Mastering CAPI Integration Through Unmatched Team Synergy

Aric

You know, all right, so we’ll get going now. Well, welcome again, everyone, to another one of our webinar series about collaboration in our centers of excellence that focuses more so on how team members from diverse backgrounds work together, and not so much on the technical solutions of what problems they’re actually solving, although we will talk a little bit about that as well. So today we have with us Alex Silva, who is Director of Solutions Engineering in our MarTech and Data Solutions Center of Excellence, and also in that center of excellence, John Spencer, Director of Digital Strategy.

So I’ll let you guys wave hi to the nice people in TV land, so to speak. And thanks for taking time out of your busy day to go through some of this. So today’s webinar is about collaboration, but specifically around CAPI, Conversion API.

And for those of you that don’t know what CAPI is in the audience, go Google it. It’s not even that essential you know a lot about it. It’s more about how our team has worked together to solve these and other problems for clients.

So, but why don’t one of you give us a background? I think you had some data you want to put up on the screen, right about the problems with CAPI typically seeing what led to the collaboration.

 

John

Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to get us started. Let me go ahead and share my screen.

All right, cool. So yeah, really where it all started is, well, a little background first. Alex and I have been working on clients, CAPI implementations for years at this point.

We’ve done everything from full blown implementations, we’ve done audits, and we’ve done various levels of consulting work. Through all of that exposure, like across different organizations and different industries, we’ve really found there’s four core issues, like four core problems that continue to rear its head in these conversion API implementations that are stopping organizations from maximizing their ROI. You’ll see here, those four issues are, one, PII deficiency, two, event ID errors, three, client-side event flaws, and four, resource deficiencies.

So we’ll dig into a little bit of those stats and kind of what we see typically, but I know a lot of this is going to be focused on kind of how we’ve collaborated and aligned in our CDP Center of Excellence to address these and really help clients solve those problems.

 

Alex

Yeah, one thing to add to that is the fact that CAPI implementations should be extremely simple. Like truthfully, like CAPI is such an easy tool to add to your marketing strategy. And it’s fascinating to us the fact that somehow, some way people, there’s always mistakes that happen within these implementations that we’re like reviewing and auditing.

So yeah, I think that’s also maybe the secret sauce to some of our success is just that collaboration within those teams that we don’t necessarily see when we overview client implementations.

 

Aric

Yeah, I mean, that’s a really, really good point. I know you said this, but it can’t be stated enough. I mean, you put those stats up there as to how often you find those issues and that is across dozens of clients.

It really is amazing how simple it should be and how it’s almost never that you guys and the teams you lead audit an implementation and don’t find one or more of those issues, right?

 

Alex

Yeah, exactly. I would categorize probably most of the invitations that we see as being like good, but they can always be great or excellent. And very few of them luckily are like bad where we’re like, okay, wow, we really need to do something here.

But the fact that if we can get you that like 25% closer to being excellent, like knocking it out of the park, that just means that everything you’re doing within those vendor platforms like LinkedIn, like Meta, like TikTok is going to be all that more successful.

 

Aric

Yeah, and actually, as I recall, the two you met, right? With leaders from LinkedIn, Snap, Meta and TikTok at a recent customer data platform conference, right? They were very complimentary and referred, I remember the audience to your presentation that day and said, what those guys from Zion and Zion said, do that.

So that was a really nice testament for you guys. So I’m curious, what led to the collaboration? What actually led to, hey, we need to do this from both our angles, not just one of us alone can solve this for clients.

Why does it take two of you and the teams that you lead?

 

Alex

Yeah, I can start off with my technical perspective and then pass it off to you, John. But from a technical perspective, I feel like it is really important to have those marketing roles. So someone like John worth that media perspective to come in and provide us guidance.

A lot of the times we’re given something like maybe a technical spec where it says like, hey, implement this upon your website or within your tag management system. But if we’re not complimenting it with the knowledge of like maybe why we’re doing something or how we should be doing something, then I think that’s where things go awry. And we often see that as a result of some of these CAPI implementations.

So while we might implement straightforward events like an add to cart or like a purchase event, those are pretty right solid definitions across a website. We know exactly how those are supposed to function. But John might need on his team something that’s like a custom event that’s triggered in a very particular way with very particular data to be passed in to make sure their campaigns are successful.

