How Marketers Can Thrive in a Post-third-party Cookie Era

Episode Description

I spoke to Larry Kim - Founder & CEO at Customers.ai in this episode.

Larry talked about how privacy regulations are changing and what that means for marketers. He also talked about how his company, Customers.ai is helping businesses with better remarketing using sales outreach automation.

Watch this episode to learn:

• How privacy regulations can impact your advertising
• How marketing is changing in the post-cookie era
• How to spot winners & losers by conducting regular experiments

Episode Takeaways

• Marketers need to find leverage by getting better at spotting unicorns and going all in on those campaigns or ideas to compete in their industry. You can get better at this by regularly running tests and finding the winners and the losers.
• Delusional Donkey Syndrome: This is a phenomenon when marketers don’t understand the difference between average campaigns and remarkable unicorn campaigns that can’t be effective at producing remarkable stuff.
• How to regularly find good content ideas: listen to your customers’ questions, answer them, and distribute them in channels where there are people with similar questions or problems.
• Advice for founders of smaller companies: people buy from people who are helpful. So work toward building a helpful brand in your niche.

Episode Transcript

LARRY KIM: If you’re a marketer and you really want to find the leverage, you have to get better at spotting these unicorns and really doubling down on those or tripling down or going all in on those few remarkable ideas and just really just ignoring everything else that isn’t sticking.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of Pitch Perfect. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyer, a PPC management tool. So for today’s episode, we have one of the best known names in digital marketing, Larry Kim. Most people know him from his days at WordStream, a PPC management software.

And now he’s gone on to another company. He started Customers.ai. And we’ll learn much more about what that is and how it fits in with all of the privacy regulations that are changing how we do targeting in a more privacy centric world. So let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall. Hey, Larry, nice to see you again.

LARRY KIM: Hi, Fred. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. So let’s jump into the maybe one of the things you’re famous for besides WordStream and now customers.ai. Okay. But you’re also the wrangler of unicorns in the world of Donquixote. You made some statements about unicorns. In digital marketing.

Can you tell us more about that? Cause I think people can learn quite a bit from it.

LARRY KIM: Sure. It’s just a metaphor, a metaphor for you know, truly remarkable campaigns. And just what we’re finding was that not just like the 80, 20 row, but like there’s like a 97, three rule where like the vast majority of the value.

Being created from marketing campaigns was attributable to a very, very tiny segment of the effort and, and then, and that’s spent and and resources. And we, we call those, you know, I call those unicorns because they’re rare and beautiful and amazing creatures. And, you know, the punchline was simply, If you’re a marketer and you really want to find the leverage, you have to get better at spotting these unicorns and really doubling down on those are tripling down or going all in on those few remarkable ideas and to really just ignoring everything else that isn’t sticking.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And unlike the unicorn, the mythical creature, that amazing campaign that 3 percent of your campaigns that drives 97 percent of the results that is out there. Right. And you looked at a lot of data in your days. So all of this is, is backed up by that. So that’s amazing. And this is really something people should do.

Now you also talked about the the delusional donkey syndrome. Right. And I think it’s about people sort of believing that they’re doing the right thing by spending their time on the mediocre things. And to me, that kind of connects to. generative world. You know, are we as a marketing culture too focused on doing the same things that we’ve been doing and wanting to do those again, when potentially the machines could actually help us with this.

Now I would argue that the human probably is going to come up with those unicorn ideas, but the machine generative AI. Can give us back the time to think up these unicorns by doing a decent enough job at the donkey stuff. Would you agree with that? Or what’s your take on gen AI?

LARRY KIM: So donkey delusional syndrome.

Thank you for bringing that up, Fred. This is just this delusional syndrome suffered by marketers where definition of a good quality campaign for marketing, whether it be content or ads, whatever it has to do with. The level of effort and the fact that it got published or executed on. And unfortunately is, is, is, doesn’t have the benefit of being true because 97 percent of these things, it’s like, it’s almost like you didn’t do anything at all, like, like in terms of any objective, you know, metrics in terms of engagement or clicks or, or anything at all.

I think your question is like, can AI. Help us generate these, these donkeys and so that we can focus more on the, the unicorns, or do you think that this is more of like a unicorn generation machine? I think that the, the, the unicorn ideas are truly hard to, to, to know ahead of time. Like, like they come along.

