The Attribution Fix: How to Prove What’s Actually Working in Your Marketing

Jeffro (00:01.168) We all know marketing is getting tougher to measure between privacy regulations, the slow death of third party cookies, and customers jumping between platforms like it’s a game of Frogger. It feels like we’re flying blind and wasting a lot of money in the process. My guest today is Jeff Greenfield. He’s the CEO of Provolytics, a company pioneering cookie-less attribution and helping brands make sense of their chaotic data. So we’re going to dig into the marketing blind spots that no one’s talking about and explore how to fix them before your next campaign flops. So Jeff, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Jeff Greenfield (00:31.029) thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jeffro (00:33.36) Yeah, I’m excited to have this conversation too, because, well, I think before we start, for the uninitiated, can you give us some insight into what’s happening behind the scenes with third party cookies? And why is it such a big deal?

Jeff Greenfield (00:44.738) Yeah, third party cookies was the way that it kind of tied the, to bar from the big Lebowski, it kind of tied the room together, if you will. It tied all of internet advertising together. And it was primarily used so that, like if you saw an ad for Volvo, they want to make sure that they don’t show you like a hundred ads a day. And so what they would do is they would use third party cookies to count how many ads you had seen. And once you got into about three or four, they would shut you off for the rest of that day so they wouldn’t overwhelm you. And that’s where cookies really came in because they could track you across the web. But there’s been a series of this, all of these privacy events that have gone on that really started with the big iOS update where it asked you, do you want this app to track you? And of course, everyone said, absolutely not. And then also one of the things, the big things that changed as well is that 10 years ago, people would spend most of their time on websites. Now most of us spend times in apps. And apps are like these kind of closed environments where cookies don’t necessarily work. And we call those in the advertising world walled gardens. And those would be things like a YouTube, a Meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, places like that. They kind of have their own environment. And so the regular workings of the web don’t actually work there. So the ability to track people across all these different places. It’s kind of gone away. we’ve moved to, we’ve actually kind of moved back to how things were before digital. Digital started and we kind of knew everything about everyone. And now the pendulum has swung back more towards the middle where it’s like, you know, we need to not know all the details on everything that everyone does.

Jeffro (02:30.214) Right. And I feel like that approach kind of favors the larger companies who have the budget to just blast commercials and ads everywhere so that enough people see it. You can’t get as targeted in that approach. So now for the smaller business owners that have relied on Facebook and Google ads to drive their leads though, what’s the immediate threat for them that they should be paying attention to?

Jeff Greenfield (02:52.526) Well, the biggest threat for them is that it’s important to understand that Facebook themselves and Instagram are kind of blinded to what’s actually going on. That iOS update that happened, they don’t know when things are really working well and when they’re not working well. That’s the biggest issue. But I’ll also back up a little bit to just let everyone know that, you know, this game of Frogger that you talk about, even though big brands have millions of dollars a day to spend, it impacts them as well. because things have gotten very, very confusing. And there’s an old, old saying from a famous marketer in the Midwest for many years ago by the name of John Wanamaker. And that saying is half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don’t know which half. And that problem still exists today, whether you’re spending 500 bucks a month or whether you’re spending $50 million a month. Same problem, same issue. It’s just it’s compounded even more because the places where you’re spending dollars, you’re really blinded to.

Jeffro (03:55.858) Well, I don’t think you’re ever going to get to a hundred percent knowledge of that because you always have to be trying things and testing new markets and new creatives and everything. But it is of course nice to know what is working and what isn’t rather than having to assume that. let’s, you know, we’ve heard stats like, there’s a 37 % drop in revenue because of these changes or whatever, or from these data blind spots. Where do you think that revenue drop is coming from? Is it from an inability to properly retarget the prospects or are there other things that are going on?

