Data: Digital Advertising Post-ATT with Kyle Antoian
Travis and I are joined by an expert in data and identity in advertising - Kyle Antoian - Founder of Zeke Strategy.
In this conversation, Kyle Antoian discusses the significant changes in marketing strategies due to Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and the evolving landscape of digital marketing. He emphasizes the importance of collecting customer data, building identity graphs, and adapting to the loss of third-party cookies. The discussion also covers the resurgence of direct mail and the need for marketers to leverage their own data to create effective lookalike audiences.
We covered powerful subjects relating to Digital Advertising Post-ATT
- Impact of iOS 14.5 on Marketing Strategies
- The Cookie Conundrum and Alternative Solutions
- Future of Digital Marketing in a Privacy-Centric World
- The Importance of Post-Purchase Engagement
- Leveraging Zero-Party Data for Marketing
- Building Lookalike Audiences: Strategies and Insights
- The Role of Identity Graphs in Marketing
- Navigating Attribution Challenges in E-Commerce
- Understanding App vs. On-Site Experiences
- Lead Capture: The Foundation of Customer Engagement
Transcript
You're, you know, 70 % plus of mobile traffic, uh, iPhone users. Generally you were impacted and you've been working to adapt your strategies the last three, four years. So Kyle, uh, welcome. And can you maybe just set up just real briefly your background, why people understand like we have one of the foremost experts in the industry here.
Erik Christiansen (:So please share your background and let's get into where we are today with this.
Kyle Antoian (:First, thanks for having me on the show guys. It's great to be here. Quick background on me. I currently run a consulting firm called Zeek Strategy. I help people think about data commercialization, go to market. Prior to that, I was at a company called Epsilon for about 11 years and helped run a number of data focused products and initiatives and ultimately ran the data practice there for about a year and a half.
I spent the greater majority of my career thinking about data and identity for advertising. As somebody that worked at a really large data company, when these changes went into effect, obviously it impacted us and we had to make some changes about how we thought about addressing the industry. It's great to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, great. So you've, you've been observing this last four years. Did you see the impact? You saw it internally at Epsilon. Did you also see the impact with, with vendors you had and, and retailers themselves?
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, I mean, so it was interesting. we so obviously we anticipated the change. Apple had made some announcements. And if you remember, I think they had actually delayed the change because some people pushed back and said, like, basically, you know, what happened? They were like, what's what's going to happen when you do this? And Apple didn't have a good answer and said they punted it. And, you know, it was like iOS 14.5, I think was like the actual update where they pushed it. So I say that because we knew it was coming.
Right. And so what did we do? You one of the things we thought about was, you know, obviously this impact was going to be Apple specific, right? So mobile Apple devices and then Safari users. Good news for us was outside of mobile Safari market share and desktop is pretty low. And so sort of initially we're like, okay, when we thought about which part of our business for this impact, it was like, okay, this is going to clearly impact mobile. This is probably not going to impact.
regular display or video as much because those were still cookie based sort of identity mechanisms and not mobile ad ID mechanisms. And then listen, we just watched what happened. So there were sort of two things that needed to happen, right? People needed to update their software to 14.5 and then once the software was updated, people started getting the prompts. And it was interesting in the beginning, we actually saw a pretty high accept rate. And so we didn't see
like the initial signs were not pants on fire, my gosh, like what's going to happen. We actually saw that, I don't remember the numbers, but the stuff that they wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be. It wasn't like, my gosh, like the sky is falling. Throughout the course of the rollout and over the next call at six to 12 months, as things started to stabilize and as most of the market for Apple devices were on 14.5 or later, so they had ATT installed,
you started to see a pretty big decrease of people opting out. I just want to take a minute and a pine on that. I think this is where the market fumbled and there are some people that did it well and there's some people that did it really poorly. And I think you, you know, all of us, you know, I don't know if you guys are iPhone users, I'm an iPhone user. And so I experienced this as a consumer. And, you know, the interesting thing about it was some of the companies like
Kyle Antoian (:hold you like, hey, you're going to see this prompt and like pretty, pretty, please. Like, can you press allow? And like, by the way, here's the reasons why we went to press allow. And then there were other companies that didn't tell you anything. And then this thing pops up and it's like the heck, you know, not allow. Right. And so I can tell you, don't know about you guys, but as a consumer, I felt like at least the, apps, you know, whether they were merchants or, or, you know, games or whatever, if they were thoughtful about how they presented this to me, I was thoughtful about whether I would opt in or not.
