Why You Need Human Oversight For AI-Based Marketing With Anthony Chiaravallo

We unpack how AI reshapes performance marketing and why strategy, clean data, and human oversight matter more than ever. We share a full-funnel, dayparted approach for B2B, show what creative works now, and outline fixes that quickly lift ROAS.

• AI tools accelerating media operations while requiring human strategy
• Risks of automation with bad data and weak tracking
• Buyer shifts beyond Google and the rise of YouTube, TikTok, CTV and podcasts
• Dayparted omnichannel plan from commute to desktop to couch
• Short-form video and UGC outperforming static creative
• Full-funnel investment timelines and influenced revenue measurement
• Cleaning fragmented data and feeding CRM segments back into media
• Common account fixes including target CPA, remarketing and limiting AI expansion
• How to audit paid media and set realistic expectations

Guest Contact Information: 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anthonychiaravallo

Website: anthonychiaravallo.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Show Rebrand
• 0:34 AI’s Wild West In Marketing
• 3:22 Human-In-The-Loop And AI Pitfalls
• 7:46 Data Quality And Ad Platform Automation
• 9:19 Buyer Behavior Shift Beyond Google
• 10:29 Dayparted Omnichannel B2B Framework
• 14:05 AI Monetization And Shoppable Integrations
• 17:18 The AI Doom Loop Of Content Quality
• 18:39 What Works Now: UGC And Motion
• 22:00 Full-Funnel Investment And Timeframes
• 26:25 Proving Brand Impact And Influence
• 30:23 Fixing Fragmented Data And CRM Signals
• 34:12 Common Account Mistakes And Quick Wins
• 40:19 How To Connect With Anthony And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01: 0:14

Howdy, welcome back to another funfold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are branding as the Best SEO Podcast. There was a lot of debate. But you can find us on all the channels at Best SEO Podcast. We are moving over to YouTube with some success. So thank you so much for your support. If you want to go follow us there or like us there. As we move into the world of AI, AI is affecting everything. It's moving into paid ads, performance marketing. It's all over SEO. I wanted to bring in one of the top leaders in the performance marketing space to really kind of share with us how he's seeing AI affect it, as well as his frameworks and what he's looking at to help um grow businesses. We are talking about industrial B2B and um overall B2B, but we're gonna maybe sprinkle in some uh discussions uh for the consumer listeners out there. I I've been working a lot in B2B, so I'll have more to contribute in that. So Anthony Cherivalo, is that right? I didn't say it. Is that right? You got it? No, that's perfect. And then Vahalomedia.com uh is is your site, and you know, do a lot of programmatic, paid ads, performance marketing stuff. Um, really excited to get into this. I've been really um really heavy into the AI SEO LM visibility space for well, this whole year. It's just uh you know, change changed the game on how people search online. Um, I was actually just in Slack uh with somebody that was using Perplexity to help write ads for them in Facebook, and then I sent him a uh a link saying that there's um actually some security issues with uh injection scripts happening uh from the Brave browser uh team. And so, you know, just there's so much new stuff happening. Uh I would love to hear from you, Anthony, kind of what's on your radar right now as far as um all the changes going on in marketing today.

SPEAKER_02: 2:28

Yeah. So first of all, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here and dive into all this, right? It feels a bit like the Wild West out there right now with AI, right? The early dot-com era, you know, which was a little bit before my time. I did start my career in print, uh, but it definitely feels like I feel the early days of the internet and what was called the e-business strategy back then with AI right now. So, you know, what we're looking at is a lot of things. We're obviously specialized on the performance marketing front. So we're talking Google ads, meta ads, TikTok, programmatic, like you were talking about. You know, we're doing a lot of CTV, uh, omnichannel buying. And that really hasn't changed. But the way that we optimize the media has, and you're seeing a lot of these ad platforms, the Google ads, the Facebook ads of the world rolling out tons of AI tools, right? And we've been using AI for copywriting and brainstorming and strategy, and it's been a great research partner for that type of thing. But we're seeing um, you know, a lot of brands are moving towards more automation within the ads platform, and it's not necessarily working out too well at the moment because an over-reliance on the automation is missing a key element, and that's the strategy. And the strategy is what we're seeing right now as the most important thing. So, yes, try the AI tools, yes, embrace GEO and generative engine optimization. We can dive into how to do all of that. Um, but think a little bit more about okay, what is our strategy with all these things? And especially when we're talking about marketing, uh, you know, that's the most important thing is you know, looking at um the data that you have, developing a strategy, which tools, AI tools, which you know processes do we want to improve, or what do we want to you know lean into in some of uh in some of these areas, whether it's the machine learning, the AI ads, AI Max ads on Google, Facebook has you know AI creative tools embedded in the ads platform now, um, but it's still that human insight and that human strategist that's going to be essentially you know operating these tools. And without that strategy, without that level of oversight, it's not going to be anywhere near as effective. It could actually hurt you.

