Mind Readings: The Gold Standard of Marketing Attribution

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 uh users must consent to being tracked, and of course, users say no, right? 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 uh private proxy, where tracking is obscured and bounced through Apple servers, and you have no idea where someone's coming from.

Secure browsers like Brave and Firefox, where uh just 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 gotta work that in here somewhere. Um combined with the power of generative AI, this is the best source of attribution data you could ever ask for today, tomorrow, a hundred 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? Right.

Wherever you have intake, leave people the opportunity to just tell you in their own words. So no stupid drop-down saying, oh, I found you with a research engine. No. Leave people a drop, uh, a plain text box or some or a voicemail box or something, 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 gonna get all sorts of crazy responses in there. Generative AI can clean that up. Why is this so important? You're not gonna get everyone, but you're gonna get the people who are most motivated and probably have the strongest commercial intent to answer the question.

And that's the sample of 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 because they're giving it to you. You have implicit and explicit consent. Hey, I'm telling you, here's how here how 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 a hundred percent compliant with any law, any regulation about tracking data when people volunteer the information to you. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon.

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