Ragnarokast Episode 13 

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Steven

From the hit studio, “Smash.”  Comes three guys at a table —

Ari

And a lot of unstructured data. 

Spencer

Ooh. 

Alright everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We’ve got my co-host, Steven Aldrich here. 

Steven

Hey, hey, Hey. It’s me, Steven…Aldrich. 

Spencer

That was recorded on video and we’ve also got our friend Ari here. Hi Ari. 

Ari

Hi. It’s good to be here. 

Steven

Also known as the A Train. 

Spencer

Alright, so Ari, welcome. You are from the Land of Littledata. 

Ari

That’s true. 

Spencer

A company that is on both sides of the pond 

Ari

Also True.

Spencer

Do you mind introducing yourself and a little bit about the old LD? 

Ari

Sure. So, yeah, in, you know, in short, I’m Ari, I, I lead on the strategy and growth side at Littledata, and we started in the UK. We have employees all over Europe and also North America now. And we’re a first-party data platform. We do revenue tracking for, mostly for Shopify brands, also a few on BigCommerce now. 

Steven

Revenue tracking. Can you tell us what that means? 

Ari

Yeah, sure. So, you know, we’ve, we’ve taken a little bit of a different approach than other players in the attribution world or even in the data world where, you know, one of the reasons we call the company Littledata is Because we’re focused on what we call the “little data” that makes the biggest difference. 

Steven

Ooh, 

Spencer

I like that. I like that. 

Ari

And you know, e-commerce is complicated, but it, it doesn’t have to be. That’s sort of our, our mission and our how we think about things. And one of the reasons we work with Ragnarok a lot, and you guys are such a great partner, is that we also send data back to Segment. And so from ther, our whole idea is that it makes it really easy for a brand to just plug and play rather than getting lost in GTM and custom tagging and stuff and just track that revenue, tie it back to user behavior, and then send it onto Segment where people like Ragnarok can then do amazing things with it. 

Steven

Awesome. So it’s purely in the e-commerce space or do you work in other industries as well? 

Ari

Only e-commerce. 

Steven

Right on. 

Ari

And mostly like digitally native brands. But as you guys are, I don’t know, maybe you’re seeing this too, like there are more and more traditional retailers, especially in the pandemic, like moved into that space and especially started using Shopify right on. And Shopify’s just, it’s kind of insane that they keep, they just keep growing and even moving more and more out market. 

Steven

I mean they power apps and point of sale systems now, you know, they’re, they’re kind of running the whole vertical stack now. 

Spencer

What we’d like to get into today is, is attribution and privacy. So attribution’s a bit of a tricky subject these days. How do you achieve accurate attribution in these, in these days where our friends like Google are making this a little bit harder? 

Ari

Yeah, I mean I guess attrition is definitely a can of worms. We built things in a way because we initially integrated with Google Analytics. It’s still like the core of a lot of other stuff we do now. We push data back for what we call data for action. So you can do stuff, you know, run better ads, run better, retargeting, all that. But it still started with GA. And so we needed to follow Google’s very strict PII regulations. And so being GDPR and CCPA and et cetera, et cetera, compliant was like a part of what we did. So, you know, without getting too much into the weeds, like we think about it as we track as much anonymous behavior as consistently as we can and then identify users only at a later point where it would make sense because they’ve actually become a customer. 

And so you were pushing data back to, to Facebook and Google and soon Klaviyo. But you know, that is not something where we can actually see who the user is and that, that’s been more of our, our approach. So it’s kind of like only making the most of what you can see while still being like a good, a good citizen. Yeah. Because we think things are gonna, and you’re already seeing it with the changes happening in Safari over the last couple of years and iOS updates, and now Chrome. Like there’s no way that those sketchy cookies or sketchy approaches are gonna work. 

Spencer

And you mentioned GDPR, so, and you’re a multinational multi continental company. 

E-commerce is all over the world. How do you, how do you stay compliant and maintain privacy like in the US versus in Europe versus anywhere else you might have clients? 

