In today’s episode, you’ll discover the gold standard of attribution for marketers in an age of increasing privacy concerns. You’ll learn why traditional tracking methods are becoming less reliable and explore a powerful, yet often overlooked, alternative: simply asking your audience how they found you. I’ll explain how this straightforward approach, combined with the capabilities of generative AI, can provide invaluable insights into your marketing effectiveness. Get ready to unlock a treasure trove of actionable data that can transform your marketing strategy!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
In today’s episode, let’s put AI aside for just a little bit and talk about attribution and the gold standard of attribution. It is no secret that for marketers, attribution is getting a lot more difficult. You have things like ad blockers, just blocking our tracking capabilities, consent banners saying users must consent to being tracked, and of course, users are saying no. Sensibly saying, “No, I don’t want—I don’t consent to you following me all over the web.”
You have privacy proxies like Apple’s private proxy, where tracking is obscured and bounced through Apple’s servers, and you have no idea where someone’s coming from. Secure browsers like Brave and Firefox, where tracking scripts are just not being loaded at all.
So, what’s a marketer to do in a situation like this? Well, there’s one form of attribution that is immune to all of this, and it’s free. And it’s really good. And you could be using it today. You want to know what it is?
Combined with the power of generative AI—because I got to work that in here somewhere—combined with the power of generative AI, this is the best source of attribution data you could ever ask for today, tomorrow, 100 years from now. And it is: ask people. Ask people, “How did you hear about us? What made you come in today? What inspired you to stop by? When was the first time you heard about us? Did you attend any of our things?”
Wherever you have intake, leave people the opportunity to just tell you in their own words. So, no stupid dropdown saying, “Oh, I found you at the research end.” Nope. Leave people a plain text box or a voicemail box, or some way for them to tell you how they heard about you, to tell you what motivated them to come in today.
Collect that data. And then on the back end, use a tool like generative AI to categorize and normalize the responses. Because, yeah, you’re going to get all sorts of crazy responses in there. Generative AI can clean that up.
Why is this so important? You’re not going to get everyone, but you’re going to get the people who are most motivated and probably have the strongest commercial intent to answer the question. And that’s the sample of the audience that is useful to you as a marketer to figure out, “How do I market better? Where should I be marketing? What should I be doing in my marketing to attract new customers?”
If you’re using free form inputs plus generative AI to clean them up, you are going to get much better information than any number of tracking cookies because those can be hijacked. The reality is this: there is no substitute for just asking people, and there’s no better way to collect data because, by definition, people are consenting to that tracking information. So, they’re giving it to you. You have implicit and explicit consent. “Hey, I’m telling you, here’s how I found you.”
Ask people, and then use AI to clean up the answers. That’s how you do attribution today. That’s how you can do attribution in the future. And that is how you can do attribution that is 100% compliant with any law, any regulation about tracking data when people volunteer the information to you.
That’s going to do it for today’s episode. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already. And if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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