How to Attribute Leads When Cookies Crumble | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you're facing that problem that the old digital marketing strategy that you or your agency used to, used to put into place, tracking ads and knowing who was watching what and where, if you're one of those people that's found that no longer works, and ever since the 2022 changes both for Google and then later on for Apple, You know that we're in a cookieless environment. We're almost going back to the old print days before we had circulation data for magazines. My guest today is going to help you and me to understand what can we possibly do in this new cookieless world. And he's also going to share with us a number one tip, his big mistake, and he's got a giveaway, which is a certification course that will help you to learn just a fraction of what Jeff Greenfield, my guest today, knows. Jeff.

Hi, Jim.

Welcome to the show.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Jim. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you. You're the founder and CEO of a company called Provalytics in Boston, and you had an internet business before where you were helping people to do internet and digital marketing. Sold that 2019, and then you've come back into the market because you've realized that people need help with this new sort of cookieless world. Jeff, help us to understand the problem that we are all facing first.

Well, the biggest problem is that the foundation of the internet, you kind of have to look at it like they're utilities. They provide us internet coverage. We're able to go places like Google. We're able to scroll through a Facebook feed. But these companies are really young. They're not like our utility company. They're not like our oil company. They're very, very young. And so, they're in a process of a major evolution. Not only that, but there's also all of these new regulations because when the internet first started, there was no regulations. There was no restrictions in terms of what these companies could do with our data. And so, as a result, as we've started to kind of uncover what's been happening with our data and how things have evolved, we've got new laws and regulations like over on your side of the pond where you are, we have GDPR. And then that later evolved into the US with the first law in the state of California called CCPA. And these all deal with how these companies can utilize our data, what they can and cannot do with them. Now there's new restrictions coming in for children. But the most important thing is that these companies are in this kind of state of change. And prior to this state of change, the way that browsers and these websites worked is they worked through a series of what we call first and third-party cookies. A first-party cookie is when you go to a website where you've been before and you're logged into that site. And as soon as you go there, you're automatically logged in again, like when you go to Amazon. You know, you don't have to log in every time unless you click sign out. And that's the advantage of a first-party cookie is that it knows who you are. But it's only for that website. Whereas a third-party cookie is when you go to a news site like the New York Times, and then you go to another site like the Wall Street Journal, and advertisers know what pages you're on and they know when to serve you ads because they don't want to overburden you and have you see 20 or 30 of their ads in a day. Maybe they only want to have 3 or 4, and that way they can keep count. And that's a third-party cookie. But the problem is those third-party cookies have been used to build up profiles on us and all sorts of things, and they've leaked out. And that's where the privacy concerns come in. And so now we've got this major shift that's in the process of occurring right now where Chrome, which is Google's browser, is going to be stopping third-party cookies altogether. They're just going to kill them. And remember, this has been an integral part of the whole advertising and internet ecosystem. We have a whole hundreds of businesses that are built upon third-party cookies that are counting on it. And now all of a sudden that's going away. So that is causing this seismic shift, if you will. But it's all being done to make the internet a safer place, a smarter place for consumers to be. That's the pro side. The con side is that some of these businesses are going to struggle a bit, but it also makes it difficult for advertisers. Now, when we knew where you were going and what sites you were going to, as I mentioned before, I could, as an advertiser, I could make sure I didn't pound you over the head with 25 or 30 ads a day because eventually you'll get fatigued and say that's too many. And so this makes it a little bit more difficult for me to do a better job of advertising and also of targeting as well. And we've already seen a lot of these changes happen in sites like Meta or Facebook. It used to be you could log in and I could target someone who was 6 months away from their expiration of their Ford F-150 pickup truck, which was great. And all of a sudden, those targeting is gone. It's become much, much broader. So we're now back at a time, as you said earlier, Jim, just like the time of of newsprint. You know, if you think back to the time of before there was the internet, advertisers and brands, they would run campaigns on TV and print and radio where you could not directly connect an event like an advertising impression to a sale. But one of the advents of digital is that there was this direct connection. But I think that that direct connection led marketers astray because we have a whole generation of marketers who believe the only way to advertise is you have to hyper-target. Well, it doesn't matter anymore because that's all going away. We're not going to be able to hyper-target anymore. So that's an important thing for, for marketers to understand, is that the ability to really target finely— you can still target in certain regions or a city or a zip code, but you're not going to be able to target on, on specifics like you could before. But the other side of the coin as well is that for larger advertisers, when they spend money, they also have to be able to measure it to try to determine what's working and what's not working. There's an old adage in advertising, which is half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don't know which half. And so the— at Provalytics, we created a platform that enables marketers to determine which half is actually being wasted so that they can be more efficient with their advertisers. And it's designed to work in this kind of new cookieless environment. It's designed to work where we do not have to have the PII or that user-level data. And it's designed to work in today's kind of new world, if you will, where we don't have cookies. Uh, and it's future-proofed in that sense because cookies are definitely not coming back.