Ari

It is a very complicated thing, especially for our merchants, and you know, I mean partly how we do it is we’ve just made sure to integrate really closely with Shopify’s own privacy API.  I’m not on the product side, so I don’t want to say the wrong thing about how exactly they’ve done that. But I know that part of the idea is that because the regulations are different, you know, it’s kind of like assuming opt-in, double opt-out in all these different places, and it’s, it is a bit different. But if you are have any customers in those countries, you do need to comply technically with the regulations. 

And so, we have tried to start by just respecting the way that Shopify has set up the privacy API to deal with those multi-store, multi-country setups and then kind of expand from there. And we do, as part of our like audit process and onboarding with larger brands, we actually just go through and help double check that for one thing, even like the cookie banners somebody’s using are actually respecting the choices users make. Because you’d be surprised at how few do that by default. 

Spencer

So when you hit reject all, it’s actually accepting all 

Steven

It’s not doing anything. 

Ari

But yeah. So what, like if you reject all, we’re making sure that then the brand respects that. 

Spencer

Got it. Got it, got it. Yeah. 

Ari 

And it’s, it is amazing. I mean, you know, I’d be curious to learn more from the Ragnarok side too. Because I know you work with some really large companies now. Like as brands are expanding in all of these different countries, it’s become, you know, I should have looked up the stats beforehand, but I know a just a lot more of our brands that it used to be like they’d have one store in the EU and they’d launch in another couple of EU countries. Now it’s like they’re also launching in Australia, in Japan and Brazil here. Yeah. 

Steven

Yeah. It’s interesting Because essentially what we see with a lot of our clients is they, they sort of take a one-size-fits-all approach. Because it’s just very, very difficult to maintain different privacy compliances across different markets. 

You have customers who, for example, maybe they’re on a proxy network or something like that, and they are a shopper in the UK or in the EU, but they’re on the US site because they just typed in your.com name and typically you would redirect them to your, you know, EU shop or something like that, that would have that kind of dope that that like location IP lookup that sort of forces them into the right experience. And then they get all the way through the checkout experience, and they go to actually buy it, and then they can’t select their country from the dropdown because it’s in the default. 

Ari 

Yeah. 

Steven

But meanwhile, you’ve collected their email address without a check box for opt-in, you could’ve done all these different actions that would’ve gotten to the point where it’s like now that you’re not actually compliant anymore, Because you know where they are. And it’s really, really hard to, like tell all of your other downstream systems to be like, Hey, wait, wait, wait, this, this, this person’s not compliant. Right. You, you kind of do that at the point of collection and then you reverse when you get the request in to delete or “don’t share my information” or “forget me” or whatever the GDPR-type requests are. 

So we tend to see it where most brands will just be GDPR compliant if they are kinda doing anything in the EU as like as a focus. 

But if they’re in North America and they plan to expand to Canada, then we tend to see them following the California and Canada regulations, which are a bit more stricter. And then people who are just in the US essentially just, you know, throw two fingers to the air and say, well, we don’t care until the states tell us not to. But yeah, it is interesting Because even on some of the compliance side that we’re seeing with like SMS collection, for example, like that’s actually different per state. Like did you know, in the state of Oklahoma you can’t send people marketing SMS between the hours of 8:00 PM and 8:00 AM it’s illegal. 

So that’s a, like that’s a very weird regulation, but when you leave it up to 50 separate entities in one country to make up their own rules based on what their people complain about. 

Ari

Yeah. 

Steven

You know, ultimately you’re gonna get a lot of funky things to have to comply with. And that’s, that’s a struggle that a lot of brands are gonna have. So they like to just adapt a single, you know, simplified as much as possible. This is the compliance we’re gonna follow and kind of leave it there. 

Ari

Interesting. Are you seeing a lot more SMS is very interesting in particular because we’re seeing, you know, more brands experimenting with it, but mostly in the US. It seems like the regulations in other places are so complicated that, I dunno, we’re just not seeing as much uptake. 

Steven

Well I also think if you’re in the EU you have WhatsApp as a channel. Yeah. So you got a little bit more, you have a better channel than SMS ultimately. I mean they, they kinda do the same thing. Their phone number connected, but WhatsApp is just infinitely better in terms of what you can do with it. 