versus the folks that just like there was this thing that hit me. was like, what is this? You know, kind of like, you know, your, native response. So it.
Erik Christiansen (:That certainly changed the customer experience when you first time, when you visit a website, you know, and even today they don't build profiles so they don't know that you've accepted oftentimes. So you see it every time you visit the site.
Travis Logan (:Well, let's, let's be clear too. There's like, we're kind of, they both rolled out in similar stamp times where there's the native app side, right? Which I think is much more what Kyle's talking about. That's the ask, ask, not or ask, ask not to track. I forget what it says. Yeah, which, which I want to touch back on that in a second. Cause I always thought it was funny. They said ask like it.
Kyle Antoian (:Yes.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, it was like allow or ask not to track where you're, you had two choices, right? That's right. Yeah.
Travis Logan (:How about I'm requesting or I'm saying do not track, but instead of the Apple prompt is asked not to track. I always thought it was funny, but on the, on the website standpoint, a non-native app, roughly around the same time Apple released in their Safari browsers, both mobile and, and desktop. basically the A first, the demise of the third party cookie.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Please don't track me.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Travis Logan (:by default has turned off and then they started rolling out. I'm going butcher this. I should have been more prepared. think it was IPT is what they call it. It's either ITP or IPT, but they even started fondling the first part of cookies, expirations. first part expirations.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Kyle Antoian (:Yes, yeah, you're talking about ITP intelligence.
Travis Logan (:one days and then they even made it more seven, like reduced it more to seven day expiration. And then under some circumstances, they'll even expire it after 24 hours. So that's where I just want to say that make sure we're all on the same page. was that website technical stuff that we rolled out versus the app tracking of the ask not to track side.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah. So it was ICP, was intelligence tracking prevention or something like that. We were prepared for both. so you're right, what I was talking about before was just specific to mobile, which was effectively the consumer was asked to consent to the native app collecting the mobile advertising ID from the device. That was the point. And if you said no,
Travis Logan (:Right.
Kyle Antoian (:then the mobile advertising idea was not shared. And effectively then that mobile app had no idea who you were. Just on that real fast. And then I wanna go back to the other point you mentioned, Travis, it's interesting. I'll talk about how we thought about the cookie issue because there was a different way to approach that. On the mobile side, the big push for us and what we told everybody to do was you need to be collecting data at the point of sort of like install.
Travis Logan (:Yeah.
Kyle Antoian (:And in a minimum, you need to be collecting the user's email address or phone number, some other identifying info that they're going to give you, which allows you to at least have some concept of who the user is behind the app, regardless of whether the mobile ad ID is shared with you or not. And the reason why that was important was then, and we'll talk about this later, you could then use that information to power identity-based solutions in media that would allow you
I don't want to say to circumvent the sort of like mobile, like sort of privacy protections, but it gave an alternative to companies to use data in a way for targeting and measurement. Just real fast, I want to touch on the other piece, Travis. So on the Safari browser side, listen, it was just a race to get, and it's still, this is still occurring right now, so it's very relevant. It was a race to get JavaScript on the site.
So if I could get a JavaScript tagged on the site, I could drop a first party cookie in the domain of the site and then at least precisely. Yeah. And so you're seeing that still today. You guys probably, don't know if you guys saw, Trade Desk bought this company Sincera and Sincera was like the biggest company in the market that tracked adoption of alternative identifiers in the programmatic bid stream.
