How To Scale Ads Faster With Sales Attribution — Andrey Kholkin | Why Traditional Pixels Fail, How Real-time Attribution Transforms Ads, Why Accurate Data Matters, How AI Reduces Ad Spend, How To Track Sales, Why Organic Traffic Tracking Matters (#356)

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In this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast, we explore how to scale ad campaigns with precision using sales attribution. 

Host Claus Lauter is joined by Andrey Kholkin, CTO of Weberlo.com, a platform revolutionizing ad tracking and performance insights. 

With over a decade of experience, Andrey shares why traditional pixels fall short, how real-time attribution transforms ad performance, and the role of AI in reducing ad spend. Learn how accurate data can optimize campaigns and improve ROI.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• Why Traditional Ad Tracking Pixels Fall Short: Browser tracking misses crucial data. 
• How Real-Time Sales Attribution Can Transform Ad Performance: Track 100% accurate sales data. 
• Why Accurate Data Is Key to Digital Marketing: Avoid pausing top-performing ads. 
• How AI and Attribution Models Lower Advertising Costs: Optimize ads with accurate data. 
• Why You Shouldn't Rely on Ad Platform Tracking: Independent tracking ensures accurate insights. 
• How to Implement Sales Tracking Quickly: Connect e-commerce and ads in minutes. 
• What Conversion Goals Can You Track: Focus on purchase and lead tracking. 
• Why Organic Traffic Tracking Matters: Use UTMs to track paid and organic sources. 

Links & Resources

Website: https://www.weberlo.com
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/weberlo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/weberlo/

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https://t.ly/qGKT5 

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Transcript

Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast. In today's episode, we discuss how to scale ads faster with sales attribution. Joining me on the show is Andrey Kholkin, CTO of Weberlo.Com. So let's dive right into it. 

This is the e commerce coffee break, a top rated podcast that helps you become a smarter online seller.

Each week your host, Claus Lauter, and his guests share what's working right now to grow your store, boost your sales, and stand out in a crowded market. Stay ahead in this fast changing world of e commerce and get expert advice you won't find on Google. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast.

Today we want to talk about sales attribution using AI. Now everyone needs to scale ads on Meta, Google, LinkedIn, whatever platform you're on. But how do you optimize your ad budget? How do you target your audience price precisely? And how do you stay on top of campaign performance? All of this has to do with sales attribution and AI can be a huge helper there.

And with me on the show to discuss this topic, I have Andrey Kholkin, CTO of Weberlo.Com, a platform revolutionizing the ad tracking and performance insights. With over a decade in software architecture, DevOps and cloud engineering, Andrej built weberloo in 2018 to solve ad tracking challenges that traditional tools like Metapixel couldn't address.

So the right person to talk to. I would like to welcome him to the show. Hi, Andrej. How are you today? Thanks 

Hi. Hi. 

Doing fine. Let's dive right into it. Can you explain the basics of ad tracking and attribution to our listeners that do not really know what that means? 

Yeah, ad tracking is just you want to measure the performance of your ads.

You want to see how they're doing and you don't want to, you don't want to optimize your ads. Just based on page views, you want to optimize on conversions. And of course the ad platforms, they have a pixel that you can install on your website. And as soon as, um, transaction happens, you can trigger an event that's will tell that you had a purchase with a specific value.

And. The problem begins exactly that because these things happen in the browser, some people may disable the cookies. Other people may leave the website and come in with another browser. And also you have the privacy laws, which are like GDPR and it's becoming increasingly more difficult to track and optimize.

And most of the time, the data that you do get Via this pixel is inaccurate. And then you could do things like switch off your best performing ad, for example. So having accurate data is the foundation for you to do everything else in marketing and in advertising. 

Now we have all about website tracking pixels and you said they're not good enough anymore.

Why is that? 

They aren't enough because when something happens on the website, that's not a real, it's not a real conversion. You can have either duplicates or you can have missing conversions. Let's say that, uh, somebody goes to the thank you page and the, and before the thank you page loads, they exit the website.

It won't count you the conversion for something they bought, for example. So Weber law in that sense is different because you connect your shopping cards and so we get like. Real transactions, which are only known in your payment gateway or in your shopping cart, like for example, there's been a transaction for a hundred dollars.

And that, you know, that this is one transaction that happened. There are no duplicates, there is nothing missing. It's always a hundred percent accurate. And when you're tracking with website, with the pixel, that's not possible to like achieve this level of accuracy. And yeah, that's why I said that it's not enough.

I have heard that for the first time that there is integration with payment platforms. So obviously you're leaving the meta ads platform, the Google ads platform, and you're really tracking and attribute the sales from the actual purchase made. How does that work? Explain that to me. 