Spencer

So on Facebook and Google, our friends, Meta and Alphabet— 

Ari

It’s true. It just sounds funny when you say it like that 

Spencer

Meta and Alphabet. Yeah. That was in a trivia question the other day. Like what are the parent companies? And I got it right, and I was like, “yeah!” 

Steven

Dork. Sorry. 

Spencer

Oh well, so you know, Facebook and Google are sort of walled gardens in the, you know, there’s a lot of hidden data in there. How would Littledata, or how would you go about helping them to unlock that? 

Ari

I mean, first of all, we’ve chosen to go very, you know, our product philosophies go very deep on the main tools that most brands use. And so that’s why we’re not, you know, we don’t, and great with like every ad platform out there, we’ve really focused on Google to start built that up and then well back when it was Facebook and then now Meta, which we support Facebook and Instagram. And then, just this last year, we added Pinterest and TikTok because we have seen not a ton of brands, but those brands that are crushing it on TikTok are really crushing it. Yeah. And so if they built an audience, it’s still relatively cheap to find, you know, basically a lot of really relevant users really fast to build paid on top of that. 

So we push service-side data back into those platforms. And so, you know, basically, our approach is like those companies, they all, you know, give lots of lip service to anonymity and think what you might about how any, what that of them actually believes. But it’s really just, they all wanna own the data themselves. Right. I mean, same with Shopify for good reason. And so we’re making it easy to push data back and even to set up, say, retargeting when somebody removes something from a cart and be able to retarget them without having to expose any PII because you’re able to just then say, run a TikTok ad, show them more relevant stuff from other, say, coffee subscription brands without knowing who they are, if that makes sense. 

It just like, so we’re kind of respecting what the platforms have asked, you know? 

Steven

Right. Is that just on like a device ID level match? Or how does it, how are you able to kind of forward that back to them? 

Ari

Yeah, and they all, they have their own first-party cookies, so we’re matching that with the anonymous IDs, Basically. 

Steven

Got it

Ari

As soon as we can. And then it’s also like eventually we’re stitching it together with the Shopify customer ID. 

Steven

Right. So that you get more of like a traditional type of match key, but you’re not setting the PII back to them still when you have a, right. So you’re essentially using like a, a, like a user ID or, I guess the Shopify customer ID concept. 

Ari

And for Segment, then we, there’s a number of user IDs that you can choose now. Right. I mean, I think we actually had this on one, I can’t say who it was, but the, you know, that they wanted some wanted to use No, ID wanted use their own ID or just a hashed email, which is a little, still a little sketch. Right. Or, but usually you wanna tie back to some sort of customer ID. 

Steven

Got it. And you, so when you work with Facebook’s conversion, API, which is a partnership that Spencer and I had with them many, many years ago, where we would actually go into different clients and set up basically conversion API for them. Like before like, Segment supported it, and there was a lot more of direct integration. So people had to manage their own, which was like four years ago or three years ago or 

Spencer

Something like that. Yeah. It was f it was, we started it up in 2018. Oh right. Wow. And it went for two years into Covid. 

Ari

Well, that’s the very beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Because they were pushing, I remember they were pushing lots of brands to do it. That’s how we first started hearing about it. 

Steven

Yeah. 

Ari

And they were like, you know, can you help? And at that point we’re like, no, like you should talk to Ragnarok or someone else. Like, and then gradually we figured out how to do it, at least build a very deep integration just for Shopify. 

Steven

Right. But in that, 

Spencer

well even during the program, like it started out where we were just implementing the pixel. Yep. And then like about halfway through, they were like, okay, we’re going to, we’re gonna push C API. Like you gotta go in that direction. Yeah, yeah. You gotta cap it. Yeah. You gotta, 

Steven

But, but  C API, you know Yeah. Almost requires you to give them these, you know, quote unquote match keys, which would be PII data more or less. I mean, you’re, you’re hashing it, but ultimately you’re sending them PII data that they can UNH on their side. So when, when you talk about actually sending them data, you’re never even sending them hash PII like, it’s all basically web web ID tokens or, or as you call it, like pixel IDs, device IDs, things like that. And they have to kind of suss out if they have that same identifier on their side. 

Ari

Yeah. But I, I think with  C API, I think we actually do 

Steven

okay. 