And so I think that’s where we need to kind of bridge that gap or that knowledge between the two like departments. While John, you may have someone that’s really knowledgeable like in a tag management system, probably where they’re gonna lock that knowledge is more in the code base where we’re implementing the data layer, which is carrying those PII as we called out like at the beginning where we might be deficient. So you understand or have a better understanding across all those vendor platforms, what is a high ranking?

Like, is the effort worth it to like reveal a user’s city as important as it is to reveal a user’s email? Likely not, just we know that that PII is much more valued in those platforms. So if we’re talking about like maybe timelines or compromises, that’s where we’re gonna really need to ask like John, like, hey, what makes the most sense here?

Ideally, we would get it all, but we know we’re working in the real world and that may not necessarily happen all the time.

 

Aric

From your perspective, you know, talk about like what you need and how that dovetails with what Alex’s side is doing.

 

John

Yeah, absolutely. So my team and I have done really over the last nine years, nothing but live and breathe paid media. So meta, TikTok, paid social platforms, Google ads, that is our day to day.

Like we are very intimately familiar with the ins and outs of each one of those platforms. And when you’re talking about conversion optimization and conversion tracking, each one of those platforms function a little differently. There’s a lot of similarity between them, but there’s also some very specific new ones that really like a paid media resource would catch and like would understand that potentially like a dev resource or somebody that’s very focused on like client side solutions may not be aware of or understand.

For example, like in meta on the pixel settings, there’s advanced match toggles where you can go into the pixel settings, decide what customer information is valuable that’s going to provide the best event match quality score based on your advertiser, based on their industry, based on how they function. That’s like those types of nuances are very, I think ingrained in like paid media folks heads. And I think that’s just a great example of where like the two can meet and come together to say, okay, this is what we need for meta.

This is what we need for TikTok and this is how we’re gonna maximize value. And then we come together to put a measurement strategy on paper and just action on it and achieve those results.

 

Aric

I mean, would it be fair to say that the reason you guys find so many problems with these implementations is that the client has either had highly technical dev literate people do this, or they have had media team members do this, but they rarely have a pair or more of people collaborate to do it and even more to monitor it over time.

 

Alex

Yeah, I would definitely point to that as one of the issues where in some of the implementations that we do see, for instance, like I mentioned earlier, maybe a media person is in control of that tag management system and is deploying those client side tags, but maybe they’re not fully leveraging or aware of the data layer that’s on the website. So they might be unfortunately doing some best, some non-standard best practices. Equally, I will say though, a technical resource can just make those same mistakes.

So this isn’t dependent on just like one side. But yeah, I think we definitely can point to that as often the cause for some of the issues that we do see within those implementations.

 

Aric

And I think you guys, did you guys wanna talk about those typical problems that you see a little bit more? I think that’s one of the things you wanna cover.

 

John

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we mentioned the four when we got started, just as a reminder, it’s PII deficiency, event ID issues, client side event flaws and resource deficiencies. I’ll get us started and dive in a little bit on the first issue we highlighted, which is PII deficiency.

So just serving all of the work we’ve done across organizations over the last couple of years, we found that 93% are suffering from what we’re categorizing as client, excuse me, PII deficiency. And really what that all stems from is an inadequate client side tracking strategy. So a little bit of background, historically client side tags, like for the last 10, 12, 15 years, client side tags have never really needed customer information in the form of PII, like hashed first name, last name, email, et cetera.

They’ve always functioned just fine off of cookies. But as we all know, we’re not in that environment anymore. We’re in a privacy first, user centric, customer data focused era.

And just relying on pixels and cookies is not gonna cut it. So really where it all starts is like just looking back at the historical client side tracking strategy and taking a look under the hood to see where we’re finding some of these gaps where, look, we have a page right here, for example, that’s a demo request or like a demo download. There’s a ton of opportunity here to capture really rich opted in customer data to send to meta, to send to Google ads, et cetera, to better match our conversions and boost conversion rate.

But what we’re finding again is just, there’s a lot of legacy historical client side tracking setups that still haven’t really quite been evolved and taken a look at to look for opportunities again to capture customer information, to boost, again, like conversion rates, return on ad spend and ROI. Alex, any additional information or anything that I missed in kind of that overview?