Jeff Greenfield (04:25.4) Well, I think it’s best to illustrate this with a great example. Let’s say I created this really cool new hose that doesn’t leak. We’ve all seen the ads for these hoses. And I run a series of ads on Meta, and it’s got a cool name to it. And I run some ads on Google. So when you search for my name, it shows up and goes to the site. And you happen to go on. You’re scrolling your Facebook feed. And you see the video of this thing. But you kind of scroll past it. But you make a mental note about it. And then a couple hours later, on Instagram, you see it again. Maybe it’s got a different thumbnail on it. And now you watch the whole video and you say, hey, this is pretty cool. You I don’t need it now, but when my hose starts to leak, this is what I’m getting. This is the one I want this summer. And two weeks later, you go out and you go to open up your hose and there’s a massive leak in it. And you’re like, okay, what was the name of that hose? And you go and you search for the name in Google and you click on it you buy. So now multiply that by like a thousand times over the month. And I log into my Google analytics. And my Google Analytics tells me that Google is killing it. They drove all these sales. And I look at Meta in Google Analytics, and it says they did nothing. So I cut my Meta spend, because I think it doesn’t do anything. And I try to spend more on Google. But we know from the example that I just gave you that it was actually Meta, the combination of Facebook and Instagram that drove the awareness. And that’s how you knew to search for my name. And so the impact is from marketers

Jeffro (05:26.791) Mm-hmm. Jeffro (05:35.666) Mm-hmm.

Jeff Greenfield (05:53.012) actually being data driven, meaning you’re following the numbers, but the numbers are leading you down a path where you end up spending more money in the wrong place. And that’s where that revenue impact comes from.

Jeffro (06:03.292) Yeah. Yeah. And I could see how that could cause confusion too, because you pull the money from Meta, throw more into Google and suddenly your numbers drop and you’re like, what happened? but I want you to talk more about this. I mean, that’s a great example. And I really think that helps explain it, but there’s, so there’s the marketing halo effect, which is kind of what you’re talking about, right? How these other things impact the ultimate transaction, but we need to be aware of that. And is there any reliable way today to actually track the influence of those upper funnel?

Jeff Greenfield (06:13.613) Right. Jeffro (06:35.484) channels and early ads, you know, if they don’t get direct credit for a sale.

Jeff Greenfield (06:39.886) Well, there is, and it comes from understanding fundamentally how marketing actually functions. So this is how marketing works. You as a marketer, you invest dollars, and what you’re actually doing is you’re buying eyeballs, you’re buying attention. And the job of that attention is to build awareness for your product or your service. And when that awareness and attention is high enough, people will walk into your store. Now, if your store happens to be online, That will translate into clicks and clicks lead to leads and leads lead to sales. The problem is, is that folks are hyper-focused on the click. In fact, most marketers today that are digital marketers, they believe you invest dollars to buy clicks and clicks lead to sales. And that’s where it comes from. So there’s that confusion, because this idea about eyeballs and attention, that’s kind of pre-internet. That’s like what all the big brands did. When you think about like a BMW, they would run TV ads. And then that would convince people to drive by and eventually drive into a BMW dealership and take a test drive. Same thing with Coke and Pepsi. So the solution here is to say, OK, well, what are those eyeballs? What are those things that I’m actually buying? And the reality is that all marketers have access to all this data. That’s the crazy thing about it. In fact, every business owner that I know has a Google Sheet on their desktop. And on there is a list of like every single day, usually for like the last year, sometimes the last two years. And it’s got how much you spend each day, how many clicks you got, how many leads, your cost per lead, your cost per click, your cost per sale. All of those things are all there. And when you downloaded that data, there was a column that you ignored because you didn’t know what to do with it. And it wasn’t called eyeballs. It wasn’t called awareness. It was called impressions. Impressions are the number of people that you are attempting to reach. And reach is the name of the game in advertising. Because whenever you put your message out there, some people are going to be in market for your service. Some people are not. But you want to try to reach as many people as possible. Now, you need to be at the bottom of the funnel, too. You want to grab those people who are immediately in market today. But you need to do a combination of both. So the solution that I always give people, kind of the DIY approach,

Jeff Greenfield (09:01.134) is you take that Google Sheet and you reconstruct it. You go back at least for the last year and you download all the data, but now you go date and instead of going clicks, you go impressions, then clicks, then leads and sales all the way down. And then you create a graph and you look at your impressions by day and then you overlay your graph for clicks. And what you’re going to immediately notice is, well, this is kind of messed up. Because on days when my impressions are really high, my clicks don’t go up. They go up like a couple of days, sometimes like a week later. Well, that can’t make sense. Well, it does make sense because remember, the job is you’re buying eyeballs, you’re building awareness. And the example I gave with the hoes, it took you a couple of weeks to actually click. So there’s that delay. It’s important to understand how long that delay is. And once you start to see it, you want to go back to what you believe from your little spreadsheet is causing that increase in clicks, which led to the increase in leads and dig in on that day. What campaigns ran on that day? It’s really simple. When you find that correlation, do more of that stuff because that’s actually what’s driving leads into your business. It’s really, really simple, but it’s completely different than looking into like Google Analytics 4. or your analytics platform and following them. You don’t want to follow them because their job is to get you to spend more money. Okay. Your job is to get more leads. You have to dissect the information, but you got to go back to the eyeballs, to the impressions first.