It’s usually something, a new, kind of like a, it’s like a bluebird. You just never know when you’re going to get them. And you know, I don’t think AI would be, it’s hard, it’s hard to know. Like.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And so one of the premises that I’ve put in my first book was the agency that wins is the one that has the best testing process and is fastest at testing and iterating and finding those winners.

And maybe that’s a little bit towards the point that you’re making as well. Like, we don’t necessarily know what’s going to be the unicorn, right? But the more that we can ideate and quickly test things out. And, and, and sort of like figure out what the winners are and get rid of the losers. So we stopped wasting time on that.

So time and resources that can get us to the unicorns, because it’s, it’s true. Like what is going to be a unicorn? What’s going to land with consumers that’s sometimes hard to predict. Right. I mean, I’m

LARRY KIM: always surprised. Like I always think I know. Feeling like I worked really hard on this. It’s going to do well.

And it falls flat. It’s pretty, it’s pretty heartbreaking, honestly. The one that I mailed in and spent 15 minutes on boom, like 10 million views. Pretty frustrating. But but yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: no, I mean, let’s talk about that. I think I personally know that you’re sort of a content machine. I think a lot of people were very impressed by.

Your cadence in terms of writing blog posts and sort of just like helping the industry learn now, how do you achieve, or how did you achieve that? Because that was even before generative AI existed, or you just the kind of guy who doesn’t need sleep much. Are you always working? Like, how do you. Put out hundreds of ideas so that eventually you have enough unicorns to really build a successful business like you did.

LARRY KIM: Look, I think that was a very unique setup where we had, you know, tens of thousands of clients. And I was just in a unique position where all of the. Kind of interesting conundrums or questions like in, in people’s ad accounts would kind of bubble up and, and I would get to see, you know, some interesting questions in, in different accounts and, and see.

You know, which was inspiration for a significant number of, of of topics. It’s, it would have been, it would have been hard to come up with those ideas without actually use cases. And I think that was sort of a missing ingredient there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. So I mean, that’s golden advice there, right? Listen to customers, listen to the audience.

Figure out the questions they have what’s not being answered and have a really good answers for those and it’s more than just opinion in that case. Right? So it was also the fact that you had tens of thousands of accounts. It was not only the questions bubbling up from them, but then it was also the data of looking across accounts and figuring out here’s the real answer based on what we’re actually seeing in these accounts.

LARRY KIM: Yeah, we, I made a kind of an imperative, like, you know, if we’re going to write something, it has to have some, some kind of a empirical evidence about that behind it. And we should, and we should share that. And we were in a unique position there where we just have a lot of client data. So if, you know, it’s pretty straightforward to anonymize it and publish those, those observations, which I think it was, it was, it was You know, kind of an unfair advantage, honestly,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: but you got to take the advantages that you build.

Right. And so I think even before you have that unfair advantage of the humongous scale, still, by listening to the right questions and diving deep into whatever information is out there and building answers that builds your following. And so you have more people that you can work with now, and that kind of helps you get to that next level.

Because I think when people. Want to be like Larry? I mean, what’s the path? There is a path. Clearly, you didn’t have tens of thousands of accounts from day one, but you were able to get there. And for anyone that’s sort of like maybe with a more nascent business, Like, was there something for you with customers.ai now or with WordStream where it was kind of a tipping point that took you to the next levEl?

LARRY KIM: this was a very intentional, deliberate you know, content strategy that had significant amount of resources. You know, behind it and it wasn’t like just dabbling in publishing stuff on the side. Like, like it was resourced and we had a competent strategy. So I think that was sort of the tipping point, like when we started really realizing the impact of a founder led content on creating brand biases towards you know, influencing purchasing decisions.

Once we, once we made that connection that’s what makes it really sorry to pick up.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. So, I mean, you made a big bet when you already had the resources. And I would argue that for anyone who’s out there as a founder of maybe a smaller organization, people like buying from other people, not necessarily other brands.

They like the people behind those brands, which is why even with big brands like Adidas and Nike, oftentimes we know the athletes who are those brands as opposed to and that, that, that gives us confidence in the brands themselves. Right? So there’s that connection there. So what you’re saying, founder led could be influencer led.