Travis Logan (:The cookie ID, all that fun stuff.
Kyle Antoian (:And there were companies like, TradeDisc has UID 2.0, there's companies like ID5, at Epsilon we had our own proprietary ID called CoreID, and there were other companies that had these alternative identifiers, but they were all proliferated through JavaScript on site. So basically Travis, when that happened, that started what I call the arms race to just go to all these publishers and say, pretty please put this tag on the site.
And then when Google started to threaten that they too were going to get rid of cookies, then all hell broke loose. And it was like a triple arms race, right? We just need to get as many publishers as we can to sign up for our alternative ID to maintain some level of addressability if and when cookies go away. Obviously, we know what happened with Google, but.
Travis Logan (:Yeah, I think I'm seeing in the inspector and the latest Google Chrome, I'm still talking about rolling that out soon. The depreciation of the third party. But where are these coming on by default?
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:What is the industry's take today? What's your, what are you forecasting for that Kyle with Google?
Kyle Antoian (:on the cookie side.
Travis Logan (:Like Google specifically.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah. that what I tell my clients is you've got to get to the source of what, so Google said they wanted to do this, right? So as a business, they decided that this was something they wanted to do. And it was a reason.
Erik Christiansen (:And for the audience, can you just step back and.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah. So Google, I don't remember the year, but it was sometime around COVID, maybe a little bit before, started to threaten that they too were going to block third-party cookies on Chrome. you know, Travis and Eric, as you guys know, but maybe the listeners don't, Chrome adoption and desktop is huge. You know, I think it's the number one browser and desktop. And it also has high proliferation of mobile because it's the...
like Safari, it is the native installed mobile browser for Android phones, which is the other half of the US market. So you're literally talking about now, like, effectively, no mobile addressability and no display addressability. So it's like, big problem.
Travis Logan (:And when you go talk about globally, it's still very much the dominant mobile market.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right. Yeah, correct. Apple market share is much lower. And so you're right. The impact of this stuff is really US centric, global, because frankly, people don't have as much as we do in the US. That's right.
Erik Christiansen (:And Travis, you often said that even if you use Chrome on the iPhone, it's still powered by Safari.
Travis Logan (:Yeah, any browser on an iPhone, on any iOS device is just Safari with a different wrapper.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, you still have to use the web kit if I'm not mistaken, right? So it's exactly right. You're still almost like routing through their servers. I'm not smart enough to understand it.
Travis Logan (:So doesn't matter if you're using Chrome on Safari or on iOS. From a cookie standpoint, privacy standpoint, it's all Safari-based.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, that makes sense. makes sense. So Google threatened that they were going to do this and then, as most people know, effectively punted a couple of times. And the primary reason, at least that I think that they punted, was what happened in the UK. And so if you're a privacy nerd like I am, you'll follow what was happening at the UK Information Commissioner's Office, the ICO.
and they filed basically a suit against Google and said, if you do this, it's anti-competitive. As a market watchdog, we're not going to allow you to do this. They said, Google, come up with an alternative. Google said, They came up with these alternatives. There was like flocks and
Travis Logan (:Yeah.
Kyle Antoian (:man, I don't know, they had all these dumb names for stuff that sort of just like, no one could agree the W3C meetings, we used to have folks that would go to them. I'm told they were totally dysfunctional. know, effectively like nobody could agree on anything, right? And I guess the only thing that people could agree on was that Google was in the hot seat with, you know, a really big company, pardon me, a really big country's, you know, like industry watchdog.
and has not yet provided that industry watchdog a viable alternative. And so until they do so, I don't think they're going to change their minds because I don't think that they can. Because I think like, they're certainly not gonna like shut down their business in the UK. And that's sort of the risk that they're running is if they go forward with this and don't provide a viable alternative, the UK is gonna go after them. And then, oh, by the way,
You've got an ongoing lawsuit right now where you've got the FTC and the DOJ teaming up with like 25 states attorneys generals suing Google for monopolistic practices. So like they got a lot of stuff going on. We're talking about breaking the company up. And so if I'm candid now, like I can't imagine this is the top priority for these guys. He's like, what are we going to do about that cookie thing? It's like, well, what are you to do about your antitrust lawsuit?