SPEAKER_01: 4:36

I I agree. I the human in the loop is is so important. And what I've seen, and there's been a couple studies. Um I'm taking a number of AI courses right now. I've been a little quiet on social media because uh the Oxford class right now is like a legit class, and the math is um really, really uh having to uh brush off a lot. But what I can tell you is it's giving people that know how to do things more capabilities the better they understand like prompt engineering and understand how these tools work. So it gives you like a a wider set that you can reach for. But if you don't, if you're just starting like, hey, we're just gonna let AI just take it over and do it. Well, what are the inputs you're feeding it? How you know, how is it building the workflow? Like, what is the prompts? It's a it's a it's a tool, it's a a co-pilot, it's it's an assistant to help you do it, but you still got to be the driver. You can't just really agentic hand it off today. Um, there's a lot of errors that are coming up, it it does some weird stuff. I'll even tell you, I was processing uh another podcast that I was on, and I was doing recordings at a conference, okay, and people weren't always speaking into the mic uh really clearly, and there was a lot of background sound, and I was using audacity to uh translate the transcript, and if it didn't hear the sound, okay, like or the person was talking too quietly, it would make up what they thought they were saying, like it was just projecting out what it thought it would say, and then it would like repeat words, and I was just like, Is the AI bored? Like, I first thought I was like, Is it alive? No, it's not alive, but is it listening to what people are saying and they're getting bored? Because at one point it was like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, and I was like, Why would it do that? And then another one was like, I am a salesperson, I am a salesperson, I am a salesperson, I am a salesperson, and said like 30 times. And if I wasn't like looking at what it was doing, right, and just like published it and it was all agentic and there was no human in the loop, it would have pushed that out. And I was just and then I like went down a rabbit hole, I was like, Why is it doing this? And it was like, Well, based upon what the person was talking about, we were talking about complex selling and B2B, and it basically just kind of aggregated what what we were talking about and and summed it up in that, and then just repeated that until uh the sound came. So AI does weird things, is is really what I'm I'm I'm trying to say. And you know, giving it your credit card, right? Like this this economy's coming, right? Where it's gonna do ad buys for you. I mean, it's different if the platform's optimizing it, but you're like giving it your credit card and you're just saying go, and there's no one driving, it you know, it's gonna go off the rails, and there's all kinds of uh horror stories about that for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 7:32

Yeah. And again, that's the issue that we see with an over-reliance on some of these AI tools or these automation tools. And the key for us, because we audit a lot of brands and we audit other agencies too. What happens is if you're not feeding these, you know, AI algorithms, particularly in the paid media platforms that I was talking about earlier, if you're not feeding them clean data and your tracking is not buttoned up and you don't have the right settings and tools and key events conversions and all that configured properly, you're basically just going to compound your problem. And so you're letting the AIs run wild with bad data. So the algorithm is in a sense doing its job, but it's just making your performance worse and it's diminishing it because you don't have the right strategy, you don't have the right settings enabled, you know, you're not feeding it the correct data signals. And so it's taking you know a small problem that could be a fix with just maybe you know a little bit of time and strategy. Uh and it's taking that and it's compounding it, and and worse, it's spending your money to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 8:30

I I I would tell you one more example that I saw. I was working with a uh in-house paid paid ads manager at a company, and they were running some CTV ads or you know, TV ads, streaming TV, and um it the AI started optimizing for spam, right? So people were spamming the ad. And then over time, like you were seeing the leads that were coming in and the CRM, and it was it was optimizing actually for that engagement, which was spam. And it was like, no, we gotta you gotta keep shutting down the campaigns to kind of restart them and get them on the right track. I'm sure you've you've you've seen some of that as well. Um it's it's it's so fun of it. Yeah, you you gotta you gotta you gotta definitely be careful. So let's switch over to what is working, what are the things that are happening today because searches change how people are buying the buying behaviors change. It's not just Google anymore. Google uh well, I I feel like 50% of the traffic's kind of left Google and gone everywhere. So you're needing to run the TikTok ads, you're you know, you wanting to run YouTube, like a lot of people look at the you know, the the cost per click on YouTube, and um they don't like that, right? Like it's like Facebook and Google has been like the game for so long, and now you're having to fan out on these other platforms, you're having to reach people in different ways, different kinds of ads I'm seeing are not working. I would love to hear kind of what what are you seeing on your end?