It’s, it’s people we respect that are associated with brands and you don’t necessarily have to be huge. Right. I think in the beginning, if you’re just like that amazing marketer and you’ve tried something new and you’re willing to share that with the world that’s going to really. Kick things off for you.

LARRY KIM: Just niche down, like pick something very specific you know, and then focus there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s a great point. So niche down. So it’s not always about going after the high volume. It’s about going for that audience where you can be maybe a big fish in a small pond. That’s more important than being kind of like a mediocre fit.

And again, it’s to your unicorn point, right? If you fish in a small pond, it’s easier to be the unicorn in that pond. And if you go for the big stage and you level up, then you’re probably going to be one of the many, many donkeys that gets mediocre attention and doesn’t go anywhere.

LARRY KIM: Pretty much. You know, so it’s like.

I don’t know, specialize in TikTok ads or first party cookies or, you know, something very specific.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So tell us a little bit more about what you’re up to now and what is your niche that you’ve gone after?

LARRY KIM: Sure. So I think this is the biggest opportunity in marketing right now. Field is website identity resolution technologies.

As well as we’re marketing software. So the company is called customers.ai and we through the easiest way to describe it is it’s a kind of magical we, we do a really sophisticated data enrichment of your first party data of your first party website data to include. The identities and other attributes of the, of the folks that are visiting your, your website.

So this is, this is first party data. I’m not, it’s not like a zoom info or Apollo, or we’re just giving you lists of people who fit your ICP or whatever. What we’re doing is we’re, you know, enriching your website data. Perhaps you’re already familiar with like how Google analytics will enrich your website data with geolocation data.

So we’re able to take that a couple of steps further. By enriching that with detailed contact and person level attributes, like B2B attributes or B2C attributes, like B2B attributes would be like, what company do they work for? What’s their LinkedIn profile? You know, what what’s the revenue of that company?

I mean, what’s the website URL for, for, for the individual business, your website, B2C attributes could be things like, you know, are they married? What’s their credit score? Do they have children? What’s their mailing address? So just being able to provide detailed. First party data enrichment and then be able to able to take action for, for those for that data that we, that we provide.

And, and one of the most interesting ways that we can you know, take action on this data as it pertains to, you know, the PPC town hall community, I think is, is in restoring remarketing audience targeting capabilities, which unfortunately, if you haven’t gotten the memo, it’s, it’s you know, pretty much 70 percent dead already, and we’ll be 100 percent dead by you know, end of the quarter because of the loss of first party cookies.

So what do you think?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, no, exactly. Let’s talk more about that. Right. So there’s the deprecation or the sunset of the, the third party cookie which has now actually been just yesterday was announced and depending on when you’re watching this, but it was recently announced by Google that the sunset, which was supposed to be in 2024 is now.

At the earliest going to be in 2025. So we’ve been working towards this since 2020. It’s now five years delayed. And it’s driven by marketers. Marketers have found issues and they need better ways to target. And that’s kind of where you’re coming in. Right. But, but, but talk a little bit about like, obviously the reason third party cookies are going away is because.

There’s privacy concerns. People on the Internet don’t necessarily understand what data is being collected, where that data is going, how it’s being prepared by different companies. Now, in your case, customers.ai , knowing someone’s credit score that obviously comes from a third party, and that is being connected to something the consumer.

Gave to you how do those permission models work and, and, and how legit is that really in today’s very privacy focused world?

LARRY KIM: Sure. Let’s just take a step back for, for, for a minute here. And Maybe try to understand, you know, make sure everyone’s on the same page for, you know, first party cookies versus first party data versus third party data and cookies.

First party is like, you know, this is, you know, your competitive advantage, like your website traffic, et cetera. The

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: first party data would be. Who comes to your website? If they, a lot of websites now have that opening screen that says, Hey, put in your email so that we can give you a discount on the first order.

That is basically step one in terms of building that first party relationship. Okay. You came to my website, but I didn’t know much about you. Now I know at least something that I can start to carry forward as I build more first party data and maybe start engaging you with newsletters, special offers, other things.

But what else gets in that first party data when you come to the website?

