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Zeke Camusio says 36 cents of every advertising dollar goes to waste, and the pixels your ad platforms hand you are the reason. Zeke is a serial entrepreneur with a background in economics and statistics, and his current company, Data Speaks, tells brands which ads actually drive their sales. He works with companies spending $100,000 or more a month across multiple channels, so when he says the dashboard is lying to you, he’s talking about real money. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next conversation lands in your feed.
The core problem we solve is that for every dollar marketers spend in advertising, 36 cents go to waste. – Zeke Camusio
Pixels miss conversions in three different ways
I asked Zeke whether his models could see the knock-on effect of advertising, like an influencer campaign on TikTok that never gets a click but shows up later as branded searches in Search Console. That’s the kind of thing I see when I look at conversion data bucketed down by campaign, and it’s exactly what platform pixels can’t account for. His answer started with what’s broken in third-party pixels, and it’s three separate failures:
- 42% of conversions get blocked by browsers and ad blockers, so they’re never recorded at all.
- 53% of conversions are claimed by more than one platform, because the pixels don’t talk to each other.
- 58% of conversions happen outside the attribution window, which is usually seven-day click, one-day view.
So really, pixels are very skewed towards the last click in the funnel. – Zeke Camusio
Those numbers are Zeke’s, from the work Data Speaks does with its clients, not an independent study. But the direction matters more than the decimals. If every platform grades its own homework, every platform gets an A.
Retargeting looks great because it’s standing next to the register
The skew isn’t random, which is what makes it expensive. In Zeke’s words, “that’s why you see stuff like retargeting and brand search being over-credited,” while top-of-funnel YouTube and Meta campaigns get under-credited. Anything close to the purchase looks like a hero. Anything that created the demand looks like a cost.
So you move budget toward the bottom of the funnel, because that’s what the pixels reward. Then the people who were going to search your brand name stop hearing about you in the first place. Zeke’s estimate is that pixels are about 50% off on average, “and you never know what’s overreporting or underreporting.” Spending the same budget in the right places, he says, gets you 36% more revenue without spending a dollar more.
Lisa Raehsler made a related point about Google handing more control to the machine in her episode on AI Max. If the algorithm is steering, what you feed it matters more than ever.
Unified marketing measurement has three pillars
Zeke pointed out that Google, Meta and TikTok each have their own name for the same standard. Google calls it Marketing Effectiveness Measurement, Meta calls it Measurement 360, TikTok calls it holistic measurement. Under the branding it’s three things:
- Attribution, which follows an individual user across channels and devices.
- Media mix modeling, which looks at the impact of your media spend on your revenue in aggregate, with no user-level tracking.
- Incrementality experiments, where you raise or lower budget in different states and watch what happens to revenue there.
Media mix modeling is how you measure a TikTok traffic campaign that was never built to get clicks. Look at 50 states a day over three years and you have more than 50,000 data points. Raise TikTok spend, and if sales rise with it, you see the correlation. If sales stay flat, that tells you something too. Zeke said a model performs well when it can “predict the outcome of any action before it happens,” like what your sales will be tomorrow if you cut Google Ads 20% and raise Meta top of funnel 30%.
Lead-gen businesses need a value per lead
Most of Zeke’s clients are ecommerce. For B2B, he said attribution becomes much more important, because lead volume is lower and the salesperson calling someone wants to know that this particular person saw the pricing page or downloaded the PDF.
So you need to know two things. One is what is the average closing rate and two is what is the average deal value. – Zeke Camusio
Multiply those and you know what a lead is worth today, long before the deal closes. A quote request is worth more than a webinar signup, and a webinar signup more than a PDF download. Then watch for overlap: if half your webinar signups later request a quote, “you don’t want to count those people twice.” I’ll go deeper on this math in the SEO Arcade write-up of this episode.
First-party tracking now feeds the algorithm
When I asked where digital advertising is heading, Zeke said we’re relying more and more on platform algorithms. Mark Zuckerberg has more or less told advertisers to hand Meta the budget, and Google is doing the same with Performance Max and Demand Gen. That puts the pressure on the data you send them.
So algorithms take 42% more spend to learn the same amounts as if you were to use a first party tracking. – Zeke Camusio
His view is that first-party tracking is already a must, and it’ll matter more as restrictions on third-party data collection pile up. Your job, as he put it, is feeding the algorithm pre-approved messaging and being very specific about who your best customers are.
You have half a second to say “I’m talking to you”
I raised the idea that we’ve moved into an attention economy. Zeke’s take was that we’ve always been in one, it just got harder. More creators and brands are competing for attention, faster than the number of users is growing, so the attention span is much shorter than it used to be. Your visual, your title and everything else has to say “I’m talking to you” in about half a second.
His example: you broke your knee a month ago, and an ad asks, “Did you just break your knee?” That stops you in your tracks. “So you have to ask the question that people are going to say, yes, that’s me.” Joel Miller covered the human side of this in surviving the attention economy.
AI ads are a problem of expectation
On AI-generated creative, Zeke said the disappointment usually comes from the expectation, not the tool. If you expect AI to be 100% the same as a human with human actors, you’ll be disappointed. If you need a visual for a presentation and AI gets you 90% of the way before a designer edits it, it’s much faster. A one-pager PDF probably deserves a human; a social post may be fine with AI.
And the prompting skill isn’t going away. “In the same way that you are a better leader of your organization, if you can communicate clearly what you want to your employees, you’re going to be a better user of AI.” His own habit is to tell the AI where he thinks he’s going and ask what he’s overlooking, instead of just “do what I tell you.”
Record every meeting
Near the end, Zeke made the point that stuck with me most. The data you’ll need to make AI good for your business, you’ve been creating for years: customer reviews, product copy, video scripts, every email your support team ever sent. He tells his clients to record every meeting, because “every time you talk to a client, that’s data.” I wrote more about why that matters for SEO copy in record every meeting.
So here’s the question I’d leave you with. If 53% of your conversions are being claimed twice, which channel in your report is getting credit it didn’t earn?
Connect with Zeke Camusio
- Data Speaks: dataspeaks.ai
- Zeke is also on LinkedIn.
More episodes like this one live in Digital Marketing, Growth and Paid Search.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
