In this discussion, the speakers explore how brands can stretch their advertising dollars by leveraging the customer data they collect on their own websites. They contrast intentional search discovery with algorithmic discovery, emphasizing that the latter relies on data to push ads to potential shoppers. The conversation highlights why platforms like Shopify, which let merchants own their customer data, are more profitable than Amazon, which takes commissions. They describe how visitor information—email sign‑ups, IP addresses, page views, cart actions—is aggregated and sent to ad platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok to train their AI algorithms for retargeting and prospecting. A key insight is that email serves as a unique identifier that allows these platforms to match a user to a Facebook/Instagram account, enabling look‑alike targeting and improving ad efficiency. The overall advice is that brands should capture and centralize rich customer data to feed advertising algorithms, thereby reducing acquisition costs and maximizing ROI.
So what should the brands be doing to maximize their return on advertising? Because everything is more expensive. It's far more expensive to acquire a customer. So you need to make your marketing dollars last, and that's what you do. So what advice do you have? How can the brands maximize every dollar so that they can get customers for cheaper?
So we talk a lot about search. Search is an intentional discovery, like people ask for things. But there's a big part of discovery is the system, the algorithms push stuff to you, right? Then the question is, how do they push stuff to you? How do they reach— they know that you may be interested in this thing. So it all goes back to the data you collect on the website. That's why Shopify is like— people make more money on Shopify than Amazon. Amazon takes commissions, right? The reason why why Shopify is more interesting is because you own the customer data. Customer data is the key to everything. So how you build a relationship with the customer data is through two things. Whether they buy and they become a customer to you, and there are a majority of people that don't buy but they land on your page, they are your visitors, and they're like leads. You get their leads through a few things. Do they opt in with the email pop-up? And what's IP, where do they come from. All this information was being tracked together with their activities, like, oh, this email person viewed the page, this phone number person added to cart, they checked out, and the entire data set is being sent to Facebook Ads, to Google Ads, to TikTok, so they can train algorithms using that data set to do retargeting or prospecting, right? That's how they find you. If they Today you view this page, probably my site, tomorrow you see an ad, that's where it is coming from. But there's one thing that is super interesting, which is email. It's a very basic thing. The reason why email is so important, and email is so interesting, is because email is a unique identification to a Facebook or Instagram user. That's it. Every single Facebook and Instagram user logins with email. So if you send that email information back to the platform, then they can match it back to the, Facebook or Instagram user, that data can be used to find out similar people to that. And that itself changes the whole story about how targeting and algorithms works.