Ari

But it’s again, it’s on the Yeah, it’s on the back end. So they wouldn’t, the brand themselves wouldn’t know. Right. It’s just so the Facebook can then identify them. Right. 

Steven

Yeah. That’s all server side. 

Ari

Yep. Yeah, that’s all server side. And that’s another mistake. I mean it is kind of like C API capping pixel, right? Like, it’s not like you get rid of the pixel, it’s just unifying the data. 

Steven

Right. 

Spencer

So not, not necessarily privacy aside, but privacy aside or in mind, how are the DDC brands once the data’s available, how are they using it? Like what, what and how are they using it? 

Ari

Yeah, I mean a lot of it is really back to the basics. So it’s retargeting and then I would say retention marketing has become a big one. And that’s where actually the PII issues are much less at the, you know, at the top. It’s really more like how do you just personalize it and make it useful. Yeah. Because someone’s agreed. They’ve bought, they, maybe they’ve even subscribed. We work with a lot of subscription brands and more and more brands are at least trying subscription even. You know, sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes you’re like, why would you subscribe to a yoga mat every month? 

Yeah. But like everybody’s trying it. 

Spencer

You’d be surprised, I bet there’s someone out there that’s subscribing to a yoga mat. 

Steven

I like all the colors, Different colors every month. 

Spencer

it’s, it’s like Rent-A-Center. They take away the yoga mat if you don’t pay your $10. 

Ari

Yes. You, I mean, what are the, basically, and then it’s sort of trying to find more high LTV customers, like finding audiences that are going to, you know, be there and be like your core community. We’re seeing that a lot, especially in the last couple years. Because I know everybody has CAC concerns and budgets have, are coming back, but they’re still not what they used to be. 

Spencer

Steven, I think you have an anonymized case study as a, as a good example of, of the success story. 

Ari

You know, the brand with the— 

Spencer

The thing. 

Steven

Yeah. So a little bit maybe more related to some of the cookie stuff, but you mentioned like some people have those banners, they don’t actually honor their permission. So one of our large marketplace brands that we worked with, we actually were working through a, a OneTrust implementation, which I’m, I’m sure your guys work with them or, or have a 

Ari

Yeah. 

Steven

A kind of partnership with them. But they were sort of setting up, like actually collecting and putting definitions against things. And they had found something like 180 cookies that were being set and they had no idea what they were or where they were from. 

So they basically, we came on and kind of launched this really in-depth investigation of trying to uncover what these all were. And, and it was, I mean, a, it’s an exercise in a lot of futility because you don’t really know, not every brand or platform out there actually documents well enough to tell you what cookies they’re setting. 

Spencer

Hmm. 

Steven

So a lot of it is we had to sort of understand what tools that we’re using then go back to those tools and say, are you sending any cookies? And if so, is it any of these from this list? And we had to do that, you know, like multiplied by however, 180 cookies, about 40 of those were set from different like internal services microservices that they had set up that had long since been deprecated, but we’re still setting cookies and things like that. 

But it was interesting to see that like, like a user could go in and like, you know, inspect and Chrome and see what cookies were being sent.

Ari

They had no idea like where are they coming from and why. 

Steven

Yeah. But there was a lot of like stuff in there that would give me pause, you know, in terms of what they were collecting. 

And so part of that consolidation exercise was to kinda honor like, alright, well this is actually an analytics use case or this is a marketing use case. So you mentioned like, you know, there’s retention uses, there’s the retargeting stuff, like how do people on, you know, like kinda relating that back to that, you know, that anonymized case study that we worked on. But you know, how, how do you kind of think about that from like, are you kind of guiding them on, you know, this is prescriptive, like this is the kind of cookies that you need to collect or this is the way that you should collect it? Or is it like, you know, our platform just kind of, it’s a plug and play, like we handle it for you. 

You just might need to give us some guidance on like what this particular cookie means if we don’t have it in our database. 

Ari

Yeah, yeah. Good question. It kind of depends on the size of the store and how long they’ve been around to. Because a lot of the third time there are these sort of like ghost scripts or like you said like old microservices that are, they’re not using, but they’re still somehow like there. Lurking. And so, we’ll it is totally plug and play. But then during the first month be at least the first couple weeks, but often depending on like, you know, client priorities and stuff, sometimes it’ll take a few little longer and we’ll go through and we do an audit of all the tracking setup and then including the cookies that are, that seem to be there. 