Erik Christiansen (:Cool.
Kyle Antoian (:So that's my two cents.
Erik Christiansen (:Well, what I can tell you is a top priority is for retailers and digital marketers trying to figure out what the game is in 2025. So if we forward.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, hell yeah.
Travis Logan (:Well, I mean, kind of like your starters, what Kyle mentioned was an immediate, your guys's immediate response and like, Hey, get captured that email or whatever it is that actual user inputted identity metric or identity ID when installing the app, right? Install the app, run through a little wizard, boom, email to get going. That was, that is still a
I would imagine a top solution to that problem on the apps. Same solution on site. With the demise of the third party cookie still, of course, it's about being able to target those people later on, right? After they've left the site. So after they've left the site, how do we all target people? Email, SMS, that's how you target them off site. Yes, you can pay for ads. Guess what? You can pay for ads.
and target those people by way of sending that email to Meta or Google or whatever to create those retargeting. So that is still one of the top, I think, solutions to that problem is capturing that email address essentially or SMS, some sort of identifier, real identifier like that at some point in the visitor journey on the site. And also even from an attribution standpoint,
Another good thing is, because that was the other part that's killed, right? Was, was merchants and publishers ability to show, to report on true attribution of their ads. that was a huge problem that this introduced. So again, like onsite things is strict. If we're talking about strictly web website stuff, our guests, this could apply to the apps too, is post conversion. Asking them, ask, give, do a survey, ask them.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Travis Logan (:where they heard it, you you get that random question, maybe it's on the checkout page, how did you hear of us? I'm not an advocate for asking any additional use, it's not useless, it's a useless if it, or it's negative, it blocks them, it's a wall, right? If it blocks them, annoys them, it's one extra thing they're trying to get out to go pick their kids up from school that they have to answer before checking out, that's a problem.
Post purchase, it's optional. They don't even have to see it. They don't have to think about it till post-purchase, till the sale is done. So that's why I advocate for doing these types of things in post-purchase rather than during the checkout process.
Erik Christiansen (:So what Travis kept touching on is first and zero party data, which we heard, we've heard a lot about in the last few years since, since this rollout. We also find those that it was zero party data. When you're doing surveys, if you're capturing, you're bringing all this data into your CDP or where you're bringing into, you then have to do something with it. Which, know, analysis paralysis type situation. What.
You know where where the the digital markers are really affected is the lookalike audiences What are you what are you seeing in the market To make up for that, know Travis. I know we were talking about you know digital markers are having to be really efficient with their spends You know figuring out, know, what other channels are working being creative
What are you seeing in that regard, Kyle?
