How Data and AI Are Shaping PPC and SEO

0:11Young. Hey. Hey. We [music] never learn. Welcome to the Deconstructing Data podcast and live stream. I'm Jesse Leisac, fractional CMO at BDEX / bdex.com. Along with David Finkelstein, we've got BDEX / bdex.com's founder and CEO himself. What's new this week, David? Hey, Jesse. It's been a busy week. And I have to say, I'm going to give a shout out to Boardy because anyone that's listening or watching, if you haven't heard of Boardy, look up Boardy on LinkedIn because he's been filling up my schedule lately with a lot of introductions and really valuable introductions. So, it's been great. It's been really interesting. And the new version, Boardy Pro has been like managing my calendar and adding some really interesting introductions. So, shout out to Boardy and I don't know, it's been a busy week.

1:40That's good. Well, we like Boardy and we like being busy, too. So, great to hear. Yeah, I'm going to tag Boardy on LinkedIn and here just so other people check it out because I agree it's super awesome. But speaking of awesome, we have another pretty awesome guest on Deconstructing Data today. Today we are welcoming on the co-founder of SmartSites. Welcome to the I'm sorry, SmartSites. Welcome to the show, Alex. No worries. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, Alex, we're excited to get this conversation going, but appreciate you joining us on the show today and would love for you to kick it off for us. Let our viewers and listeners get to know you a little bit a little bit of background about yourself and what led you to co-found SmartSites and what you guys do for your clients today. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for handing it off. Yeah, so I co-founded SmartSites with my younger brother 2011. So it's been don't even want to do the math more than 15 years now. So it's been it's been a while. I've personally been involved in digital space much longer than that. Actually started my first company in the mid 90s incorporated in 1997. I started one of the first web hosting companies which for those that were around back then that was the age of tripod, GeoCities, hyperart I don't know if any of those names r any bells to people but I've been involved in digital space for a very long time. Been doing the SmartSites thing SmartSites thing

3:08For 15 plus years now. We're now I think we are the largest private digital marketing company in the US. A couple of our competitors took on equity or sold. So I think I think la last time I fact checked myself it was it was still true. We have over 400 employees work with thousands of clients and everything digital make websites SEO paid search pretty much anything that touches anything digitally we're there to help small and mediumsiz businesses be successful with it online. That's awesome. I love that journey. And yes, I am familiar with all of those companies you mentioned. I was I started my first internet company in 94 as an internet service provider. So I was definitely in a parallel space with you back in those days as well. Let's jump right in and kick off our first topic using data to optimize pay-per-click performance. And so being a data guy myself and this being deconstructing data would love to have you kick this off and give us some insights on like how companies can be using data to optimize their performance. Yeah, that's a good one. So paid search what's interesting. So digital marketing what I really like about digital marketing and I briefly

4:31Before I've done a million different things but briefly before starting SmartSites I worked at Publicis which is one of the biggest advertising agency I think now they are the biggest I think back then they were one of the biggest and they did all kinds of media right they did digital was always the at the bottom of the totem pole I was in charge of digital for Walmart for a little bit Samsung before that and this wasn't the 90s this was 15 years ago but digital was always the lowest onto and the biggest media was always print TV radio right out of home those things and as powerful as those are they are really not databased and what I really liked about digital and when we started SmartSites the reason we focused on digital separate from my background digital is that it's very database and very measurable in a very good way. If you think about the other mediums, I don't know, TV, TV advertising, Which is still very nothing to say about TV, there's still value to it. It's still a huge channel. If you think about TV advertising, as much as it tries to be data driven, it really isn't. The data for it is I don't know Nielsen estimates viewership by a couple of people having

5:56Boxes and then they project that out. And whether they actually saw the ad, didn't see the ad, did perform an action after the ad, it's really not trackable at all. So paid search is the opposite. It I think it's one of the most powerful advertising channels because of the data angle. And what's interesting is as we are in 2026 now the data component I think could be split in almost two different ways. So one side of it is the data that is natively feeding into a platform and the platform uses itself. So this is the machine learning that Google ads Microsoft ads does. So that's 100% very data driven. Still needs to be set up correctly and still needs to be running correctly and it still needs someone overseeing it. But this is the data the campaign itself collects. This is the data from your website feeding into the campaign. This is setting up actually values on your conversions. It's some of these things seem simple, but it's really the only way the data will actually do something useful. So that's I think half of the data equation in 2026 and moving forward. The data that's natively feeding into the machine learning engines, It's your data, but you're feeding it to Google. You're giving it to Google, you're giving it to Microsoft, and you're supervising it and making tweaks, but you're giving it to make a lot of on the-fly decisions.