Because sometimes it’s a question of just do they want to keep them in. Exactly. Like investigating where do they come from? 

Steven

Right. 

Ari

Yeah. So that, that’s pretty much it. And then, but our whole, our whole goal with our app is we really just wanna be this really, you know, secure revenue tracking pipeline. So we’re just storing the data long enough to backfill it If something goes down and Shopify’s down for a second, which doesn’t happen often at all, but it does happen. And then, and then that’s it. And so then the data lives wherever they’re sending it. And sometimes now that’s the big BigQuery via GA4. Sometimes it’s to segment and then from segment to, to Snowflake and to Amplitude and other places. 

Steven

Makes sense. 

Spencer

You had mentioned like soon Klaviyo. 

Ari

Oh yeah. 

Spencer

So would you mind giving us a 30–60-second blurb on that? 

Ari

Oh, sure. Yeah. So I mean, we’re really excited about building it and I’ll, I’ll just say that the sort of the prelude is that we’ve, we already track email and SMS campaigns and conversions. And so what we’ve now been working on is a way to push the data back to platforms starting with Klaviyo because it’s definitely the biggest in the Shopify world. And we’re, you know, initial tests, we’re seeing really good results. And it’s basically the core of it is the ability to identify more Klaviyo users for retargeting where you already, similar to what we were saying, where Klaviyo kind of has the data and you have it, but it’s just Because sessions break or all kinds of other things go wrong that you’re not able to just immediately build an audience and retarget. 

Spencer

Got it. 

Steven

Is this particular to just web data or is it also app data as well? 

Ari 

It’s just web data. To start. Yeah. 

Spencer

Cool. Well, we’ll keep a lookout for it. I, I look forward to being retargeted On Klaviyo and Littledata. And so just on a, you know, I know a Littledata has clients of various sizes, there’s multiple use cases no matter the the scale. But however, if a, if a D2C brand, which assume most of them want to, they wanna scale, what would you suggest or, or how does, how can Littledata like unlock a, a scale I guess? 

Ari

That’s a good question. Well, I would say number one, like hire a good agency. I mean, really not just because we’re here on the podcast, but like, it is, you know, so many of these brands are, it’s amazing to me they’re, so they can be doing 20 million a year, but they still, it’s really the team, it’s very small, it’s very strapped. Everybody has, is doing, wearing lots of hats. And so it’s kind of like you, you need to create a growth plan before you even create a data tracking plan. Like a growth plan. Like really what is your goal? Do you know your customers? I mean, first of course do you have a product that people actually want? So that’s, but hopefully you do at that point. And then it’s like, yeah. You know, really what is the growth plan and then what are the steps to get there? Not just how do we suddenly get a bigger return in the next 30 days or something. 

Steven

Yeah. So I mean, do you, because obviously you guys are on the, the data tracking side, do people come to you without like core defined use cases? Do you have to kind of walk them back a little bit to say, well, here’s what we actually solve for, and here’s where you’re misaligned and what we think we solve for. Like is there a lot of that in kind of your exploration or your client prospect conversations? 

Ari

There is, I’d say, more than, yeah. More than I would’ve thought when we started the company. And now, and it’s become even more so because, well partly just because GA4, the, the launch was like such a mess on Google side. Right. In my view, I mean, we like working with Google, but it’s, it, it’s been a big learning curve. For a lot of people and, and sort of fixes were slowly rolled out. 

Steven

Well it also, it’s really, really hard to use if you’re coming from UA for sure. 

Ari

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, that’s, you know, we’ve to solve for that, we ended up, we started creating a sort of a GA4 training program. And so we do that in, instead of focusing just on getting Littledata set up and obviously getting the tracking right is one part of it. But then we actually do GA4 training, both like private webinars for clients, but then also one-on-one with agencies and merchants. But I guess to really answer your first question, it’s often people come to us not with this big grandiose plan, but it’s just like, we noticed that these numbers don’t match. 

Steven

Right. 