Kyle Antoian (:think there are two solutions for marketers as it relates to that. One is, and I think this is the easy option, is people leaned into some of the big walled gardens. And so you can lean into Meta, you can lean into TikTok and some of these other platforms, and they have native lookalike solutions. And if you take what Travis was suggesting one step further. So if I've got a list of my best customers,
you know, presumably have all their email addresses because they wanted a receipt or something, right? I can upload that directly to Meta and then Meta can create a lookalike audience based on that data. And so I don't need necessarily the signal from the mobile app. In fact, I would argue this is a better signal because this is like actual purchase data. So I would say like that's one way. so there are a couple, you Google offered this. A lot of the big media providers within their walls made these solutions viable and
If you're a DTC marketer, you're spending a lot of money with these guys. So like that would still scratch your itch. And by the way, why maybe some people think the Google stuff is any competitive is because like they're not losing identity fidelity if they get rid of cookies, cause you're logged in across every device and like they know who you are either way. Right. The other way was, and this is probably more important is people were just leaning into the offline data component. So
When I was at Epsilon, we were sort of like this OG offline data provider originally. And then it sort of like wasn't cool. And then it became cool again post-ATT because everybody now needed email addresses and phone numbers and physical addresses, terrestrial identity. As you guys know, it doesn't change as much. And it's a little bit more of solid identifier base. And so if I can collect an email, what can I match the email to an address? Well, sure. Like if I'm a DTC brand and somebody buys something from me,
I'm probably getting their address, their phone number and their email. And they're probably happy to give me that information because they want SNS shipping updates. They want an email receipt and they want the product to arrive at their house. So like, these are all reasonable things to ask. So now if I have those assets, can I build lookalike audiences from those assets without even going to Meta? The answer is sure. If I've got a sophisticated data science team, if I've got a CDP, but basically if I can take my customer data,
Kyle Antoian (:and create an identity spine against it. Now I can link it with all sorts of other data sets. And now I can create lookalike models, you know, either with companies that do this or, you know, with an internal data science team or a tool. And so I would say like, those are the two sort of options and they're not mutually exclusive. A lot of really sophisticated folks will do both. So they create their own models and they'll use the platform models and they'll test them head to head because frankly, who cares what works?
You know, like it doesn't matter what works. If you're a performance marketer, you just go with what works, right? So it's like, don't, maybe I'm going to hurt my data scientist's feelings because the meta model works better. But if I'm a performance marketer, I'm going to go to whatever gets me the lowest CPA, right? That means, so who cares? Yeah. And then by the way, if I create the offline identity spine, it opens up all these other channels for me. I can go to use direct mail. I can go to Google.
Travis Logan (:I mean, regardless, just need to diversify anyway. yeah. Right.
Kyle Antoian (:targeted TV ads, can do CTV. You laugh direct mail for DTC brands is back and there's all these big startups that are just like this is.
Erik Christiansen (:You saw me laugh because yeah, Drew Sinaki at Postpollett, they're crushing it right now.
Kyle Antoian (:Postpilot, those guys are great. And there's a couple of folks in that space and it's like, I mean, it works. And by the way, there's no ATT for sending a postcard to your house. Sorry. There isn't, right?
Erik Christiansen (:It's always interesting the trickle down effects, you know, we re we know how to adapt. so, you know, what I'm hearing present day, people are adapting to direct mail. CTV is something we've been hearing a lot about. Travis, I know you can see you, you're brainstorming right now.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Travis Logan (:I was just thinking about the, the, the, you know, sending direct mailers out is become so effective again. And popular Amazon in part, it's why Amazon had to more recently, not, not super recent, but in the last few years had to remove a house number from providing the house number to the merchants who sold something when, when you're doing fulfilled by Amazon. So.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kyle Antoian (:Hmm, so they would follow up with a catalog or something
Travis Logan (:Yeah, they started for many, many, many years as an Amazon seller. You couldn't get the person's real email address, right? Because they wanted, they give you a proxy email address. if you, all your emails you try and send to the market goes through Amazon, they flag you and whatever. So yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:You would secretly stuff something in the box.
Kyle Antoian (:Interesting.
Travis Logan (:everybody would stuff something in the box. But then, you know, they've successfully shifted a lot of sellers to do fulfilled by Amazon. So they no longer have access, but Amazon was still giving them the address information with the fake email. Now for FBA, they give you the city state zip and first name, I think last name as well, but they don't give you a street, a house number and street.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Kyle Antoian (:If you
Kyle Antoian (:Sure. Yeah, and that's a problem, right? the good news is, yeah, listen, the good news is if you were motivated, you know, there are data at Penn Company who can work with, with incomplete data. And if you've got somebody's name and city and state and like three, come on, it's, yeah. That's right. That's right. That's right.
Travis Logan (:It's a problem, man, not gonna work.
Travis Logan (:yeah.
Travis Logan (:Five cents, match rate, things like that.