 

Alex

No, I think you’ve covered it. Like we said, we just don’t see sometimes some of those big, those things that matter the most, right? Like email, phone number, those are gonna be weighted heavily across all those like vendor platforms.

So we just want to ensure that we have those pieces available. And sometimes that’s where the collaboration between us really comes into play. For instance, if John wants to send in a page view, unfortunately, right, that’s a PII deficient event.

We’re not likely to get PII available, but us collaborating, okay, maybe there is a solution to get PII in terms of if someone’s logged in and they’re navigating the website, let’s pull in that account information that we have on them into every single event that they do on the website. So that way we are leveraging some of those PII data points to make that campaign event stronger.

 

Aric

Got it. So yeah, that makes, I mean, a lot of sense. I think it’s becoming very clear why you two and the teams you lead are better together, so to speak.

So let’s move now to, okay, you guys have been working together for literally years. So have your teams, you’re a well-oiled Navy SEAL team, got it. How do your clients start to get their teams to break down those silos and collaborate in these ways?

I mean, of course they can always hire us to solve the problem. Let’s talk about if they want to build teams like that themselves.

 

 

John

I’ll go with my very simple answer first, just based off of Alex and I’s relationship over the years. I would say it really just starts with talking to each other.

Like you really got to break down those silos and barriers. You’ve got to sit down, take a look at the issues that you’re facing and just talk to each other, to information share, to really understand the other’s worlds and the other’s perspectives. And I think that all boils down again to a center of excellence model, right?

Like where you have cross-functional teams that are all aligned on an ideal customer experience. And again, I mean, I bring my own paid media kind of focused perspective to that. Alex brings her own background and perspective, but it really just starts with setting the time aside and dedicating time to sit down and just talk to each other and look at the issues or the problems that you’re facing and just talk about how you can come together to solve them.

 

Alex

Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with that. Also, I feel like we do serve as a great example for our clients, just like how the two of us collaborate when we’re working with them.

A lot of the times I would say, right, the client likely has the right people like on their team to like set up CAFI implementations, but they’re just not working in ways that are productive. So like you said, Eric, breaking down those silos, I think that’s the biggest hurdle that we often see with teams is maybe that person that’s touching the code base, the person that’s touching the tag management system, the person that’s touching the media, like vendor platforms, they’re not really talking to each other, like John, like you just said. So we kind of get some different results in terms of like ask, if we’re asking to implement a data layer event in order for a client side and a server side event, we might get different results based off of what that person’s job role or function is.

So really just communicating across those teams and being in the same room and just being able to make sure that we’re all aligned in terms of strategy is so important. It’s really as simple as that, right? Which is crazy because it seems it is truly as simple as we’re stating, but not a lot of people are getting it right.

And that’s where we’re often seeing all of these events that we alluded to at the beginning really stemming from.

 

Aric

Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting when you think about the organizational momentum as client organizations scale, they naturally build silos, they try to build handoffs, which is not the same as collaboration. There’s always something in the handoff of that baton that should have been discussed rather than just passed over with assumptions. And it’s true, right?

Agencies also, as they scale sometimes, suffer from the same problems. But I think what you guys are saying, and in my experience, the only way to fight that is to be constantly aware that the more you scale silos emerge, and if you don’t actively have a program to break them down, they will become the norm. And then you give up something in terms of quality at what could have been a collaboration point, and those collaboration points then dwindle as organizations scale.

So the only way to do it is you gotta actively fight it. So, well, that’s fantastic. I definitely appreciate you guys taking the time.

I know this is not the first time you’ve shared this message. You did it recently at a national conference, like I mentioned with Snap, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn. I think we’re there singing your praises as well.

But anything in closing to add before we sign off?

 

Alex

Once again, I think just kind of what I said at the very beginning, Caffe is incredibly simple, and it’s so powerful. Like, it’s such a great tool to use within your marketing that I would say, don’t let these deter you. These are very easy issues to overcome, and it’s very possible to get the maximum out of your Caffe implementation.

 

John

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think it really comes down to, again, like these are issues that are very easily solvable. Continue to put in place programs within your organization wherever possible where you’re promoting cross-functional collaboration.

And I think you’ll really find a lot of the efficiency and success when you put those programs in place that we’ve found. So yeah, I’ll leave it at that.

 

Aric

All right, well, thanks to the two of you. We’ll let you get back to the rest of your days. And thanks for sharing the information.