Ari

Which over time as you get bigger, suddenly like a, you know, a five, 10% discrepancy between what you see in Shopify and what you see in Facebook or Google is concerning. 

Steven

But should they ever match? Like would you expect that the data in Shopify would match Facebook, Google? 

Ari

Yeah. Well, you know, from our perspective it should, the revenue should match and that’s what we help, our app does get it to, you know, a hundred percent or 99.99%

Steven

On a gross revenue perspective, yes. But obviously Shopify— 

Ari

It should account for returns and you should be able tell what the description, what’s not that kind of 

Steven 

Stuff. Got it. Okay. So it it like net net it should be one-to-one in terms of, 

Ari

And, and all the same with country stores. So if, again, with the multinational thing, some people are using Shopify markets, there’s some, they’re using different apps, some are set up different country stores, which is their old way of doing it. Like that should match too in, you know, in, in individual currencies. But also we’re seeing more brands wanna just do one big warehouse or roll up with like all the stores pushing to one place. 

Spencer

Got it. When you say country store, I think of like, I just see you in like with like a farmer hat, 

Ari

Panama hat,

Spencer

Come on in, we got some Littledata here. 

Steven

Would you like a pack of jelly beans to go with this? 

Spencer

Hey Barb, 

Ari

We’re whittling Littledata 

Spencer

Barb. The pigs are squealin’ again. 

Anyway, so beyond the the exciting new Klaviyo partnership, do you have any other features or things on the horizon, things you wanna share? 

Ari

Oh, sure. You know, a lot of what we’ve, I mean we’re, we’re still seeing a lot of use of Segment from our larger customers. So it’s been very cool. Like Segment has really enhanced their own, I would say in a way it’s like full circle back to the CDP use cases. Yep. But their own C API connection is really good. And so, you know, for those users, they’re just using us to go from Shopify to Segment and then back to C API and doing just really cool stuff. And also using that data for personalization. We’re seeing a lot more of that. 

Steven

So is that use case, because I guess you’re connecting the client and the server integration. Yep. So you’re bringing back in like the, the FB click ID or, or, or FBC ID and and the GID. Exactly. Got it. 

Ari

Yeah. And so it’s unifying that client service or what the, that they call like cloud. Right? So it’s, and then you’re able to use, identify calls to like do interesting stuff with it. 

Steven

Right. 

Ari

And yeah, I mean the other, for us feature wise, we spent a lot of time on this last year on actually just building out ways to validate tracking. Because it does come down to those like small differences can make a big difference. 

And so we don’t, we never wanna get into the reporting space ourselves. We work with great reporting partners or we help brands do it in GA but we’ve built ways to, we call, I mean there are a few different features, but they’re basically ways that go into the app and then you can send a test order and see, make sure that it goes through and see all the properties associated with it or see the discrepancy, what you would be missing if you didn’t have server side tracking, that sort of thing. And so kind of like tools for data geeks, but making them that make me really excited, but making them like accessible to everybody. Yeah. 

Spencer

And you know, on that note, you, you, you mentioned Segment several times and that, that jogged my memory. Steven tagged me into a LinkedIn conversation the other day. That was pretty interesting. And Steven, do you want to, maybe you can get Ari’s take on that whole thing? 

Steven

Oh yeah, yeah. So one of our partners, Simon Data, their CEO, Jason Davis posted Twilio had a major departure to the sand major departure. You know, my first thought was, well, nobody’s gonna do karaoke there anymore. Because that’s, you know, that’s what he was, that’s what he was, I mean. When I met him, yes, he was all about that karaoke. I mean, he literally went—this is a funny story. We had this sort of partner, he was like super, super excited to like, do karaoke. Like we had this like formal meeting going on and he just, like, towards the end of the meeting, halfway through, he just leaves and then we go to the like reception area or whatever afterwards. And he is literally setting up the karaoke machine on his own—CEO of like Twilio/Segment—setting up his own karaoke machine and just like ripping it. And he’s, he was so fun. It was really cool. I mean definitely like, like I was, I was like, frankly I was, I was gonna do it, and I was like, I’m kind of intimidated. Like I know I’m bad at karaoke—

Ari

But did you do it? 

Steven

No, no. I was, I was a little intimidated and there wasn’t enough beer. 