LARRY KIM: Yeah, it’s, it’s the data that, that are in your systems like Google analytics, Salesforce, MailChimp, HubSpot, like the customer information and interactions that you have with those prospects and customers third party, it’s like, you’re just buying or leasing or renting, you know, marketing data from some, some That’s awesome.

Some vendor like zoom info has a directory of, of marketing people that you can, you know, reach out to, or you know, Google ads, for example or sorry, Facebook ads or has this ability to specify certain interests or behaviors. In this case you, you, you actually don’t know who those people are, but that targeting is, is being Provided by a third party data.

And the mechanism by which you’re able to, they’re able to figure out that information is actually the third party cookie, which was an interesting cookie that allowed for transmission of data across different domains. Whereas the, the first part, it’s, it’s, Kind of a, it’s more limited in scope in terms of being connected between the browser and the business, a third party cookie literally has a third party in that mix like sitting on the side here and metaphorically you know, listening in and able to send some data elsewhere.

Okay. So, so, so hopefully, you know, that kind of sets the stage there in terms of marketers, PPC marketers in particular, their exposure, you know, what’s your exposure to third party cookies? You know, I’m 99 percent sure that it’s kind of mostly based on your usage of the Facebook pixel or the Google ad pixel, because those are, Third party pixels that did a lot of stuff.

Okay. And I don’t think that most marketers even know what those pixels did. I mean, you’re probably, you’re probably aware that the Google and Facebook pixels are doing that kind of conversion tracking. So phoning home, like conversion events so that they’ll show up in in the in the campaigns and ad groups for, for attribution purposes.

But what you might not know is that there were two other core use cases. One of them was that it was a full blown identity, like identity management resolution system that could identify 50 percent of your website. Through the power of a third party cookie. So like Fred, you could go visit my website because you’re, you know, logged into either Facebook or Gmail.

And because my website has a pixel on it, the, the, the Facebook, Google or Facebook pixel and using through third party cookies, we could pick up and say like, Hey, that’s Fred. And, and, and send that back to YouTube ads or send that back to, to Meta ads kind of clandestinely and, and

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that’s the whole premise of remarketing is built on that, right?

Because it is knowing that I visited this website. I later go to that website. It uses the third party cookie to say, Oh, he was here before. So let’s show ads from here on this website.

LARRY KIM: You got it. You got it. So like, you know, how, how, how is that done? It’s, it’s, it’s using the third party cookie, which, you know, even though Chrome is kind of.

Kind of extending that lifeline by a few more months. Like it’s been eliminated in Firefox, Safari, all iOS, you know, users. You know, so, so you’re that remarketing signal remarketing, I think it’s like the crown jewel of, of, of, of advertising in terms of like, if you want the highest. Quality signal for, for behavioral or interest based targeting like remarking is like, it is that unicorn.

It’s like, you know, it’s, there’s it, even like an ad fatigue for marketing audience beats a brand new you know, interest based targeting. So, so that, that was loss of signal, which is already at like 70 percent signal loss, even with Chrome intact, but we’ll go to zero as, as Chrome kind of goes through with their defecation plans.

I mean, and that’s why they’re, they’re, they’re stalling here. It’s, it’s like, this is so critical. Okay. That, you know, that this,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: well, that’s where the privacy sandbox thing comes in. Right? So they’ve been looking for work around solutions and cohorts and all of those things. Okay. But nothing has come out that really seems to work for everyone.

And that’s exactly why they’re smaller.

LARRY KIM: So, so the other thing that these pixels were doing, which I’m not sure that you’re aware of, if our visitors are aware of, is that not only was it sending that. Browsing data back to Google for, for your retargeting, but it, you know, it was also being sent back and then re resold to the tens of millions of, of, of advertisers on the Google and meta platforms so that they could then.

Do behavioral or interest or demographic based targeting of their ads to, you know, to, to target the people who are, who are interested in working in process. Yeah, exactly. And

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: to clarify that. So when you say it was being resold to tens of millions of other advertisers, it was not like there was this shopping cart system or whatever.