Jeffro (10:41.21) Yeah. And that’s interesting because you kind of, just have to have a longer term view, of course, in order to do this. But you also then have to be a detective to kind of go back and say, okay, I read these ads on this day. Maybe if you’re running too many and you see a spike, you won’t know if it was all of them or just one of them that did well. you got to maybe do some more specific split testing there. but I know in the past with the traditional media, they would use coupon codes or have people take a survey. in order to find out, it the commercial that drove them there, right? But the way you’re suggesting doing it, you don’t even have to, you’re just kind of planting the seeds and waiting to see where things grow. And that’s your indication of what’s working or not.

Jeff Greenfield (11:24.046) Yeah, and the reason for that is because the problem with asking people, you know, how did you hear about us is about as reliable as like a lineup at a police station. Human beings, we are not good at knowing what motivates us. And the reason for that is that there is a huge component of advertising and marketing, which is emotional. And it’s actually unconscious. We don’t understand.

Jeffro (11:30.674) Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (11:35.698) the end.

Jeff Greenfield (11:51.83) necessarily what things influence us. And so to ask specifically what ad, I’m going to tell you what ad just got me to make the motion today. So in the case of that hose example, you would say, I searched for your name on Google. That’s what you would put down. You would put down Google. You wouldn’t even remember the ads that you saw a couple of weeks later. So human beings, we are not reliable sources. And so what we use and what we’re talking about using is using statistics. and actual numbers to look at what are the patterns that we’re seeing in the data. Essentially, I’m telling the listeners here to become their own AI bot. Because that’s what AI does, is it looks for patterns. And unless you have a very complicated mix where you’re spending in five or six different places and spending millions of dollars a month, this is not a huge undertaking. This is maybe an hour, hour and a half with a spreadsheet. but the insights you’re gonna get out of it are going to be massive to your business, because you’ll know where to spend more in order to get more leads.

Jeffro (12:59.878) Yeah. And it’s interesting because with this approach, you don’t get to know as much about who’s watching until they buy. so you like it. I’m thinking of connected TVs that are maybe in a restaurant or even at somebody’s home and their friends are over watching the friend liked it, but you don’t know, they weren’t signed into their smart TV. Right. and so there’s all these places that you could misattribute if you didn’t know that and you don’t. you just kind of have to go in the aggregate. Did these types of ads. have the best impact on the most number of people.

Jeff Greenfield (13:33.368) And you just nailed it there because we left about two decades of what we would call deterministic, meaning that in the era of cookies, we could actually track every single ad that someone was exposed to and us in the advertising ecosystem, well, we got, you know, we got to be to the point where we were expecting that that’s the way it was always going to be. But the reality is, is that Jeffro (13:58.897) Yeah.

Jeff Greenfield (14:02.134) What happens when someone drives by like a billboard and it’s not a digital billboard and there’s no signal there or anything like that? How do we account for that? How do we count for the fact that maybe I sent a mailer to your house or you saw an ad in a newspaper? Yes, there’s still our newspapers. People are still advertising in the mayor. So the best way and the safest way is to look at all of this data and aggregate and understand that there is this network effect of what happens. And then look at the differences. In fact, platform that we built here at Provalytics, what we look at is we look at these patterns and spending each day in aggregate and the patterns and leads and sales that come in. Because when you start to step back from it and you look at it, you realize that essentially every single day is a series of hundreds of different experiments, A-B tests, just like you were talking about earlier. And using AI and machine learning, we can actually use that to determine those patterns of what’s actually working and what’s not working and solve that problem of the money that we’re wasting and to know how not to waste it. That’s essentially what AI allows us to do these days.

Jeffro (15:11.238) Right. So now you get information back that says, okay, when you run a TV ad three days later, you’ll see a 20 % uptick in, you know, purchases and it’ll be this X ROI based on the ad spend. So that’s the kind of decisions you can make going forward is planning and mapping things out. Right.