SPEAKER_02: 10:05

Yeah, that's a really good point. And we are seeing that evolution that's that's taking place right now, and the biggest shift is you know how people are are behaving online. I mean, Google's offering their own, you know, AI summaries now, they've got their own AI engine that you can just start chatting with right within the uh you know the search engine page. And uh behavior is changing, and what's old is new again, right? So, what we're actually advising clients is you need to invest in the upper funnel. You have to invest in your brand. And you mentioned YouTube, that's a great example of where brands need to be now across the entire ecosystem. Now, yes, it depends on your customers. Certain customers are on TikTok, others are not, right? So do some research, understand where your customers are actually consuming content and think strategically about it. So we have a global B2B brand right now, and we've developed a campaign that leverages day parting. So we're running programmatic audio ads in the morning as their target customers on their way to work, right? They're we're we're playing those ads in podcasts on different uh music uh streaming services, right, on the radio. And then when they get to work, we're ramping up our display campaigns. And that includes like rich media, HTML5, a little bit of social media during the day as well. Because again, these people are at their desks, they're researching, hey, new suppliers, new partners for our business, whatever it may be. And so we want to ramp up uh our spend and our positioning there during that time. And then at night, we're hitting them again with the audio on the way home. And then when they're home, we're running CTV at night when they're sitting there on their couches, just kind of unwinding from the day, they're scrolling their social media feeds, catching up. They're not in that buying mindset, which is why the ads shift to more of like a brand focus. Like maybe we use entertainment or humor or we do something that reinforces the brand values. They're not in that buying mentality. And so we need to adjust our messaging and our medium during that time. As opposed to our display ads, our rich media, our other in-feed ads that are running during the day, those are maybe you know much more um, you know, conversion, lower funnel focused. The same goes for search, right? You have to understand when people are going to search, they're either asking a really specific question, in which case you should have blog posts that answer that question, right? Because that's gonna get you featured in the generative engines. And you should also be thinking, okay, what about the people with higher intent? They're going to search, they're looking for something very specifically. They're either ready to buy or they're, you know, further along in their research journey, especially for these B2B type clients, where, you know, like you were saying, long sales cycle, complex. Um, there's gonna be a lot of touch points that need to happen, a lot of personal touch points as well. But people need to be able to find that information, especially this younger cohort of buyers. If you have, you know, targeting millennials, for example, um, they want to be able to easily find information about your company, but they want to reach someone when they're ready. But so you have to be there throughout all those different moments and all those different touch points that are that are happening throughout that individual's day.

SPEAKER_01: 13:01

Man, I love that. And I I want to highlight something you said running multiple platforms at different times of the day based upon what the bulk of people might be doing. Um, I've I've seen a lot of success in the like streaming ads and the podcast ads. Um, but thinking about the windshield time of like, hey, let's hit them when when they're most likely listening to these. We've seen like that on the weekends or something like that, and layering these together where you're really omnichannel following them around, right? Like a remarketing ad, uh, but based upon what what they're doing and and understanding when they're on mobile, when they're on desktop, what they might be doing. Um, I I love that kind of framework to develop that. You know, one of the before we move way past AI, everybody keeps bringing it up, and I'm I'm guilty of it as well. Um, one of the discussions I was having the other day, and I just wanted to get your opinion on this, is Chat GPT said we are not gonna be going the ad route. However, I do have a Google alert for Chat GPT uh, you know, ads uh for when uh that that may be the case. Um based on buying behavior of how people are using it, and I know perplexity is uh you know not leading as much as it it was when it first came out, but I think Apple or somebody could buy them and could change the game. They started putting affiliate links uh in uh the calls. So like the the uh citations are actually like affiliate links by them, and that's like the business model that that they are um you know following or or trying to pursue, I guess is the word I was looking for. And so I mean it's very new. It's everything's wild west right now for sure. I I definitely feel that. And I I'm constantly trying to you know interpret what different people are saying in social media, everybody's saying different things, there's different sides, um the data keeps changing. I I feel like the the spine hasn't totally hardened on the the the training data yet, and I think it's kind of still pretty fluid. Um, but where do you see like Google, right? Big Bohemoth, um if people are wanting the answer immediately, I mean they're they're testing out different placements of ads and local ads there, you know. But if someone's looking for something and they're trying to buy something, um you know, how AI is changing and then people move over to more of a uh you know, agentic assistant to to go do the research for them. Do you see ads getting incorporated in there or how how do you see it playing out from uh advertising landscape as everything changes, I guess?