Yeah, thanks for the, thanks for the, you know, bringing us up to date really on what's happening in the market. That really explains why a number of clients that I have have, have shared their frustration that they're spending money on social media and just not getting the leads or getting the wrong kind of leads. And to be honest, to encourage them to stop and think more about inbound marketing and, you know, content creation and podcast, uh, you know, guesting and so on. I have to ask, if it's cookieless, how does Provalytics help us to manage to find out which half, as you say, of the advertising dollars are being well spent? Is there, is there something else going on that we don't know about? And if there is, what is it?

Well, anyone who has done ad campaigns, just like you mentioned some of your clients, when they look into their measurement system, which is typically Google Analytics or now Google Analytics 4, you end up with a lot of unknowns. Because if you were to go back through like the last 3 or 4 months of leads or sales, whatever it is you're doing, and you look to see what it's— where did they come from? Only about 20 to 30% can you track back to actual advertising, like a click here or a click there. And then you've got the other 70 to 80%, which I call navigational, meaning it's either people just showed up or it's what we call brand search. Someone typed in your term and they ended up clicking on your pay-per-click ad in Google to come to your website. But the problem is, is that when I advertise and I market myself, I want to find out how did people find out about me? And one of the issues that we have, and this is one of the problems with Google Analytics and Google Analytics 4 is that I only have insight to about 20% of my advertising. And since that's all last click, it's all at the bottom of the funnel, which means my ads actually have to work harder. I'm not doing anything to— if you can like think about advertising as a funnel, I'm not doing anything to expand my reach, like being a guest on a podcast or advertising on a podcast. There's nothing what we would call Upper funnel, and so what marketers need to understand is how did people know to look for me in the first place? So if you had a store and people just started showing up, obviously people drove by and they saw your sign. But how did they know to stop in there? Did someone tell them? Did they see an article in the paper? Those are the things you want to know because if it was that article in the paper, I want more articles. If it was the ad in the magazine, I want to run more ads. I want to know how did people know to go to look for me. And the way we're able to do that without getting that privacy-centric data that was there at the time of the cookie is that we use a combination of machine learning and AI. But here's what's fascinating. What's fascinating is that machine learning and AI is a bunch of math. And behind the math were all these algorithms. The algorithms that we use are back to the future. They're from the past. The basis of what we use was actually developed in the 1700s. That's one aspect of what we do. And the other is a mathematical formula that was developed in the late 1960s. But what's fascinating is that we could have done these things 10 or 15 years ago. But by the time we solved the mathematical equation, it would be a year too late. It would take us that long to do it. But the computing cycles have sped up so much that we can actually solve these very complicated math problems in hours instead of months or years now. And that's why we're able to do what we can do now, which is absolutely incredible.

That's incredible. So, Provolytics then is using, if you like, formulas from, you said, I think, the 1700s and the 1960s. bringing those 2 together and, and the attribution then that you can get for a lead which has come along the customer journey, that's in real time, isn't it? You're not waiting hours for that data to arrive. You can, on a dashboard I'm imagining, you can start to see the performance of those ads. Is that right, Jeff?