It was basically, well, you have everything, right. The interest based targeting that powers Google making money from. Higher CPCs and, and more clicks. That’s how they were set. So they were just adding, offering it as a targeting option, which in in market segments, which

LARRY KIM: it’s, it’s all based on the, the, the browsing, the browsing history for, for Google and on Facebook, it’s the behavioral interest and, and demographic targeting is that particularly the behavioral targeting was based on you know, your, your data being sent home by 10 million, you know, Facebook ad pixels or Google ad pixels being sent back to the mothership and, and, and that, that, that was a big problem that would like, because that wasn’t disclosed. Do you remember reading this disclosure? Like it wasn’t being clearly disclosed and it was powering like this, you know, multi hundred billion dollar advertising empires. And, and so, you know, GDPR and all these things, like they, they kind of have a point, like, like if you’re going to do that, basically like you would, you someone would browse my site and because it wasn’t a certain category, then they would start seeing ads.

From like a hundred other advertisers in that category, the same thing. So yeah, that, that can be, that can be concerning. Okay. And so, you know, that’s why Apple’s kind of, you know, they’ve, they’ve made it, you know, opt in rather than opt out. Like you have to specifically opt into allow these app tracking and that’s why, you know, Firefox has made it come out.

And you know, does that mean you can’t do remarketing and all this stuff anymore? You, you, you can provide that there’s, there’s kind of two big differences between what, like what, what we’re proposing versus kind of the sins of the past the first is let’s, let’s limit it to a first party context.

Okay. We’ll see. We can encrypt your first party website data and send it back, you know, through custom audiences in a way where it’s not being like resold, you know, doing all this other crazy stuff that, that that you had no idea was happening. So, so, so that’s

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, let’s open that up for Rebecca, right?

So the example you gave before was Fred went to a website. And we’re going to remarket to him. The first level of privacy is basically saying, well, it’s not Fred, but it’s this like weird string of characters. And you can still do remarketing to that, that identity, but you don’t know who sits behind that identity.

But then obviously you started doing a fingerprinting. And they’d use their own third party connections to figure out, Oh, well, this identity seems to probably be Fred because we know from these other places. Wow. What this person has done, where they’ve been and, Oh yeah, it’s probably Fred. So that kind of didn’t work.

LARRY KIM: The, the advertising use case, I feel is like. Pretty rock solid. Like there is no GDPR of like, I have a right not to be advertised to on, on banner ads or in my Facebook app. Like, you know, you can just not use Facebook or you can just not use YouTube. Like that’s like, we haven’t gone that far, you know?

You know, even in the most privacy you know, zealot countries like France or whatever like no one’s proposing that there can be no ads and ad targeting in YouTube or Facebook.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. Because the alternative is a grant for which you have to pay. And we’ve seen time and again, people do not want to pay for access to most things.

And in fact, I believe this is one of the techniques that you use. People don’t want to pay for. Access to news, but there’s a change of information and permission there. I believe. Can you talk about that?

LARRY KIM: Sure. Sure. Sure. But just just just completing the thought here. It’s just you know, limiting the scope and the other thing that.

You need to disclose. So, so the antidote for a lot of these privacy issues you know, is full disclosure. We’re not, we’re not advocating to clandestinely do remarketing, like just, you know, Put it in your privacy policy, put it in your terms of service, make it very, as clear as possible on like what the attributes you’re using and where you’re sending them to.

And you know what, as customers don’t mind being marketed to from the brands they know, like, and trust. All right. We talked about this earlier. They, they start to, you know, perk up a little bit in, in, you know, being a little annoyed. When like suddenly you’re getting all these, you know, ads or inquiries from completely unrelated parties, you know and so, so this is, this is that’s, that’s the difference between first and third party data and, and, and, and, you know, we think first party data and first party data Enrichment and acting on this in the most intelligent way, in a way that’s privacy compliant and limited to a first party context.

Like that’s, that’s a rock solid you know, use case from a, from a privacy adherence perspective. And, and that, and that is the way forward like, like the way of, of, of like leasing data through ad pixels that were like Trojan horses for behavioral data, like, like that’s, that’s the path. Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So what you’re proposing is not a way to become one of these hundreds of brands in similar categories and start inundating the consumer with ads for competitors, but it’s more about you have a first party relationship because somebody has been to your website.

But how do we know a little bit more? About that first party relationship because, because I mean, you said one of the first party data components that businesses have will be what pages were visited. How long did they visit? What dates did they visit? So it’s all the website logs, basically. But how do you take that to the next level?