SPEAKER_02: 15:56

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I think based on what we're already seeing, I think this is this is definitely what's going to happen is there's going to be you know product integrations directly into these feeds. I'll just use TikTok shopping as an example. So people are buying you know tons and tons of products just without leaving the TikTok app, right? And I know Instagram offers something similar. Um, so we're seeing much more of these like social, you know, shoppable uh integrations. I think YouTube's doing the same thing, right? Um, and so we're seeing that across the board already. From what I read, Chat GPT has already now um signed some kind of deal with Walmart, maybe a few others to where product you know listings are going to be directly within the AI answers. So yeah, I didn't hear that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:39

That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, no, check that out. I just get all the man I don't trust him.

SPEAKER_02: 16:45

Like no, I know these things are it's coming out like so fast too. So everything's changing day by day here. So we absolutely are gonna see more of that. We're going to see, you know, the shopping because you know, I'm just thinking about how do I use AI if I'm looking for a product that hey, give me the top 10 recommendations for this particular product and this, you know, for this use case. And here's what I'm thinking. I'm talking to it just like I would a person. And it's you know, it's spitting out recommendations. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not. You know, you have to understand, like like we were saying earlier, the AI can hallucinate, it's only as good as the data that we're feeding it. And here's another issue. I actually just wrote a LinkedIn post about this. We are seeing a huge influx of AI content on the web. I think more than 20% of content that's being churned out is AI now, probably gonna be 80% in two years or less. And then we have to think about now the AI is training itself on AI content. So it's it's almost like becomes this, you know, self-perpetuating doom loop uh, in a sense that the AI is just gonna be producing lower and lower quality content because it's just training itself on its own recycled content. So we got to be careful too. And I think the brands that can really stand out are the ones that can, you know, be more human and and and really think about how do we, you know, really distinguish ourselves in this world where AI is training on AI and it's just going to just multiply the volume and the type of content that we see coming out on the web.

SPEAKER_01: 18:05

Wow, the rabbit hole of uh dead internet theory and the degradation of like training data. Um, let's not go, let's not go down that path. I I um today. Uh, but uh I would love to hear from you what what is working. Like, I agree with you, brands that are putting in the strategy, putting in the creative and standing out because it's all about attention, right? Like you gotta be able to grab the attention. I mean, I'm recommending and and again, like not heavy on the paid ads, really. Paid ads I see as a support for when when I get brought in to drive um, you know, uh AI visibility, LLM visibility, as well as kind of like traditional SEO. Um, I I usually work with a team that's that's that's running that and and try to get some support and some data put in there quickly uh to help the search engines understand what this is about. But man, I say like you should be running always videos. I don't feel like static ads are are producing the click-through rates that I would like to see, especially with the bid auctions going so high. A lot of the strategies that used to work maybe a couple of years ago, really since COVID, everybody's come online. Um, it doesn't work anymore. And you're having to go to you're having to fan out to some of these other platforms and you're having to do what you talked about, a multi-layer strategy on different platforms to hit people at different times, because you can't like a lot of companies just want to run AdWords, right? Or and maybe run some Facebook remarketing, and that used to work, it doesn't work anymore.