Well, it's, it's not so much in real time, and the reason for that is because Most digital marketers today try to make too many changes too fast. We try to teach our marketers that when you put a campaign live, you need to sit on your hands a bit and wait for it to have an impact because there is sometimes immediate impacts from advertising. But really what you're interested in is those longer-term impacts because when you think about that funnel, how long does it take someone who doesn't know about you or your business, once they become aware, how long does it take them to actually come through and do some sort of action? For a lot of businesses, that can be weeks and months. Some, it can be closer to a year. But what's important is that with these older techniques brought forward using new computing power, we can look at things like CTV and podcasts where there's nothing for anyone to click on. So when you think about someone advertising in a podcast or advertising on CTV, if they were to, there's, since there's nothing to click, that would never show up in Google Analytics. That would show up as just someone showing up. So with Provalytics, we're able to unlock those upper funnel, branding, building awareness channels to figure out where you should spend your next marketing dollar. And that's important for these larger brands.

And Jeff, and I think at the end you're going to give us a link to a course that you've built that will help people to understand attribution. And so people must stick around because Jeff's going to share with us a course he's built for, for people like me to understand and to, to make some smarter decisions. Sounds like a lot is changing, Jeff, and you've got some old-school experience, I can tell, um, and then you've got some new tech innovations that you're bringing to bear as well. Provalytics as a business, you've got to be competing, I guess, with some of the bigger companies or some, some of the sort of startup pure AI players. How have you gone about getting your own business noticed? Because that's a challenge in itself. You've got, as we know, you've got the product doesn't mean that you've got the customers.

Yeah, I've, I've built it one conversation at a time. And it's all it's about is that when I decided to build Provalytics, I had a network of people that also were connected to a larger network. All of us, we have a group of people that we're connected to, whether it's in our current business or people that we've known from the past. And the hard work is getting people on the phone And talking to them and doing surveys and finding out from them, what are you hearing out there? And this is what I've built, this is what I've done. And you build awareness one person at a time because once you do that, those people now understand you. And in the early days of this, I was having 5 to 7 conversations a day and had hundreds of conversations. And those led to articles. Those led to appearances on podcasts like this one to build even more awareness. And then, as I started hearing back from people, because when you build a business, you have a concept of what it's going to be. You build it for customers that you have in mind, but the more people you talk to, the more you find out what some of those issues are. And so, that's what led me to build this course was reflections from some of those conversations. Conversations are the backbone to me of building any business.

Really, really interesting that you've managed to build it. You say one conversation at a time. And a recurring theme from my guests is the need to engage and not hide behind the brand and social media, but actually to get out there. That's a little bit old school, Jeff, isn't it, in a way? I mean, you and I probably recognize that. Is there anything that you've done, Jeff Greenfield, with building Provolytics that hasn't worked quite as planned? I mean, you've got a fabulous video on your homepage, you've got good blogs, and you can see you've also done national TV, uh, I can tell from your LinkedIn. So you've plainly been able to do really well on some of the PR as well as the one-on-ones. Anything that hasn't gone quite according to plan?

Yeah, you know, I, I, um, in the past, in previous businesses, I had been very successful with cold emailing, emailing folks who I was somehow semi-connected to. I was able to get their email and reach out to them and engage them in a conversation and had very, very good success with that to then leading to those more one-on-one conversations. And, but that was back in the the pre-COVID era, if you would, you know, probably 2017, 2018. And I tried it 2 years ago and I tried it again last year and it did not give me the success that I had had in the past. I noticed that people opened them, but the engagement rates were incredibly low. And I don't really know the reason. I think a lot of it is I noticed that I started to see a significant amount of cold emails my own inboxes. And so, there was some frustration that I felt myself, even though I was someone that was doing it. So, I kind of look at things, I try to look at things through my own lens. I didn't respond to any of those cold emails. So, my response rate was relatively low as well too. So, I was a little disappointed because that's a technique that had worked in the past. But I think this goes to kind of the part of our conversation here, which is that what worked yesterday is not going to work tomorrow.