Erik Christiansen (:So will you, will you guys are, you know, the theme that's emerging here is you're owning your customer data and enriching it to X to be able to engage with your customers more, but also then take that and build your identity graph and then go out and and try to look for and build lookalike audiences elsewhere outside of Facebook or
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, it starts there.
Erik Christiansen (:Where are you, A, how are you building that identity graph? And then how are you going to build?
Travis Logan (:this.
Travis Logan (:I mean, there's lots of big identity graph providers these days, for certain. Obviously, the majority from an advertising standpoint, your typical e-commerce merchant goes to is Meta or Google's. I mean, that's just the easy route. That's what their e-commerce platform kind of plugs into. But then they, you know...
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Travis Logan (:They can sign up, you can sign up and utilize any one of the other hundred, you know, big identity graph advertising marketing companies as well, whether in parallel or not. Or what I was going to also say is to your other question regarding like, what are they doing today for lookalike audiences, right? I think it's less of a problem.
look-alike audience today because when this first hit people weren't sent they the look-alike audiences weren't based on that hype
that identifiable data that we have today. Now, because of that, everybody is sending up this order information that Kyle was talking about. The emails, the first name, last name, the shipping address, items ordered, things like that. I think items orders are always sent up, but so we're actually sending up all this identifiable information now. So those identity graphs are so filled out that when you send up your own list of customer data now, they all can, you can get
your lookalike audiences can be filled entirely these days. So I think it was, I think that aspect of it was just a hard hit maybe for like the first 12 months. I think it was quickly, you know, fixed on that end.
Kyle Antoian (:I agree. I agree. think people, you like I said, we, we had a huge business relying on it. So like we, you know, once the news sort of broke and we heard about it, it was all hands on deck to figure out like, what are we doing? Right. That may have not been the case for every merchant or retailer because they may not have had the people to do it or understood what was really going on. Right. And I mean, this was like our livelihood. So, you know, for us, it was like literally, you know, five star, you know, five alarm fire or like, what are we doing? Okay. And then we figured it out.
I agree with you, but to your original point, it's been a few years and I think the market has adjusted appropriately. These DTC brands, it's not like everybody went out of business. Sure, some people struggled, but there are a lot of people that continue to do really well and those are the folks that basically adapted to the changes and any good marketer that's going to continue to be the case.
Travis Logan (:Yeah.
Travis Logan (:I think the harder thing for the merchants is, you know, it's identifying what's working now for what they're at.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right.
Travis Logan (:So, I mean, they just don't know. mean, you can be thrown, you know, $100,000 a month or whatever it is that you had a better idea that you were getting a, you know, whatever, a 5 % return on advertising spend, whatever it might be. And now you just, have no clue. You can't trust those numbers. They're, they're, they're varying ranges. So that's been, I think the more, uh,
Kyle Antoian (:Hmm.
Travis Logan (:continued focus approach to improving. And there's just no silver bullet for it, unfortunately. Attribution has been the Achilles heel, I think, of e-commerce companies when it comes to their ad spend and where to do spending.
Kyle Antoian (:It's really hard. And unfortunately, the market has been incentivized to continue to make it really hard because the big players don't want you to really understand like how is really working. Right. And so like the best you can do, you can buy like MMM and stuff like that, which is like, I don't say pseudo science that's offensive, but like there's a lot of there's some guesswork there. Right. So there's some really smart folks that do that stuff, but it's really hard.
Travis Logan (:Yeah, of course.
Travis Logan (:Thanks.
Erik Christiansen (:You define and then what would you say?
Kyle Antoian (:like marketing mix modeling or like MTA, sorry, all these stupid jargon, like, you people that are doing multi-touch attribution and basically trying to solve Travis's question, which is, you know, how do I allocate my marketing spend in what channels most efficiently? you, that's right. That's right.
Travis Logan (:You can't compare, you have to take everybody at their word because everybody does it differently. mean, you literally try to any one to any other one, they'll be wildly different numbers.
Kyle Antoian (:It's very hard.