SPEAKER_02: 19:46

Um no, it does not. I would say a couple things there, right? So when we're uh talking about what works right now, short form video content, like you were saying, non static ads and a large volume and And a large diversity of this type of content. So we do a lot in the UGC space, which you know, influencer, you can call it uh whatever you want, but we actually work with just independent content creators. And I'm not really interested in their reach or their influence. I'll just have them create a branded video, we'll give them some, you know, specific guidelines, they'll do it in their own style. We'll work with an editor to pull together some, you know, uh different sort of uh clips and things like that. And from there, you know, we'll run those in our ad campaigns. And so we'll have vertical videos running across, you know, Facebook and Instagram, UGC style. And then yes, we're still capturing people through remarketing, but what we use is now is HTML5 ads because to your point, the ads with the motion uh in it perform way better than just static. So we don't even use static unless we unless there's just literally no other option. But um we always want to have some type of motion um even in our display ads, right? And then we run them across you know Google's ecosystem, we run them um, you know, programmatically, that sort of thing. And again, with the video content, I'm seeing now they have these AI tools where it's churning out hundreds of UGC style videos. And I'm a little hesitant with that because it's like, okay, you're you're just literally just creating copies of copies of these different UGC and it's testing hundreds of different hooks at a time. So there are tools and and strategies out there that are um doing that. Uh, we still like working with the individual creators. Again, it's pretty low cost because we're not going after influencers with millions of followers. I'm just literally finding people that create video content, like actors essentially. And for a few, for a few hundred bucks, hey, record me a selfie style video, and here's a script, you know, feel free to add your own personal experience, your own flair, whatever it may be, as it's relevant. And then we'll we'll we use those pieces of content. We find that it works really well. And that's something that we're refreshing on a monthly basis for these brands. And then from a remarketing standpoint, right, um, it comes down to, you know, are you properly investing in your brand? Are you building awareness? And a lot of clients, they just want to rush right to the bottom of the funnel. Like, I want to run Google Ads, I want to spend, you know,$10 and make 20. It's not always, you know, it doesn't work like that anymore. Uh, maybe they used to be able to do that, but now you really need to think about the funnel and you need to not only drive awareness through YouTube and these other channels, but more importantly, build warm audiences and preheat audiences that you then retarget with additional video content, the the ads we were talking about. Uh, and so we're seeing the brands that are doing well are taking this full funnel approach and not being so focused on that, you know, return on ad spend lower funnel metric exclusively, right? Because we need to think about this as a brand uh more holistically. And that's been our number one, you know, the thing that we saw driving performance.

SPEAKER_01: 22:39

Man, you just you just hit on attribution, right? That's another very, very hot topic. Um, going back to what you said, uh, that I just want to kind of highlight it, it it sounds like there's a level of comfort, a level of risk where there's Gary Vanderchuk on one end saying, um, your brand, uh, as long as it's uh out there, people know it, it's homemade, you know, it doesn't matter if there's brand guidelines at all. Just it's out there, that's good, people know about it. And then on the other end, like there's a number of clients that that I see that we can't run the five uh HTML5 ads or uh change them in any way because it's like very strict brand brand guidelines, you know. I think somewhere uh in the middle safe. The question I had for you is when you're running these full funnel ads, I've seen like even like Facebook ads, like if I'm just running a strict Facebook campaign, you need at least well, it depends on your ad spend, of course, like how much of the market you're reaching. But I've seen it take about two weeks to even start to see an impact of of inbounds and and requests coming in. Um with kind of these campaigns you're running. Can you give me a size on kind of kind of budget, number of platforms, and when do you start being able to get attribution in any way? And you don't know last click, first click, like it's probably weighted. Um I I think Google gets a lot of last click attribution, even though maybe it was generated somewhere else uh over a certain period of time. But I'm curious, you know, we're talking mainly B2B, I believe, but what kind of how much budget are you spending? How many platforms? And then what is the time frame of measuring however you're measuring it, success in some form? It doesn't have to be exact attribution because I think that's really difficult right now.

SPEAKER_02: 24:37

Yeah, for sure. I would say, you know, we have some clients that are spending just a few thousand dollars a month, maybe five to ten thousand on ads, and then we have clients that are spending a few hundred thousand. So it just depends on the size of the business. But I would say as an entry point, you don't just want to dip your toe into paid and say, hey, we're gonna throw three to five thousand dollars at this and just we're gonna get a return. That's not how it works. There's gonna be a time frame, there's gonna be uh an investment that needs to be made. I would say, you know, a minimum three to six months, but ideally you would commit for a full year. Now, don't get me wrong, we could turn on ads and start driving results in a week or two, right? We'll start driving traffic, right? But a lot of the ad accounts, especially if they're brand new, if the a brand has never run ads before, uh, there's a warm-up period on these accounts. There's also a learning phase the ads have to go through, and that takes about a week, uh, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. And then you need at least one month of running campaigns to gather enough data to make your first round of optimizations. And that could be adjusting the bid strategies, adjusting the audience targeting, you know, uh adjusting the creative, the placements, the geographies where you're showing up. So it depends on the client. Again, we audit a lot of clients that have been running ads for years. What we found is they have just uh had they've had bad experiences with paid agencies in the past. We went again, we had a client who went through four different paid media agencies, and we went in and we audited their whole account and we're like, your bid structures are wrong, your campaigns aren't set up properly, you're not, you know, using all the potential, you know, ad space that Google or Facebook's you know making available to you. And so we're noticing this is so prevalent in the industry, is that a lot of these foundational things are missing uh from a paid media campaign. It's something that we try and address, you know, right out of the gate. And in that case, we could see improvements of 30% or more after one month of making some of these, you know, little tweaks.