7:27Google calls it auction time bidding. For those who are not familiar with it, when you search something on Google, in the fractions of a second after you press submit and before the ad learns, the ad loads, Google uses the data to determine what ad to show you, what's relevant to you. There's so many things that happen. I think that's one piece of the data equation for paid search and probably the most common one that people think about. The second one is actually more interesting to me. So what's been happening now is there's this whole second data component of the data that you have not only of yourself the data you could have from others and that becomes very relevant for us as an agency and I'll give you guys an example. So we're we have we've been very AI forward. We have AI enabled for everyone. We're Claude-centric. So, we use Claude a lot and Claude is hooked up to all of our data sources. So, for us as an agency, let's use dentists as an example. We don't just manage one dentist, we manage thousands of dentists. And we're hooked up to the data sources for all of this. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, all these data sources. And what's funny is I mention some of these things at conferences in Europe sometimes, and people like freak out.

8:47Like you have all this data that you're allowed tax the US we are and we have even clients who canceled who never on LinkedIn so we have this huge data set so how this is different from the data you're giving of your own website to Google is this data that agencies and other companies can now access and the way it works is for example you're a dentist and you're feeding all of this data to Google ads everything's optimized really well Google ads is doing machine learning it's bidding really well, but it's just not performing well for you this month, It's a slow month for a small business. That's probably the most common complaint they'll ever have. It feels slow, they'll say, Anyone who works in on the agency side or works with small businesses, they probably hear it feels slow a million times a day. With the with the data that we have, we could actually the PPC analyst who's managing that dentist could literally go into claude and say, "My client is having a slow month. Is it slow for everyone? Is it geographically slow for those? It's not slow for, what are they doing differently?" So that becomes a second part of the data that perhaps not businesses might not have themselves but I think that's what gives agencies like us a lot of a lot of advantages and a lot of more insight.

10:13So I think data for paid search is really going to come down to those two things and they're I think they're very separate. I think it's the data that you own that you feed into Google and the data that you are able to get agencies able to get or third party data or things like that could help you make more educated decisions about your market. That's a great point and that's a really interesting data set that aggregated data across an industry is super valuable. I spoke to somebody this week actually that's doing something similar in the e-commerce space where they have a I think it's like a Shopify app and it's doing something and it has one purpose but the secondary purpose of it was to totally like get this aggregate data about what people are doing how people like the journey that people are making through their e-commerce journey when they make a purchase and that aggregated data is really interesting when you really start digging into it and understanding what people are doing as a whole. Whether it be you can look at it from the entire data set or then to your point you can separate it and say okay what's happening in this industry versus this industry or what's happening in this geographic area with one industry versus another geographic indust area in that same industry.

11:40What's interesting Yeah. And what's interesting is we had this data forever, It's not all like all of a sudden we have more Google Analytics data, We always get we're always growing. We have more clients, but relatively speaking, we always had tons of this data, but there's no way no easy way to analyze it, I don't know. We have Google Analytics access to 100 dentists. How would you figure out if it's slow for everyone or just a specific region? How would you figure out if a certain channel is working better for some than a different channel? How would you figure out if all of a sudden organic search is slower for them because AI overview is taking over organic search volume? You'd have to spend like months, I think the big push in being able to use more data is AI and Claude literally within two minutes can analyze all of it and they could it could even tell you that you could ask it. You could say for these 100 dentists are they getting less organic search traffic because of AI overviews and it would be able to tell you that because we have Google search console access. So it could tell you the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, things like that. It could get tell you search information before they click to your website for Google Analytics to capture and it could marry that data with Google Analytics and could give you such rich insights in like seconds where it would take months before. So I think I think that's the big that's

