search for Some Audiences!
Now that you’ve read to the end of this guide (did you really have nothing better to do with your time? Or do you enjoy my writing that much? If so, I’ll buy you a cookie.) there’s nothing else for me to explain.
You’ve learned about all of SparkToro’s features, options, and quirks.
Now I implore you: go and fall in love with this incredible software on your own terms. I promise, you won’t regret it.
Side Note: we also offer SparkToro consulting services if you would like some help getting set up.
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Learn about the SparkToro guide series by checking out the introduction or read about my content marketing workflow with SparkToro.