Right? And you talked about demographics, you talked about.

LARRY KIM: The, the easiest way to like, like a example, like, I think you’re familiar with data enrichment of, of your website logs to include city, state country, that kind of information, even language like this is that, that what I would describe that as a very basic enrichment of, of your first party website data.

And then that’s usually doesn’t, doesn’t work.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s because we’re mapping from the IP address of the consumer. So someone

LARRY KIM: is doing, someone out there is doing a good job of maintaining a master file of all the IP addresses and all the households or cities and states, you know, to which those, those IP addresses are, are mapped to.

And and and basically, you know, this is for this is just an enrichment, you know, of the first party data providing additional context. There’s there’s nothing, you know, like, I think

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: most consumers would be okay with that, right? Like, listen, IP address to city mapping. That’s private, but now you mentioned IP to households.

Now we start to get into maybe a little bit more of a territory where somebody might be like, oh, wait. My IP address actually tells someone that I live at such and such a grass. So this is,

LARRY KIM: that’s what, that’s what we do. So, so we have a more sophisticated mappings you know, it’s fairly sophisticated stuff that gets updated, you know, billions of times per per day.

But we’re able to sort of you know, just get a slightly higher resolution view of, of, of, not for everyone, but for a meaningful full fraction of, of us consumers you know, to be able to ID those people in a more granular way. And again, this is totally legal as we, we you know, it’s, it’s all about disclosure and fully.

Explaining like we have like a, some sample verbiage that you can use in our terms of service that we, we ask that you put in your terms of service to, to, to describe the use of, of their, their marketing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: There’s a surface acceptance policy because the problem is like privacy policy terms of service.

Like these tend to be multi page legal documents. And the reality is most consumers will not read those. So fine to disclose it, but do they, did they willingly disclose? Sure.

LARRY KIM: Sure. So look if you go like, maybe you can do this in post editing. Like if you go to the website. This is like, you know, ground zero for, you know, privacy zealots and GDPR loving citizens.

You know, a pop up will appear and, and it’ll say this, this website uses marketing trackers, cookies like, like there’s a way to do this. In a, in a compliant way. Okay. What they didn’t like was that it, it, it was, nothing was being disclosed. And I, you know, frankly, I think they have a point.

Okay. And, and this is what I’m trying to say is you know, just look at what they’re doing at Le Monde, you know, as an example of all the things that they’re loading and and, and There there’s, if, if, if you believe that, you know, doing anything in the space is, is somehow like a privacy violation or like, you know, I think that’s just a self limiting belief.

I think, you know, you haven’t really spent much time in, in becoming informed and in the space. And I think you have, like, there’s nothing I can do, honestly, if, if, if that, but if you spend the time and look into, you know, what the core issues are you know, the. The, the, the, the kind of the nutshell is that, you know, we, you just have to disclose and, and, and the pop up is, is like a higher degree of, of like in your face disclosure, it’s, it’s not required like there’s no law that says like, it has to be like this big and this big font 20 seconds,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: depends on locality too.

Right. So in Europe, the GDPR requirements are that certain things are by opt in only. The United States has fewer regulations around that. So, so don’t take Larry’s statement as like a global legal advice. Every locality will have its own rules and regulations around

LARRY KIM: that. Of course, but like in general, it’s, it’s all about disclosure, disclosure, disclosure.

And we are 100 percent pro disclosure. So, you know, we talked a little bit about kind of what it does. Like we, we, we provide this, this, this data. The, the impact is nothing short of, of of, of a complete game changer, Fred like in terms of like, Oh my God, like CPCs and from ads in 2024, they’re, they’re not getting any cheaper.

You know, they, they get a little bit more expensive every quarter. And you know, just imagine like, like if you had the ability to. Retarget the, the clickers who kind of express interest, but the fish that got away that, that they were kind of on the hook, you know, but like those, those are your best leads.

Like if you have a dollar to spend on ads I would spend that over marketing, right? Because we’re marketing compared to, well, search ads, of course, is it’s its own own category, but like within. These like display categories like YouTube or meta ads you know, among those display targeting options, like retargeting, holy moly, like that, like the, the engagement rate is two to three times higher than non retargeting audiences, like the click through rates and higher click through rates means lower cost per action, cost per click and, and And that excitement tends to carry through to a completed purchase or sale because the people who are more likely to buy from you are the people who’ve kind of heard of you before.