Spencer

So speaking of being intimidated. Yeah. Sorry. How, how do you, how do we feel about the CDP space now? I don’t know. I’m just trying to transition you back to the— 

Steven

Yeah, yeah. 

Spencer

I couldn’t find a good link there. But—

Steven

So one of the things that they were, or part of that post, you know, obviously everybody kind of weighed in on their feelings around it. But I think the, one of the, the interesting things was, you know, it, it comes back to this question of like, you know, is there, like, what is the value that A CDP brings to the table? And you guys are, you know, working with a CDP partner working with Segment. So you’re like enhancing Segment’s value. And I think a lot of it comes down to like, you know, you said it earlier, like, did you have an agency come in to actually help you instrument this? 

Because part of it is linking back to what are the business cases or the, or the, or the goals that you have and how you’re gonna drive those. What ultimately determines whether or not A CDP is gonna give you value, but how do you, you know, you being part of this, the, the CDP value equation, so to speak, how do you kind of see that partnership with Segment around that? And also just how, how do you kind of help drive that vision with them to their, to your mutual clients? 

Ari

I guess that’s a interesting question. Because it’s hard for us. You know, we try not to recommend necessarily the tools. It’s more like once you decide what you’re gonna work with, we’re happy to support you. Yeah. But actually, Ed, our CEO just wrote a couple weeks ago. We’ll have to share it in the comments when the podcast comes off. Like, a post about that basically is if you’re a modern Shopify brand, you don’t need a CDP that you should be using BigQuery or just pushing the data back to Klaviyo is one of the reasons, and, and that we’re so excited about this Klaviyo integration. Because it’s like actually what a lot of brands need to do. Especially. Yeah. I mean I wouldn’t even say it’s necessarily tied to revenue, but if, if your goal is like trying to just increase that retention marketing and build better audiences and stuff, you don’t necessarily need like a full CDP anymore. It’s just Because those tools are all becoming stronger themselves. It’s becoming like you, it’s more like that you need one if you’re way more upmarket. 

Steven

Right. So there’s, there’s almost this like, as you mentioned, the tool’s becoming stronger. So you’re working now with Klaviyo CDP, which is a marketing automation. What was just a marketing automation tool is now becoming a cloud network almost. Or, or a provider of that Klaviyo kinda being your first stop in that, in that CDP expansion. But are there other partners that you see that also have that kind of similar flavor of like, these, these tools are becoming better. We’re not necessarily going to need such a full-impact solution here to drive value

Ari

Yeah. It’s funny, we were just talking this morning about, well I was at NRF this show Yep. The last couple days. And definitely some of our biggest brands are using Braze. Right. I think actually some of our shared customers. Yeah, yeah. Oh, we love the Braze. You know, and so, but for right now, they’re u if they’re using us and Braze they’re using segment in between. Right. But you know, maybe eventually there’s a way to just go right back. Because Braze really has, I mean it’s, I’ve been very impressed. I hadn’t seen it in action in a while and some, some of my brands were showing me and it’s kind of like, it really is covering like all of the touch points now. Yeah. And there are, there are some other tools too, but that’s the one that’s really been on our minds of like, maybe we should just, you know, go deeper there, but then how many customers would we really be supporting to start that sort of thing. 

Steven

Right. That makes sense. 

Ari

Because it’s a big technical lift. All these things seem easy, and this is what we found to really do it. Right. It’s a big lift. 

Steven

I can imagine. I mean there’s certainly a lot because you own that client-to-server integration, so to speak. You know, like that, that’s your sweet spot. I imagine there’s a ton of use cases, you know, with Braze and the other folks around that, because ultimately they have the same, you know, I identifying mechanism, right? Where they wanna kind of stitch that, you know, client-side web data to whatever server-side data that you’re sending, and you use a unified identifier around that. Obviously in a marketing automation tool, you can use the PII data. It’s meant for that. So it’s a little bit easier to join it up. 

Ari

Is that, do you, do you guys do I actually don’t know Braze implementations at the beginning. That’s interesting. Yeah. We’re is that a long process? 

Spencer

6 Weeks is like the, the basic package that’s for their SMB, and then, you know, Steven’s worked on ones that have been like a year plus. 