Erik Christiansen (:I still don't understand why Travis, we can't, owning the on-site experience, why we can't show that journey more clear. Like, look, we know this is the first time they came to the site.
Travis Logan (:Well, no, we can show the journey on the site as clear as day. We can't show where they came from and where they went. And when in things like that, I mean, we can, but that's, that's where things get blurry and they get blurred real fast. And also think about attribution. If there's, there's so there's
Erik Christiansen (:with you.
Travis Logan (:It's like an endless step journey, right? Because you have, okay, the person maybe first found you by an ad on their phone, then Googled you from their computer on the same network, then went to your site left, then they saw a retargeting ad came back, then you captured their email you sent to a lookalike, then you sent them an email, they came, all this stuff, and it's like.
Who gets that attribution? Is it the original person? Is it a mixed attribution? Is it last touch attribution?
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, that's right.
Erik Christiansen (:What year do you think someone will have a business that can answer that?
Travis Logan (:Oh, that exists today. Now, can you trust those answers? No idea. You can't audit them. You can't.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah.
Yeah, these businesses exist, yeah, there's no... Put it this way, you don't get... I mean, you guys know this, but Facebook meta doesn't send you raw exposure. So the way you would do this in an ideal world... And this was something we tried to solve at Epsilon in certain channels because we had...
Travis Logan (:There's no way to audit them.
Kyle Antoian (:you know, the agency behind us. And so we were like one of the biggest buyers in media. And so we could like at least try, was you needed ad exposure data from every single one of your media partners. Ultimately, like that's the only way you can answer the question of like customer journey, right? Like how many ads do they see and what sequence, and is it going to be perfect? No, but like that would be the way you would do it is you need every media provider you work with to send you all the ad exposure data and they won't.
Travis Logan (:And what you don't with, mean, Google organic SEO, like you're not working, you know what mean? Like you got a person, they touch all these different providers, including your website and you're, well, Kyle, what you're asking is all these people should send me the event date timestamp of this person's touch. And then I can decide on my own in my, you know, how I want to do my own attribution.
Kyle Antoian (:Sure.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right. That's right. So there are some sophisticated brands that are doing, you know, a version of that with the data that is available to them. And so like, I don't want to say like that doesn't work. think like it's, if you're a really smart market and then there are ways, know, you can do like geographic call that's and stuff like, what if I turn off this channel in this market? Like what happens? And depending on the sales cycle of your business, there are really smart marketers. Like think about the insurance industry. It's like a lead gen.
Travis Logan (:But that's not gonna happen.
Kyle Antoian (:business and they're constantly trying to generate leads. These guys are testing all the time with different ways to market to people and some super sophisticated marketers. As an example of a category that's like constantly testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and so.
Erik Christiansen (:One thing to just step back before we finish up today, both of you use the term app versus on-site. For everyone, can we just get the exact breakdown of what we're talking about there?
Travis Logan (:If it's some, so the native apps, if you have to go to an app store to download that, generally speaking, that's your native app. If you're going to your browser to go to a website and you're plugging in a website address, that is a website. So that's the easy break down between the two.
Erik Christiansen (:As we see stores that offer their own apps to shop with, is that something retailers should look at?
Travis Logan (:Yeah. I mean, those people offering the apps, they're getting asked if they want to opt out of tracking at a hundred percent. There's no, on an iOS device, there is no getting around that period. of story.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right. But you can ask the consumer to log in. And then, you know, I don't want to say you've gotten around it, but then it's like, OK, at least now I know, hey, this is Travis. This is Eric. This is Kyle. That's right that I won't have their mobile ad ID to do like cross device stuff fine, but at least I have some signal. Right. And that's pretty appropriate. I don't know. I think most of the shopping apps on my phone
Erik Christiansen (:I know you've been working with TapCart.
Travis Logan (:Right.
Travis Logan (:Right.
Kyle Antoian (:I am logged into because they have my credit card info saved and all my shipping details. So if I want to buy something, it's like boom, boom, boom. Thank you very much. Right.