Jeff Greenfield (15:30.038) That’s exactly right. And we also know that when TV1 runs in combination with other types of media, there’s a synergistic effect where the combination of them is like a one plus one equals seven. So there’s all these impacts of running all of these different media together. And through the sophistication of these tools that we have today, we don’t have to turn everything off and just run TV by itself or just run connected TV, but not run TV during the game. We can run everything simultaneously and be able to determine and essentially pull out how each one is impacting things individually and how it is working as part of the team to essentially get that goal and get that touchdown.

Jeffro (16:15.932) Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And it’s cool that it’s able to take a look at all that data and figure that out. for now, I want to move on to the retail media revolution. And it kind of goes back to what we talked about, how things are, you these walled gardens, right? And things have gotten fragmented. We don’t necessarily know where everybody is. So my question is, can service businesses ignore this and just continue on with the Googles and the Facebooks? Or is there an opportunity for them to promote their services? to people who are buying specific things. Like if somebody buys a plunger, so you advertise to them your plumbing business on walmart.com, amazon.com or whatever. Jeff Greenfield (16:55.086) So I think that we’re gonna see, and we already saw a shift happen with Amazon, several shifts. Amazon used to just be books years ago. Then they added these products. Then they added third-party sellers. And now you can buy a car on Amazon. They said you would never be able to buy a car there, but you can buy a car on there. And so when you start to think about the volume and aggregate of every service-based business, and then when you start to think, especially in the US, who are the customers that are buying your services, and how many of them are a customer of Walmart or Amazon, it creates a significant opportunity to say, OK, well, maybe I can capture some eyeballs there, especially when someone happens to be in market. Because just like you said, there are certain products that people can buy that indicate they’re having an issue. And maybe they need a plumber. maybe they need an exterminator, those types of things. So that creates a massive opportunity to get attention and in some instances, possibly at a fraction of the cost that you would get on a Google or a Meta. And so we have to look at all of these different places. Remember, one of the jobs of advertising is you wanna be where people are at. So when we think about demographics in the US, if you wanna target women over the age of 35, you wanna be on Instagram or Facebook. If you wanna target anyone under the age of 35, so if you’re in a market and you have a lot of younger folks under the age of 35 and you wanna target them, you really need to start thinking about where are they spending their time? Well, we know they’re on Amazon, we know they’re shopping on Walmart, but they’re also on the TikToks of the world. And so you can’t stay in one medium, because what’ll end up happening is that your population of the folks you go after are gonna continue to age, but you won’t be taking in any new customers that are moving into your area, especially in the younger demographics. Folks that are on TikTok, they don’t live on Instagram, they’re not on Facebook. So you kind of have to go where they are. And the way to look at this from the world of traditional media is that there were certain TV shows that folks over 50 would watch. And if you wanted to target people over 50, you would be on those shows.

Jeff Greenfield (19:13.304) And then there were younger folk shows that you wanted to advertise if you wanted to go after the younger generation. So TikTok is kind of like that younger generation TV show. That’s the way to

Jeffro (19:23.12) Yeah, so the targeting goes back to the behavior of the people and getting in front of them there. And I did hear at some point that Amazon has been testing some kind of display advertising network that goes beyond just on platform, because they’ve had the on platform ads for long time, but my understanding is they are planning to expand that.

Jeff Greenfield (19:40.526) Yeah, they have the Amazon DSP product. So you can buy kind of outside of Amazon. We have a couple of clients that are part of it as well too. And also remember that one of the things that happened with Amazon and Google is that you go back about 10 years ago, Amazon was very smart. They took their feed of every single product they had and they put it into Google’s feed and they bought an ad for everything because what they train people is it used to be 10, 15 years ago in the U.S.

Jeffro (20:04.348) Mm-hmm.

Jeff Greenfield (20:10.702) When you would search for a product, you type it into Google and you would see the first ad is Amazon, you click on it go to Amazon. It didn’t take people more than probably 10 times of doing that where they said, should probably just go straight to Amazon. And literally overnight, Amazon now controls 35 to 40 % of the search market in the US. So all product searches in the US, the vast majority go directly to Amazon. I would not be surprised if Amazon does the same thing for service type. businesses. But you’ve also got other places as well, like Yelp, the Thumbtacks of the world. There’s so many places. And I say, unfortunately, it used to be you just had to be in the yellow pages, and now you have to be in all these other places these days. It is tough, but you just have to kind of work with the team and also get an understanding for yourself of where you’re at. But most importantly, make sure you know your numbers so you can figure out what’s working and what’s not working.