Steven

Yeah. Yeah. It depends on how many use cases ultimately they gotta bring in, but yeah, yeah, generally like six to 12 weeks to activation pretty fast. 

Spencer

Maybe the two of you can just give us each like a minute, like kind of summation on the thesis that we’ve been talking about today. 

Ari

Yeah. It’s all about smart growth. I mean, it sounds like a catchphrase, but it’s really true that it’s about like, if you can align on your top goal, not just your top three goals, but like really what is your goal as a brand this year, then you can figure out your data play. 

Steven

I like that. Yeah. That was very eloquently said. If my goal is to make more money, then my data play is to make more data. 

Ari

Well, I mean, I would push back making more money’s a bit too broad. 

Steven

Right, of course. But that’s ultimately what it comes down to, right?  Like that’s, that’s that, that’s the ultimate goal of all the, of all the different initiatives. I’d say, you know, from what we talked about, some of the things that really come back to mind are particularly what you had mentioned around the, you know, the compliance with different laws, local laws across different shops, and making sure that that data is accurately tracked, which is a really hard problem to solve that you guys have managed to solve. So having a good kind of web attribution side of things. 

And then I really like your kind of philosophy around like thinking about how your tool will kinda integrate with tools in the future, where the expansion opportunity lies. And particularly like the, I like what you said about, you know, how we’re gonna integrate with Twilio and in the future, how people are using that to integrate with tools like Braze and, you know, what are some of the other partners that may be there in the future. So I do think there’s a lot of, a lot of great stuff that’s gonna happen this year in terms of what the, the different platforms build. And you guys, of course, you know, continuing to solve a problem that I don’t think anybody else has really solved as well as you have definitely a lot more in the mobile attribution space, but not really in this web, e-commerce space. I think you guys are the, there might be other players, but you’re the only ones I know. 

Ari

Oh, I like it. 

Spencer

Oh man, I just, this fricking thing, like, I’m gonna kill this thing. It just keeps—

Steven

You know what, it’s, it’s not an inanimate object. It has feelings and so you need to apologize to 

Spencer

It. I’m sorry, actually you know what? So my, this is has nothing to do with that. I just—

Ari

Can we get that on a loop?  

Spencer

I’m sorry. I’m Sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll be like, those YouTubers that say something like really in offensive and they’re like crying like, oh, I’m so sorry. 

Steven

Leave Britney alone!

Spencer

I keep, I, this is, this isn’t relevant. I keep like, like that. And this brings me back to, I won’t name any names, but we had a client who used to use, I’ll call it a legacy old-school email platform. It, it wasn’t working properly. So the client and us, Ragnarok, ESP, we all jumped on, and they had their specialist support person. He didn’t know anything about anything, and he kept going and *clears throat*. At one point, he said, oh, “I got a frog in my throat.” 

At which point I was on the phone with, it was one of our team members, and we just looked at each other, we were like, we need to get off this. 

So that’s nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to share that. 

One other thing is that recently, as in several months ago, indeterminately in the past on January 12th, you spoke with Ed, Ari’s business partner for a LinkedIn live/“let’s not call it a webinar” webinar. Yes. And, and do you mind giving us like a, just a quick little like plug about what you guys talked about and we can include a link to that as well in, in the podcast here? 

Steven

Yes. That indeterminate time ago, which at the time of this recording was last week, so I did speak with, with Edward at the little DA team. We talked a lot about the new Klaviyo CDP integration that they’re launching as well as what the value of the Klaviyo CDP is for e-commerce clients. I think was a pretty, a pretty great conversation. You get a lot of my rambling there as well. Yeah, definitely check it out if you wanna learn a little bit more about just our opinion on that as well as what Littledata will support there. I think there’s a lot of, a lot of useful tips there for sure. 

Spencer

Cool. Tips and tricks. Yeah. Coming at you from Ed and Steven. 

I would like to say thank you very much Ari. 

Steven

Yeah, good having you on Ari. 

Ari

Good to be here

Steven

All the way from the Upper West. 

Steven

Oh West side. A train on the A train. 

Spencer

A train on the A train. Rad Express. Hey, get out there like us and check out Littledata coming at you prerecorded from New York City.