Right.

Because the foundation that we're building upon is so young and is in the midst of an evolution. We'll be back after a quick break.

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It's interesting, Jeff, because I've read one group of people saying, do more emails, do more emails. And yet, I'm finding these sequences that people put together frankly quite overwhelming and a little bit obnoxious because it's not just one email. You get daily kind of verbal, you know, a verbal stream of, uh, of emails. So maybe people have used email automation to the extreme, and that's actually turning people off because you're, you worry if you reply to one of them you're going to get a cascade of multiple emails over the next few days. Jeff, what is working then? I mean, I know with Provalytics, you've got cookieless attribution for the ads. You've talked about one-on-one engagement, but as you scale a business, it's quite hard to have enough conversations to get enough volume of business depending on the kind of company and kind of product you're selling. What do you think does work in terms of marketing at scale?

I think at scale, you need to get to a point where, you know, in most companies, you've got— that's a founder-built company. You have someone who's built it from the ground up. They have a network. There's a brand that's around them. And so, what needs to happen is you need to scale up people around you that can help support that. So, one of the jobs as founders, especially if you go the VC route, is to start focus on raising money. But on the other hand, you also have to focus on making sure that that marketing message and that branding message continues in the same vein. I've seen a lot of companies where as they scale up, the founder focuses on raising money. They hire a marketing team who then goes off in a different direction. And all of a sudden, the founder disappears from the messaging and everything. So you have to focus on making certain that there's a continuity of that voice. And luckily, that can all be done because the founder doesn't have to be involved. You can have a founder once a month who does some stuff on Zoom, does a couple of videos, And then have a team that then goes and divvies all that stuff up as though it's being done on a daily type basis. I think one of the other things that I see that happens a lot, especially in my business and in most B2B businesses, is that in the B2B world, when you're selling to businesses, it's a group decision. You're not selling to an individual. And so, one individual becomes aware and says, wow. That's going to solve my problem. And then before they bring it to the company, they then worry, is this going to get me in trouble at my company? I need to make certain because what you want is when you bring in a vendor, you want to make sure they're consistent. And I see a lot of times with companies that they're messaging across all the different social media and website and email. I see a lot of inconsistent messaging. So there needs to be, as you start to scale, an alignment where what you say on Facebook and what you say on LinkedIn is the same that's on your website or maybe on your Instagram feed. Very simple inconsistencies can stop someone from bringing in a new vendor. That's what I find a lot of times.

Yeah, really interesting that, Jeff, as we get to scale and the pace of content creation, and especially as AI is creating content as well, the old one person to review everything starts to fall away. We had a guest with a company called Brandwatch that's starting to help monitor different channels. Jeff, with Provalytics there, if there is one tip— and you've been running marketing companies for many years— if there's one tip that you'd like to give my fellow unnoticed entrepreneur, what would you, what would you say to us?

The one tip is to recognize that if you're doing anything in digital marketing, You have to recognize the fact that if what you're doing today is working, it's not going to be working in the future because this concept that this is a young utility that you're leveraging your business on and it's in a constant state of change. Back in the early days of Google, as Google was evolving, even before they had ads, back in the early days of SEO when SEO was was a real fine art in the early days. I would have friends that would find these exploits in the search engine, and everyone still looks for them these days. And everyone, you know, all ad buyers, they all have their tips and their tricks and things like that. And they would find something and they would go crazy with it. And my rule of thumb was, is that if you're in month 6 and it's still working, you're on borrowed time. And I still feel that way today about any type of digital marketing activity. If what you're doing has been working for 6 months and you haven't made any changes, just be aware that the world is evolving. You can talk to any marketer, people who sell on Amazon, they go on Amazon for the first time and their product explodes. Things do amazingly well because They're coming out of the blue. There's no competitors. What happens around month 6? There's 5 or 6 competitors. People are bidding against them. We live in this world that is constantly evolving and changing. So my number one tip is to understand that this world is always moving and changing, and you cannot build a career based upon doing the same thing over and over again. You need to be aware and be prepared for what's around the next bend. because it's coming soon. Wow.

