FULL STACK
Accountable Ads
The mission statement of our company was to provide accountable advertising. That's where this project started and the reason it was never finished, not officially anyways.
Accountable Ads stack started over a decade ago when I built our first few tracking scripts. This was at a time before google analytics when it was known as urchine. That's where the utc_source tags in urls originated from. The stack evolved several times over the past decade
Origins in Marketing Accountablility
The first marketing dashboard I created was for a company called Laser Spine Insitute. LSI was spending over 10k a day in marketing with google adwords without any idea what ads the visitors were coming to the website with.
Our company at the time was tasked with running the website and optimizing the website for search engines. Back then SEO was considered taboo because rankings were based on inbound link count. Everyone was selling link farming, but we saw the future was in accountable paid advertising.
That's when I built a central tracking system that would collect the advertising tags and submit them to CRMs along with the visitors information.
Key Developments
01. MySQL Database
Tracking website visitors with marketing required massive amounts of storage. Being a budget conscious developer I always leaned towards open source. Decades ago MySQL was really the only free option at a time when companies were charging obscene amounts for licening other big data solutions.
02. Google Analytics
As an early adapter of Google Analytics I firmly believed it was the future of web analytics because of the importance of understanding how money was being spent on advertising. Goals, Devices and Interactions on all the websites I built were bring analyzed to improve marketing accountablility.
03. Salesforce
The Accountable Ads ability to update our clients CRM with advertising metrics along side leads generated was game changing. Getting leads from a website was only the first step, now I was able to generate reports on a complete picture of marketing programs right to sale completion. Lower spend in bad performing ads, increase spend in ads that produce sales.
04. Twilio
I remember how excited I was for twilio to come to market. At the time, It was the only service available that could answer incoming calls and connect with users in salesforce through a webhook. I developed one of the first telephony systems in salesforce console that could connect to a unique phone number. It was then possible to link incoming ad campaign phone numbers to salesforce.