You need to connect your payment platform or your payment gateway and wherever local Yeah, basically get all the data out of your shopping carts, all your transactions, and then for each transaction individually, it will find the visitor who was on your website and attribute it.

That's why we call it attribution because we take each sale individually and we attribute it to a traffic source. In that sense, also, when we're talking about attribution, we can also, WebRL has different attribution models, which then give you different types of insights. 

How does this information, this data help me in deciding how I want to spend or optimize my ad budget?

It helps you in the sense that you want to increase the budget on the ads that are working well. And on the ads that are not performing, you want to switch them off. So that's one part of the equation. The second part is that when you get the data, you get the conversion, you need to send the conversion back to the ad platform so that the ad platform can use their AI to improve the targeting of the ads.

So if you get good data in, then you're sending good data back to the ad platforms, then the ad platforms are capable of optimizing better your ads and therefore decreasing your costs for your CPA. 

So talk me through the implementation process. What's, what's kind of the onboarding, how do I get the system up and running?

Well, the best way to do the onboarding is to just, um, book a call with us. And so we do it live together. That's what I've seen that works best for most people. Some people are though are capable of doing it perfectly by themselves. So we do have like a documentation for each single integration. So if you're using Shopify, there is a guide for Shopify.

If you're using, I don't know, PayPal, then there is a guide for PayPal. So it's very specific to which ad platform you use and it's specific to which shopping cart you use. But generally for all the other platforms, like excluding WordPress and Shopify, you just get a tracking code and then you install this like JavaScript snippets, um, on all your pages and done.

What kind of integrations do you have into your solution? 

So for e commerce specifically, there is Shopify, there is WooCommerce, and there is BigCommerce. Those are like the three that we support for e commerce. If it's none of those, you could still connect like, for example, Stripe and PayPal directly.

Obviously, it wouldn't be as accurate as using like, for example, the native Shopify app, just because we can collect data better. Then if it's none of those, you still have the option to use something like Zapier or make to send the conversions or. If you have your own custom coded platform, you can always use the API and send the conversions directly for the API.

So there are different paths for, yeah. 

Are there other conversion goals than a purchase that you support with your solution? 

No, just purchase and leads. So how many leads you generate? If somebody, if you have a form on your website and somebody creates an account or they submit a contact form or whatever, that is counted as a lead.

Otherwise it's a purchase that we count as a conversion and there, there are no custom conversions in the platform, which is one of the reasons it's, it's a benefits and it's a downside of the platform, but it's also a benefit because unlike other tools, you don't need to set up conversions. You don't need to create the goals and the events like you didn't Google analytics or the setup is much simpler itself.

So in that way, it simplifies everything as well. 

So if you get conversions from organic traffic to your store, how do you deal with these? 

Yeah, that's one of the things about Weber law is that it works both for paid and organic traffic. So if it's organic traffic, then the tracking would be based on UTM parameters.

And if it's ad tracking, then you connect your ad platform using just a, it's like a button, you push on it, it takes you to Facebook ads or whatever. And you say, okay, I give permissions whoever will to collect my data. But if it's organic traffic, you don't need to do any of that setup. And you just do the tracking based on UTM parameters.

Okay. No, that sounds fair. Is there any kind of homework that a online seller needs to do before they can get started? 

No, it's really simple. If you've already worked with this type of tools before, the setup should really just take like five, 10 minutes. 

Okay. How does your pricing structure work? 

Pricing is we have a free plan for like 2000 page views or something, which doesn't include ad tracking.

And then our lowest tier price is 39 per month. You get ad tracking. And there as well. And that gives you 20, 000 page views. Then the next one is 100, 000 page views for 119 a month. And then it's 1 million page views for like 300 a month. So it's the pricing is always based on page views, depending on where you are.

Okay. That sounds fair. Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? 

Yeah, I would like to say that it doesn't matter which tracking tool you get, if it's Weber law or another tool, but it is important to have a tracking tool and not to rely just on the.

Pixel offered by the ad platforms. If I were to say this, like the number one mistake where people get stuck is by trusting the data coming from this pixel and assuming that it's correct. And yeah. 

I totally agree. The data coming from these platforms is, um, not very accurate as we know, for many years of experience.

And I think really tracking it at the source where you make the sale. Um, it's a very, very good decision in your business, uh, to have accurate data. And then obviously from there you can optimize your campaigns. Where can people go to find out more about you guys? 

Weverload. com. 

Okay, cool. I will put the links in the show notes and you just want to click away.

Andrei, thanks so much giving us an overview of your solution and how to attribute attribution model and then basically have a good outcome on your ad campaigns. Thanks so much for your time today. All right. 

Thank you 

as 

well. 

Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast.

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