SPEAKER_01: 26:22

Yeah, I guess and I appreciate all that background that was super helpful. I think more of my question, and and maybe I didn't uh articulate it well enough, was say you're doing everything right, right? And and say, okay, let's uh discount the warm-up period and and the learning phase. But like if you're running ads, right, and you're you haven't done top of the funnel, right? You haven't people don't aren't familiar with your brand. There's like one of the data points I saw, which the data that we used to use was like, hey, you need 11 touch points. Someone needs to see your brand, you know, 11 times before they recognize it. One of the most recent pieces of data I saw was it's 30 touch points now, right? And so when you're starting a campaign and you're running it multi-funnel, but if people are not familiar with your brand, they have to get used to seeing your brand, they have to understand it, they have to be in the buying mode to click on stuff. Like how long does that take when or how are you explaining that to the customer? That hey, we're gonna start running this campaign and it's gonna take a while to see results, and we're gonna have to tackle uh not just bottom of the funnel, but but middle of the funnel. What you know, what are you doing there, and then top of the funnel and how to justify this makes sense to to to reach all these people because a lot of times they'll be like you're wasting money, right? Like they just want they just want people to buy. So I'm just curious how what you're seeing in the data, uh, from how long when you do start running the campaign, does it trickle down and all the way through that where it's the brands start to get tractions? I guess. I don't know if that's a very quantifiable question. So just give it a case of scuddy, I guess.

SPEAKER_02: 28:26

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I would say, you know, when we're talking exclusively the upper funnel, especially with clients who have already done a lot of the lower funnel, the most important thing uh I would say from a timing perspective is to give it at least six months to a year to see results. Now, something we're doing on the upper funnel side from an attribution perspective is actually looking at influenced revenue. So we can show through the data how many people were exposed to an upper funnel ad, whether it be programmatic display or CTV or an audio ad, and then came to the website at a later time, let's say within a period of 30 days, and then actually made a purchase. And what was the value of that purchase? So that's one way that we show the value of upper funnel. Um, there's obviously platform metrics like video views and click-through rate and traffic and impressions, right? So there's some value in those metrics, but everyone knows those. And you know, people think of them as as vanity metrics, and in many ways they are. But we also look at uh qualifying metrics from upper funnel campaigns. And so that includes people that are coming to your site and taking desired actions, whether it's you know, spending more than two minutes on the website, we need a way to qualify these people, assuming that they're not gonna convert on those first 29 times, right? To your point, there's 30 touch points that need to happen. And so if a client is really wanting to invest long term, I would say commit to at least a year of running upper funnel ads. We're gonna show results, you know, within a month. We can show, you know, increase in traffic, increase in qualified users, increase in key events, but we're not gonna show a last click, hey, someone saw this upper funnel ad and then went and bought us, you know, and immediately converted into a sale. We actually do some of those, but it's not gonna be like what you're seeing on your Google and your and your Facebook campaigns uh that are that are lead-driven and conversion driven. Uh, and that that's okay. I think you know, brands need to understand that they need to invest in these campaigns. And there's been the best part is there's data that supports this. There's um, if you're familiar with Warc, the uh industry uh advertising association did a study where they looked at all these brands that invested, you know, very limited in upper funnel versus brands that invested, you know, more heavily, let's say 50% or more of their budget into these brand campaigns. And the results were crystal clear. The ones that invested uh a more balanced approach, they had 10x their revenue over a period of five years. Whereas the ones who just, you know, were very transactional in nature, they just wanted to focus on that lower funnel, they wanted those short-term returns, they needed the uh the last click attribution. Every click had to be accounted for, every click or view had to be tied to a sale. That ends up shooting you in the foot. It's actually the worst thing you can do if you want to grow your business or your brand. And the data has come out and it it supports that. The study is called the multiplier effect. And so, you know, your listeners can check it out. There's a ton of fantastic data in there about the value of properly investing in a full funnel approach.