Right. And by definition, if you’re using retargeting as your, as your target method here, you’re you know, it means they were recently on your website, which means they’re in market for your products and services and, and it also means they’ve heard of you because like, how else did they get to your, your website?

So, so like this, this

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: require, right? So most of the listeners here, they understand the value of remarketing and certainly something we should continue to do. And even if the technology through which we do it changes. Use whatever options are being made available to you, whether that’s through your platform or through whatever Google and meta will be putting in place or do it within the network.

Right? So, like you said, Google owns that data. It is a 1st party relationship for them, and they can do things. On YouTube, on the display feed, on or the news or, or

LARRY KIM: GGDN. Like, like, but you can do power retargeting on, on G dn. This is, this is data that is ha has been disappearing since 2018.

Fred, like, so the, you know, Firefox shut down third party cookies in 2018. It was false by, by Aplin 2019 and they got much more. Stringent in 2023, like they, they started just like ignoring scripts you know, like ignoring the Facebook script, ignoring the Google scripts. And you know, this is, this is signal loss.

And, and so, you know, as far as what I would describe, this is, it’s a way of kind of resurrecting that signal in a compliant way. And this is a tremendous impact on, on ROI. Like people don’t realize how much they’re, well, maybe you realize, but like, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to see because the, the death of this cookie signal.

Wasn’t necessarily like episodic, like it’s been kind of like a, like a death by a thousand cuts over four or five years. And yeah, if you, if you punch in a retargeting audience, like it’ll something will run if you have enough volume. But you might not realize that it’s one fifth the size of what your remarketing audience was in 2018.

And so like, you know, our timeline is basically remarket like it’s 2018 again. And we think that’s very exciting.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So this is all about the issues with targeting, right? Let’s talk a little bit about measurements and attribution as some of this data is going away. So. My first question would be remarketing really good ROI, but it is really an ROI that’s built on top of SEO efforts, social media efforts, brand efforts, or previous PPC efforts.

You’re just basically bringing back someone who’s already come in. So, so how do you think about. Valuing that, like, is it for you an absolute that even though someone else already paid for that, you should go after it again and get the credit for it or within an organization. How do you make sure you’re not under investing in SEO?

Like you said, you had a big content organization but that drives people into your blog articles. And then that becomes your first party data for remarketing. If you measure everything at the bottom of the funnel and you say, Oh, it’s remarketing that drove that sale. You would conceivably stop the content effort.

That’s going to hurt it. So how do you think about measurements and attribution in that manner?

LARRY KIM: So, so nobody is suggesting that this becomes like 100 percent of your marketing budget. Remarking was just the top defensive marketing channel. So like, in terms of like there’s demand creation, which, which is like the publicity stunts or the podcast and stuff like this demand creation, and then there’s demand harvesting, and that’s like the, the remarking ads and The offer pages of the CRO that goes into creating like compelling experiences.

Remarketing was just like by far in a way, the best of, of the kind of you know, closing vehicles and, and you know is, is it necessary? Absolutely. Like people. You know, believe it or not, people are not, you know, they’re busy people. They have other things to do other than just buy your stuff.

And, and sometimes you, you need to remind them a few times and that’s a very leveraged tactic. Now you were talking about attribution. Like the other thing that this technology, this website identity technology does is it gives you a really true picture of the, of your, your sales channels.

Because like, we’re not just, I deem the person. Once, and then sending them back to an ad campaign we have, we have a customer journey capabilities, right? So like we can see that, that someone, you know, came from Pinterest, we can ID them as Fred. We can see that we were then like send them to, to an ad audience where they clicked on an ad that came back, but didn’t convert.

And then we can see that, you know, two weeks later they came through a Google search and then converted like, like a paid Google search. This is a, this is an identification kind of a persistent ID, smart ID kind of solution that works across browsers and devices. Like we can kind of recognize that, Oh, this is Fred from his phone.

And this is Fred from his his desktop at home. Like that’s like we’ve solved that problem. Again, this is done in a first print context. We’re not, we’re not like licensing that out to your competitors, you know, who sell competing things. And, and you know, it, it, it just, I think you can have your pick and neither to hear like this, this restores the remarketing and it enables like a level of, of analytics, you know, that, that was, that’s frankly impossible to do in, in GA4 right now, because of all the.