Travis Logan (:I've always been surprised that, I mean, I've never, I've never personally built an, an iOS app. I would, I would have just assumed that for a long time, not anymore, that as soon as I downloaded the app, yes, I always knew about the device ID, but I would have just assumed that Apple just gave the app developer my email address and my problem number two. But it sounds like they pretty much never did.
Erik Christiansen (:Shot A.
Kyle Antoian (:Mm-hmm.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah. Uh-uh.
Kyle Antoian (:No, and not only that, if you've seen the, I don't know which iOS version it came out with, if you use like the sign in with, so there's some apps will allow you to sign in with Apple and then you're given an option as to whether Apple will obfuscate your email or not. And so then like you're back to where you started, right? They're going to give you some like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.com that now you can't link to anything. And so you're back to right, you know, we should be super clear here. You need clear text email.
Travis Logan (:Yes.
Travis Logan (:Right.
Alright.
Travis Logan (:Right.
Kyle Antoian (:Right, you need.
Travis Logan (:That's the throwaway emails. plug a little bit of Just Uno here. Just Uno launched email verification as a value add feature to our pig plan. And one of many of the features of it is to be able to disallow if you choose throwaway emails or temporary emails. I forget what we labeled them, but that's a very prime example of what one of those emails is. So you can say, no, I'm sorry.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right.
Kyle Antoian (:Very nice.
Travis Logan (:We will not accept this email. Give us a real email address. Now that's the Internet of Way leak capture. So I'm not advocating to turn that on, but that is an available option, you know, depending on your industry or your use case.
Kyle Antoian (:That's right. That's right.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, I mean, if you know the customer relationships important to you, then like having that data is critical. So you as a you as a merchant might have to weigh that.
Travis Logan (:Yeah, I would, from a merchant standpoint, would accept it and then do my due diligence to email them to get the real email at its current point, right? Like, their affection, when their loyalists and ask for that email address, or simply put, mean, one could suggest that if they opted in with that email address and then they bought, when they buy, they're probably going to put in their real email address.
Kyle Antoian (:Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Travis Logan (:that even if they don't opt it in technically at that end with the real email address and you're saying this is the same person they opted in, you might walk that line and say, fine, this real email address is opted in.
Erik Christiansen (:Well, before Travis gets too edgy there, we'll finish up. But I think it's, I'm really happy to hear that Kyle himself brought it into the importance of lead capture with every visitor to your site, to your app. That's where it starts today. It's nothing new, but it's renewed focus. If you're going to be trying to figure out where to reestablish your business.
it's with your current visitors.
Kyle Antoian (:Then I can build prospect lookalikes. And then if they turn into customers, I can build customer lookalikes. So we started the call just sort of talking about, hey, how are these people going to build lookalike audiences with these new privacy frameworks in place? And the answer is it starts with your own data. And so capturing data at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel is critical. And I agree with Travis. Top of the funnel, recapture, keep it simple. Just give me your email. That's it. That's all I need.
When you get to the bottom of the phone, getting all that other information, I think is trivial because people expect to give it to you. You hey, I want your product to show up at my house. So sure. Yeah, I'll give you my address and I'll give you my phone number and I'm giving you my credit card number. Right. So, you know, right. So I'm with you. And by the way, that's awesome, guys, on the lead capture stuff. I'll be sure to test it and report back.
Travis Logan (:A little bit of homework for you for the next, maybe one of the next follow-up webinars to this is talking about server-side cookie tracking. That's, I don't even want to do that now, but because at first I want you to read up on that and start to get an idea of what it truly is and what it all solves for. But also then go and take a look at a company called Blout and what they've been building that is a
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, great. All right, Kyle.
Kyle Antoian (:Giddy up.
Travis Logan (:newer version, I would say, of what server-side tracking is. It takes server-side tracking to the next level. And they're incorporating, you know, different partners with their system and everything. just, that would be the next webinar.