SPEAKER_01: 31:29

Man, I'm gonna have to go read that study. I've heard people talk about the data from the study, uh, but I I haven't uh gone and read the study myself. So I'll have to check it out. It's called the multiplier effect. Is that what it's called?

SPEAKER_02: 31:41

Yes, exactly. It's it's basically a CMO's guide to investing in brand in the performance era.

SPEAKER_01: 31:48

I love it. I love it. Now I wanted to switch gears because you know I'm trying to not talk about AI, but AI is important. Um, I want to talk about fragmented data, okay, because that's one of the areas from a marketing agency, from an ad agency, from a PR agency, whatever a performance agency, whoever's listening out there. I know each one of us are logging in to multiple platforms a day, okay? And the data is siloed in different areas, and we bring it into a spreadsheet or whatever, and we try to kind of bring the data together and then put it together in a presentation and present it to the client. Um, that's been one area that I've been really focused on on the on the SEO side specifically, is unifying all this data into one like clear pipeline and then you know, visualizing that data in like a Google Look or something like that. I'm curious, what does your workflow look like on fragmented data? How are you looking at it? I know you touched on some AI tools. There was a previous guest that was on that was talking, actually, really interesting. I haven't checked out the tool yet, but it was a simulated audience. So you could take uh an ad and then you could build uh uh an audience set and drop the ad into it, just kind of like a survey, and you could get feedback based on that target persona on how that they would experience the ad before even running the ad, which I thought was pretty interesting with some with synthetic data or synthetic people. I mean, there's all kinds of different tools out there. I'm curious, um, kind of how are you looking at that? What are you doing? What do you recommend the best practices? But I know that like fragmented data disconnected strategies are just something we still see a lot of. I I almost feel like this AI revolution or fourth turning or whatever you want to call it, people are just now getting. I and I saw this in a uh my one of my classroom uh studies, but most businesses, 89% of businesses are still in the industrial age, just moving into like the web 2.0. So now, like everybody's like, all right, we're ready for you know, web 2.0 is like, oh well, web 3.0 has just dropped, right? So um just interesting to hear where where you're at and how you're how you're viewing the world in in that regard.

SPEAKER_02: 34:15

Yeah, no, that that's so interesting that I feel some of these companies are still trying to do digital transformation for for a world that has you know totally uh evolved at this point. And to your question, which was around the data uh fragmentation, so I want to dig into that a little bit. You know, we have clients, you know, in a similar situation, their data is absolute mess. And so, how do we help them get a handle on it? You know, for us, it's about um really understanding what data that they actually have to work with. We find some clients don't even have access to proper sales or revenue data, and so we're feeding information into their Google Ads platform, into their Google Analytics platform that's totally wrong. And you have the campaigns that are optimizing uh against the figures that aren't accurate, sales and revenue figures. And so the number one thing that we try and help clients do is get a handle on their internal data. So, you know, we have partners that we will bring in that specialize in you know CRM data, um, you know, sales, revenue. We also build looker dashboards. And so something we'll do is actually take uh look at all the paid media data sources, so SEO, website analytics, uh various different paid platforms, and uh pipe that into a looker studio so we can see everything holistically. And then you can make better decisions, more strategic decisions. But then especially on the back end of what the clients are doing, we help them to segment their CRM data. And so one example is we'll take you know a client that's in the B2B space and we'll segment their customers based on the most frequent purchasers, based on the volume of orders, based on what they call, you know, VIPs, which are, you know. And then, you know, from there, what we'll do is segment that data and we'll use those lists in our paid media campaigns. So we will actually take a uh segment of their audience list, it could be, let's say, their most frequent purchasers, and we will retarget them across the open web, across different paid platforms, and then we'll also build lookalikes of those uh audiences. And that's been really effective. But in terms of helping them, you know, get their data cleaned up, that's a pretty big undertaking. Uh, it's something that is so important though, because without it, you know, our campaigns and our as can't be as effective as they as they could be.