I’m actually not, I don’t know how you feel about it, but like it’s all sampling and, and then like estimated this and estimated that, like, I just, I just can’t, I can’t deal with it. And this, this is showing you actual user journeys with like names attached to them and seeing like what their journeys were and you can see all the information.

So,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: yeah, I mean, it’s certainly a big shift, right. Going from having that level of precision and specificity that we have been used to and trained to use. And now. All of that becoming sampled and grouped together. So, yeah, it is frustrating. I don’t love GA4 either. I think a lot of people haven’t made the right transition, and then the data in it is also, like you said, sampled. But it is kind of the world we live in, so we, we have to figure that one out. So good. Well, thank you for sharing some of your thoughts on targeting and measurement and attribution. I do want to ask you a couple of rapid fire questions, Larry. So, are you ready? Yeah. Alright, so what’s something you wished you had known before you got into digital marketing?

LARRY KIM: I mean how much time do you have like you know,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: rapid fire? So like, let’s the, gimme the context.

LARRY KIM: I, the regret is, you know, there are, there are bigger opportunities out there, even bigger than digital marketing. And, and you know, I, you know, I just wonder what would have happened if I specialized in something else?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Hey, everyone watching, Larry said you’re working in the wrong field.

LARRY KIM: No marketing is, is, is definitely an important field, but like, you know, and, and there are big companies you know, but there’s a lot of other big opportunities, like, you know, like e commerce, for example, it’s starting you know, starting your own product, like an Amazon or something

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: like that.

I think maybe like looking at our companies, there is a limited audience in B2B marketing. And so you see like super high valuations for. Consumer oriented companies that make some really dumb thing, but they get super high valuations easier. Like digital marketing is not easy because the platforms are constantly evolving and what we’re talking about today, tracking technology, third party cookies, like, That means big, radical changes in how we operate, how the software works, how your tactics will change.

And maybe that’s the thing, right? We’re always fighting just to keep up when maybe we could have built a stupid little game and gotten millions of users for it and you know, gotten a different outcome that way.

LARRY KIM: Yeah. Like think of something like Uber, for example, like really, like how hard is that?

Like it’s built on the Google maps API, you know, like you didn’t have, there’s Anyways, I love digital marketing. You know, that’s going to, I’m going to, I’m going to end my career in it, like to the end here. But you just asked, like, you know, what, what, what you wish, like, you know, just be more intentional about serving the universe of opportunities.

That’s all.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s another device. Hey, what’s one big PPC myth you might want to debunk? .

LARRY KIM: I actually think that the, the engagement rate and the quality scores matter a great deal. So I guess, you know, if there’s still people who are saying that, you know, what matters is only the CPA. I suppose I would be trying to debunk that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Oh man. That takes me back a decade, Larry, when you and I kept blogging about quality score, but it still matters.

It’s still half of the formula for how you rank on Google. And it’s also the thing that influences your discounts. So absolutely. What is your favorite AI tool and how do you use it?

LARRY KIM: You know, it’s, it’s chat GPT and, and I use it for synthesizing information. So I just, whenever you need to, not just But like, you know, cross referencing like this and this and this, and combining it with Chet Chiquiti seems to do a really good job with that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. With the pivot towards a privacy focused marketing, what is one important skill that you think new advertisers or marketers should learn to stand out in 2024 and beyond?

LARRY KIM: Maybe the power of, of segmentation and and music journey. So just being able to. Capture, you know, legally capture all the available information for the, these first party visitors and group and organize a group and organize them into different segmentations and then push those different segmentations to different actions, like a tick tock ad or a Google app, send an email, et cetera.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. Yeah. Well, Larry, you’ve been a fantastic guest. Thank you for sharing some of your insights with the audience. If people want to know more, customers.ai is your new company. How else should people get ahold of you?

LARRY KIM: Yeah, here, like LinkedIn is great. Or just email me Larry Kim at customer.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great.

And if you enjoyed this episode and want to see more of them, please hit the subscribe button and follow us. We do an episode roughly every two weeks. Larry, thanks for joining us, everyone. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks.