Mastering Online Ad Campaigns with Data-Driven Insights | Ivan Rud from Keitaro

Ernesto Quezada: PathMonk is the intelligent tool for website lead generation. With increasing online competition, over 98 percent of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in their buying journey separates you from the competition online. PathMonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments with relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more.

Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%, add PathMonk to your website in seconds, let the AI do all the work, and get access to 50 percent more qualified leads while you keep doing marketing and sales as usual. Check us on pathmonk.com. Welcome to today’s episode. Let’s talk about today’s guest. We have Ivan from Apliteni. How are you doing today, Ivan?

Ivan Rud: I’m pretty good, man. Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here. Appreciate it.

Ernesto: It’s great to have you on. I’m sure our listeners are tuning in wondering what Apliteni is all about. But let’s get on with what they came for. I know Apliteni is the head company, but the program or the product is Keitaro. Is that correct, Ivan?

Ivan: Yeah, definitely.

Ernesto: Awesome. Great. Well, let’s start it off with that then. In your own words, can you tell us a little bit more about what Keitaro is?

Ivan: Right. So our company is called Keitaro, as you mentioned before. Technically, it’s under Apliteni, which is more of a legal name, but Keitaro is our flagship product, the reason why we’re known in the market. It’s the ultimate advertising tracker for setting up, tracking, and optimizing your online ad campaigns and traffic. Basically, if you’re running ad campaigns, say on Facebook or TikTok, and directing traffic to a specific landing page, our tool helps you to set up the perfect sales funnel. It ensures that the right page is opened for different types of devices from various geographies, for example, while giving a clear insight on which creatives are effective, which are not, and ultimately how many sales you’re generating.

If, for instance, you have your own website with a lot of traffic from partners, you can also embed our script on your site to track clicks, generate affiliate links, and monitor their effectiveness. Our tracker combines two key aspects, a traffic distribution system and analytics. While we may not be able to compare with Google Analytics, as we don’t have access to big data and don’t have our own historical data for conducting cohort analysis for audience behavior, we excel in other areas. Specifically, we’re more adept at receiving postbacks, which are events from third-party systems, and connecting them through post-catch requests. This makes our system uniquely efficient in certain aspects of tracking and data integration.

Ernesto: Absolutely. All right. Awesome to hear that. And so that way our listeners who are tuning in could get a better understanding of Keitaro. What are some problems that you solve for your clients?

Ivan: Primarily, our service is tailored for media buyers and affiliate marketers. We provide specialized tools and features that cater specifically to the needs and challenges faced in these sectors. You know the case when people basically buy traffic on the net with the purpose of its subsequent resale? This is done by affiliate marketers, for example. They promote a product or a service and buy hundreds of thousands or even millions of clicks, directing them to a landing page. Their conversion happens, and the affiliate earns their commission. It’s a massive industry. As far as I know, the market size was around 13 billion in 2023. We offer them data and conversion attribution updates every minute, high-performance reports, local landing page and building editor, full IPv6 support, built-in geo-database, A/B tests, more than 30 filters to distribute and protect traffic, user activity log, and also integrations with services like Namecheap, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Google Ads for automatic transfer of costs and conversions between services. With this data, you can analyze and optimize your advertising campaign.

Ernesto: Definitely awesome. So as far as your clients, who would they be? Is there an ideal ICP for you guys or a vertical or segment that you like to go for?

Ivan: Definitely, it’s affiliate marketers who like to promote some products. They’re suffering from a lack of data about how effective their online ad campaigns are, and they need to optimize them. For those people, we offer our tool to track their clicks, collect all data, and then optimize them to get even more ROI than they had before.

Ernesto: Awesome. And so these affiliate marketers, how would they usually find out about Keitaro? Is there a top client acquisition channel for you guys?

Ivan: We prefer to focus primarily on quality partnerships. Partnerships with the right services where our audience overlaps with the goal of providing as much value as possible to our mutual users. This approach is far more effective than paid advertising for us because it allows us to attract the most relevant traffic which can be converted easily. Moreover, we consistently work on our SEO and social media platforms, which help us to increase our reach and attract a new audience.

Ernesto: That’s funny. All right. Awesome to hear that. And so that way our listeners who are tuning in can visit you guys. They could check you out at Keitaro.io. What’s the role the website plays for your client acquisition, Ivan?

Ivan: Our website plays a key role in the customer journey. First of all, it’s essential for registration and starting to use our service. However, as I mentioned before, since we attract a lot of target organic traffic, I wouldn’t say the website is a decisive factor. We don’t really sell on-site, to be honest, and it’s not designed the best way right now. We are currently working on a new version, but at the same time, we have incredible conversion rates from visits to registrations. It’s about 14%. This is an exceptionally high rate for such a website, largely because many of our clients visit the website already knowing exactly what they need, and the website just provides them a bit more information. Of course, with the launch of the new version and the comprehensive campaign on Google Ads and social media, we expect a significant boost in the website traffic, which will greatly enhance the site’s role in attracting new clients. And I want to say that afterward, we will definitely give it a shot to services like you guys have to increase its conversion rate even higher. I plan to. I just want to say that I had time to manage small research. And it looks very interesting.

Ernesto: That’s funny. Perfect. Thanks for that, Ivan. But let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about you as a leader. You being the CMO there for Keitaro, what are some key tasks you focus on in your day-to-day work?

Ivan: My primary routine involves managing my marketing team. I have an excellent group of creative and proactive guys. I try to give them as much decision-making freedom as possible and teach them to be accountable for their choices. This fosters growth and true leadership. Our goal is always to expand our customer base and increase our product market presence. My workday starts with responding to messages from teammates, followed by a couple of calls probably, then interacting with partners. After that, I delve into organizational tasks and strive to keep the machine running, mostly ensuring that all the cogs are moving as they should.

Ernesto: Perfect. Awesome to hear that. But let’s switch to our next section now, Ivan, which is our rapid-fire question round. Are you ready for them?

Ivan: Awesome.

Ernesto: First off, Ivan, what is the last book that you read?

Ivan: You know, there was probably “Deepfakes and the Infocalypse” by Nina Schick. That book critically examines the dangers and impacts of deepfake technology. It discusses how these AI-created fake videos and images can influence politics, society, and personal security. It suggests ways to mitigate these threats. And for now, I started to read one book about meditation because I just feel like the time has come. Sometimes I find myself lacking a bit of focus to get my thoughts in order, and I’ve been curious about this for a while now. So, I want to give it a shot. Simply put, I want to stay more focused and reduce the chaos in my daily life.

Ernesto: Interesting read. Next, what is one single thing that your company is focused on the most at the moment?

Ivan: I guess we concentrate on rapid growth. We try to expand into the North American market and the Brazilian market. So we pay a lot of attention to things that will help us grow and attract more clients. We also try to organize our workflows. As we become bigger, we need to improve all these workflows to stay as efficient as we can.

Ernesto: Definitely would agree with that. Now, Ivan, if there were no boundaries in technology, what would be that one thing that you want to have fixed for your role as a marketer today?

Ivan: Some kind of fantasy question. For me, it’d be really amazing to just snap your fingers and have all those dream features and marketers’ wishes implemented instantly because in reality, the path from an idea to its implementation in a product can be incredibly long. The market is always on the move, so you’ve got to keep up with trends and strategize on a global scale for your product development and positioning. You can’t just bring every idea to your product manager and expect it to be squeezed into the development roadmap because development is typically planned out a year in advance. So we need to be super flexible in responding. For instance, we came across some CRM system, a real game-changer, and their clients need our product too. The integration seems perfect and it could seriously boost our customer base. But what if the integration is held back by the state of our backend, which isn’t ready right now and won’t be ready for the next year? Therefore, we miss the opportunity for integration now. By next year, that space might be occupied by other services. Working with these technical limitations is what really throws a wrench in the works sometimes. If there were no such constraints, fixing this would be a big deal for me.

Ernesto: That’s funny. I like imagining it. It’s a fantasy thing. If there’s one repetitive task that you could automate, what would that be?

Ivan: The most exhausting part for me is probably responding to emails and messages. I don’t want to set up any spam filters or auto-replies because amongst all the spam I get every day, there are sometimes really interesting proposals for collaboration or even invitations like yours to be on the podcast today, for which I’m very thankful. A part of my incoming messages is handled by my PR manager, but I still deal with 50 to 70 messages daily, including emails and messengers, which takes up a lot of time and energy. Of course, AI is taking steps in this direction, but so far, it’s all very raw and far from being set in auto mode. So manual persistence seems inevitable, and this is kind of a problem for me.

Ernesto: Great, great stuff there from you. Lastly, Ivan, what is one piece of advice that you would give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today?

Ivan: If I started today, my advice would definitely be to learn the basics of prompt queries to work with AI because AI is today’s reality and it’s already integrated into our lives and will only become more prevalent. Also, I think it would be hard to learn the basics of content making, creating reels and video in general, understanding the essence of what makes viral videos, and so on. Content is key today. Millions of bloggers are growing like mushrooms on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, which are accessible to almost everyone. It’s all about video content. Years ago, the focus was more on targeting, on how to set up targets correctly and outbid competitors in the auction. But today, people make millions in sales with just content, just presenting their offer correctly through video. Then it’s all up to the algorithm.

Ernesto: Awesome. Thank you so much for that advice, Ivan, for our listeners as well. Ivan, thanks a lot for being on the show with us today. I do want to give you the last word. If someone forgets everything about the interview today, what is the one thing they should remember about your company?

Ivan: To sum up our mindset, focus on quality content, provide value to your clients, and put their story at the forefront of yours. Then your product is bound to be successful.

Ernesto: No doubt. There you guys heard it from Ivan. You can always check them out at Keitaro.io, the ultimate self-hosted advertising tracker. Ivan, thank you so much for being on. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. Looking forward to our next episode at PathMonk Presents. Thanks a lot.

Ivan: Thank you. Appreciate it.