Yeah, the digital bends are getting tighter and tighter and quicker and quicker, aren't they, Jeff? Jeff Greenfield, as the founder of Provolytics, also plainly a man of, of great learning as well. If there's a book that you've read or a podcast you'd like to share that, that you find inspiring, what would that be?

Well, my number one marketing book, which I always have right here, is— I'll put it up here so everyone can see it— Lemon How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour by Orlando Wood. It's, it's from the IPA in the UK. It's an amazing book. It's about $60 on Amazon. It's because it's got color photos in here. And if you like that, then you can pick up his second book called Look Out, also by Orlando Wood. These are amazing books that talk about the foundation of advertising And look at it from a historical basis. And the greatest thing about these books is that even if you're new at a brand or new at an agency, you pick up this book and you read it. No one, I'll guarantee you, no one at your agency has read it. And this is the type of book that you'll pick up tidbits that one of these days you're gonna be writing and they're gonna ask what you think about something. You're gonna pull something from this book. It's gonna make a huge difference in your career. Trust me on it. Absolutely amazing. Cannot recommend them enough.

Jeff Greenfield, that's cool. And the one called Lemon has got the picture of a brain on, on the front, so people will think that you're actually also, uh, a brain surgeon or studying to be one. So they think you're even smarter than that.

And Lookout has got the dog with the, with the collar on it.

So they've used some cute things there. Jeff Greenfield, we talked about a giveaway, your attribution course. Do you— would you like to just, um, share the details of that and then we better close up?

Yeah, absolutely. You can go to the Provalytics website. There's a link up there that says Attribution Certified, or you can also even just go to attributioncertified.com, but it's right there. The Attribution Certified link is there and you can sign up for it. This goes along with the whole theme that we've talked about. This course is going to give you a, a very quick historical background on, on advertising. So that you understand things about where things came from, like the click-through and the view-through. It'll even teach you about one of the basics of advertising. Anyone who does anything in digital knows what a UTM is, like UTM source. Very few people know that UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and that comes from a company called Urchin that Google acquired, which became Google Analytics. So there's all this historical basis there that'll help prepare you to understand that this change that we're talking about is real. It'll help prepare you for the next change. And eventually it'll hone your vision so that you can see what's coming around next before anyone else, which is what you want to be able to do as a marketer.

Jeff, you definitely give us the ability to see further ahead than I ever thought I would before. If people want to find you, where can they do that?

Oh, the best place to go is to go to LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn, or go to the Provalytics website as well. But I'm fairly active on LinkedIn and love to always communicate with any other entrepreneurs, talk to anyone who's going through this fun little journey of life that we have.

Jeff, thanks for sharing so much in a short amount of time. We could have talked for much longer, but thank you for coming on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show today with me.

Oh, it's been a pleasure, Jim. Thank you for having me.

Well, it's a whistle-stop tour around a huge topic, and Jeff has got literally decades' worth of experience as well. So I encourage you to connect with him on LinkedIn. That's Jeff Greenfield, as in G-R-E-E-N, and then Field, F-I-E-L-D, and go to Provalytics. These, of course, will be in the show notes. I think, you know, Jeff's really raised an interesting point, many interesting points. Fundamental is that we have to go back to basics. Because if the digital attribution programs no longer work, don't keep spending money on digital advertising that no longer is the same as when you commission the ads. We've got to move on. We've got to think differently. Think about inbound marketing. Think about creating authority through different channels. So hopefully you've enjoyed this show and I've learned a lot. So I'm sure that you have as well. If you have, please do review this show and leave a review on any player. and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to get unnoticed. From me, your host, Jim James, just to say thank you so much for following the show and like to just encourage you to keep on communicating.