Jeffro (21:09.542) Yeah. Well, and when we’re talking about knowing your numbers, it used to be easier if you were just on one platform. But now if you’re on all these different platforms, you need a single source of truth, that pulls in the data from all these platforms and ties it together. Right. So I would imagine, is that what Proveletics does?

Jeff Greenfield (21:24.312) That’s exactly what Provalytics does. We work with larger advertisers, take in all their data for them, and then make sense of it all. Because what ends up happening is that every place you spend dollars, they end up telling you how many sales they got you. So let’s say I’m a service-based business, and my focus is on leads, obviously. And yesterday, I had 25 leads that came in. And as I go to each platform, it’s going to tell me how many leads I had. as I add it up, from all the platforms where I advertise that, it’ll tell me I had 100 leads. Now, I know I didn’t have 100 leads. I only had 25. So there’s this overcounting and duplication that happens because Meta doesn’t know about Google. Google doesn’t know about Walmart or Thumbtack, and nobody’s talking to each other. So what we do is that we do essentially just like what I described. We take in all that data, but we look at those eyeballs each day for all of the platforms at a very granular level. And then we look at the total number that you actually had, which is that 25. And then we apply statistical models and AI and machine learning and put it all together to actually tell you how to divide up that 25. Who actually got you what so you know where to spend your dollars and move them around so that you can go from 25 to actually 50 spending the same amount of money. And that’s where the magic comes in.

Jeffro (22:49.49) Yeah. And I imagine for a smaller service business, starting with ads are probably going to be on one platform. So they might not be ready for that yet, but once they expand and start being everywhere, something like this is going to be critical because otherwise, you know, the different teams are going to be like, Hey, we’re doing well over here. No, we need to spend money over here. And you’re just going to fight with each other. So you got to make sense of it.

Jeff Greenfield (23:09.742) No, you’re absolutely right, because it can get very confusing and you can, know, buying digital dollars is like going to Vegas and putting everything on 23. You know, it can, sometimes you’re going to hit, but a lot of times you’re going to be like, where did my money go type of thing. And so it’s important to scale and scale smart. That’s the key. Jeffro (23:29.628) Yeah, money can go fast if you’re not keeping track of it. Well, Jeff, thanks for helping us make sense of this today. mean, the marketing attribution is really the messy middle for all these campaigns that we’re doing. And we’re always going to be looking for better ways to understand what’s really working. So for those of you listening, if you want to learn more about how Provolytics helps companies make sense of this fragmented data, be sure to check out the links in the show notes, especially if you are a larger brand and need help with this. But before you go, Jeff, here’s my last question for you.

Jeff Greenfield (23:32.28) That’s right. Jeffro (23:58.34) If you’re looking ahead, what’s one shift that you think business owners aren’t preparing for, but they should be when it comes to marketing data and attribution. Jeff Greenfield (24:08.834) I think it’s the involvement of AI. AI is going to change things a lot. I think that what we’re going to see, and we’ve already seen this happen in Facebook, Instagram, and also in Google, where they make it easy for you, which is great. Meaning you just kind of put in your brand name, your logo, and they make ads for you. so what ends up happening is that as everyone starts having these AI created ads, everything kind of looks the same, doesn’t seem real. And remember, the job of these ads is to grab attention. And also what’s important is that 60 to 70 % of the effectiveness of all your ads is from your messaging and your creative. And so we find that a lot of folks will get, and I’ll accuse marketers of this, they get lazy and they don’t worry about the ad. They’re more focused on where they’re spending their dollars at and they’re focused on the money. But I can tell you that taking time to focus on the ad and spending the hours looking at it and critiquing it, asking your partner, asking friends and family how they feel about it, it can make a huge difference. So that’s what I think people aren’t prepared for. They’re prepared, they like the fact that they can generate ads quickly, but they really need to… take time to critique them. That’s the key. Jeffro (25:35.44) Yeah, careful what shortcuts you take. Well, thanks again, Jeff. Thanks to all of you for tuning in. Please share this episode with someone in your world who would appreciate it. But that’s it for now. Take care and we’ll see you next time. Thanks again, Jeff.

Jeff Greenfield (25:48.002) My pleasure.