SPEAKER_01: 36:35

Awesome. So I want to ask you like we've we've talked about like meat and potatoes of kind of ad campaigns. Um, maybe we've we could go into a little bit more detail on on some best practices. We've talked about how AI affects it, attribution. I would love uh and and the the the name of the podcast that we had started with 12 years ago was the unknown secrets of internet marketing. And really what I try to do on this podcast is share things that are like maybe things that are that are not brought to light as much as they should be, or common mistakes of what's happening. I would love to hear from your perspective when you go into an account, like what are some things that you see that are like obvious fixes? And also what are some things that you might be doing that you think other people should be doing? I at one point I was like screaming from the rooftops that you need to be doing remarketing, right? Like clients would come to us and I was like, why are you not doing remarketing? Like they just aren't spending any money on paid. And I'm like, why are you not at least doing remarketing? Like it makes the most sense. Like we can turn it on quickly, like you should be doing remarketing. And I felt like that was just something that I was beating the drum on for a long time. And I think in general it's gotten better. Uh, while still there are people that are not doing it. Like some of the things like that, uh, I would love for you to kind of uh share some of those insights.

SPEAKER_02: 38:11

Absolutely. So to your point, um, I would say, you know, 75% of the brands that we audit are still not doing remarketing, or or if they are doing it, they're not doing it properly. So still a very big issue. And certainly what we consider low-hanging fruit from a from a media standpoint. I mean, come on, you're we're trying to, you're paying to send people to your website. You don't even have this basic retargeting, remarketing campaign in place to bring them back. You're literally just throwing money away by not having this uh live. So we're still seeing that. Uh um some other things that we've seen is that you know, clients, like I'm using Google Ads as an example, but they have um, you know, no target CPA uh under their campaigns and their ad groups in their bidding settings, right? And so what's happening is you're letting the algorithm determine what should we pay for an acquisition, whether it's a sale or a lead or whatever it may be. Um, and these are on big accounts. I mean, these are on accounts that are spending 200K a month on Google Ads. They don't have a target CPA. So that's one simple fix that you know your audience can look into. Um, we're also noticing that some of these uh some of these accounts have AI max settings enabled. And what that's doing is it's triggering hundreds of irrelevant search terms. Facebook has something similar called Advantage Plus, where it's expanding your audience outside of your target to try and get you more results. What it does though is it actually floods the account with either traffic that's not qualified, that's not within your target audience, or in the case of Google, it's flooding the account with irrelevant search terms that we've also found had an extremely high CPA. So they're overpaying for customers that are not even qualified. I mean, I could go on, there's a lot more that we find.

SPEAKER_01: 39:54

I have not seen, at least in campaigns that I've been personally involved with, that. Work ever. Like uh where where you expand like the the audience set, um, you know, uh like if you're doing display ads, okay, maybe, but like on on paid ads, you don't have a lot of visibility. Yeah, that's horrible. Well, we're getting close to time here. I would love, Anthony, for you to share kind of what are the things uh where you it's you talked about LinkedIn earlier, you just did a a post on LinkedIn. Where are the places that people can follow you, find out more, and uh share how to get in contact with you if they want to learn more about your services?

SPEAKER_02: 40:35

Yeah, so you know, check out our website, volomedia.com. We've got a full list of our services and case studies up there. Happy to help. And then on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active on my personal LinkedIn profile. So give me a follow, reach out. If someone has a question, I always respond to uh, you know, DMs or anything. And we offer free paid media audits. So if someone's like, hey, I don't know if this is working, you know, I don't really our current agency is not really um delivering the results we expected. You know, we're happy to just take an unbiased look um at the accounts and ultimately say, you know, here's our assessment. Like, is this setup right? Is it not? You know, that's something that we offer. And then I just wrote a book called Brand Powered Media about the importance of having a fully balanced uh, you know, marketing investment. So that's something else that I think yeah, your readers might enjoy.

SPEAKER_01: 41:19

I love that. And where are you based? So people that are listening know kind of geographically. I know in the World Wide Web now you could be anywhere, uh, but people still like to uh know where people are based out of.

SPEAKER_02: 41:31

Yeah, so I'm in I'm on the East Coast, about an hour south of New York City. I'm at the Jersey Shore, like Asbury Park area, but I have a team members on every continent. So we're a global company in that sense. But uh, you know, I'm here on the East Coast, which I've called home for uh my whole life.

SPEAKER_01: 41:46

Fantastic. Well, Anthony, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Uh, everyone, if you like what you're hearing, please share. If you don't like what you're hearing, please share that comment as well. Uh, my team does read all the comments. Uh, we are uh trying to move over to YouTube, like I said. So please uh give us a like, follow. Uh reviews really help. Uh we, if you if you like it, um if you want something different, like let us know. Um, this is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, Best SEO podcast. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Uh EWR Digital is sponsoring this. We do a lot of enterprise SEO. Uh until the next time, bye bye for now.