13:06The big change that's happened and I think that's makes data so much more val. It's one thing to have tons of data, But if you can't really use it and yes, there are dashboards and reports and there are companies that help you combine it and show it to you in different ways, but to able to ask questions against your data and have a logical response after an analysis within seconds, I don't know, definitely not minutes. I don't know, fractions of a minute. I think [clears throat] that makes all the difference. And it's that's it's funny. I don't see it being utilized as much as I thought it would for us. I was on another podcast and the question was what's your competitive advantage? I think our competitive advantage is literally having this data and being able to ask questions against it. It's people a lot of people have this data though. It's not like only us. It's proprietary. Not proprietary at all. It's not like and I think there was another question of like did you build proprietary AI stuff or I'm like no not at all. We use we use Claude for everything. So it's all out there for everyone. It's just people aren't creating the processes and connecting it and all of that to use it. It's even for a small business. Let's say you don't have the access to all the data we do. Let's say you're a small business, collect connecting Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your claude could get you such rich answers

14:36About your search activity. Could literally based on that data, it could suggest what content you should be writing. It could show you the impact of AI overviews. It could analyze competitors in your market and what they're doing correctly. It's all this really cool stuff that even a business with a smaller data set could be doing. Yeah. And I but I think you might say that's one of the reasons why people work with companies like yours, Because not just because you have the unique data set necessarily but because you have the unique insight, from an industry perspective to know what to do with that data. And like there's no dentist that's going to be able to figure that out, And so, yeah, it's interesting. That's I think that's why Yeah, I think that's why we're going to stay in business. Because there's a lot of like a lot a lot of our competitors, sold. And they sold it. It's not like they was a fire sale. They're selling at crazy multiples, but a lot of competitors sold because they're like crap. Is there a place for us anymore if the dentist could do this all themselves? But yeah, I think I think that's the value. I think the way it should work is the dentist should focus on being an amazing dentist and not be learning about ChatGPT ads in the middle of the night. So, I definitely think I agree with you 100%. But I think it's still really

15:59Cool that small businesses are able to access some of this and really have intelligent conversations about their data with AI. I think that's just such a big change. Not again, not that they should spend hours doing it versus be becoming a good dentist, It's not you should you should become a good dentist and have someone help you with marketing versus get be become medio mediocre dentist because you're learning marketing. But it's very interesting about the how AI is giving you the ability to work with your data a lot a lot easier than it than it was before. Yes. And what we consider data because there's so much that we can like such as content moving into our next topic SEO strategy powered by data insights. This is a big conversation. Everyone's talking about GEO AI SEO all the different things. So, yes, walk us through this topic, Alex. Yeah. So, this been a hard ones. I do a lot of public speaking. This has been the most requested. This has been the most requested topic by far. SEO, GEO, and AO. GEO is generative engine optimization. AO is answers engine optimization. I actually use GEO as a word more often, but they're slightly different, but very similar.

17:27Yeah, whole new frontier coming now with AI search, ChatGPT already has ads. Anyone can do it. It's it was beta for a little bit. You needed to have a lot of money invested. It performed terribly, but now it's beta for everyone. It's a little bit better. Anyone could go and do ChatGPT ads. And then similarly, anyone could start optimizing their website to rank higher in AI search. And if we look down the road a year or two, a search for sure will continue to grow. It's a little bit different than traditional search. And what's interesting is traditional search at the same time also continues to grow. It's not that it's not that, ChatGPT is eating from Google search activity. Google search activity is growing at the same time. What's interesting is that we're seeing, them use slightly in different ways. So AI search continues to be more upperfunnel. So, it's where people go to have conversations really top in the funnel. So, if you're looking for a car, you might go on AI search and ask it what the safest cars are or have it review the safety features in this car. Or, for example, you're looking at two window stickers. You upload the two window stickers into AI search and tell it to compare the features on both cars. And guess what? You could even ask it to recommend which car is better for you. And then ultimately when people make a

18:54Decision whether it's the car they want, the car dealersh actually on traditional search finding those businesses for now. That obviously might change but for the time being people are still trusting traditional search to find a dentist versus getting AI to recommend them a dentist. But I guess to your to your question as the as this whole new market opens up it's definitely becoming very important to figure out how to how to come up in AI search similar to how you would focus on SEO and coming up in Google search. And I would say all of this would be very difficult a couple years ago without AI. But AI now gives us so much u so much assistance that for sure you could use AI to help you rank on AI if that makes sense. You could literally have conversations with AI about the content and have it guide you with how to how to rank on AI search Google search. Again the data the data thing comes into play. If you have your if you have your AI, let's we use Claude. So if you have your Claude, if you have your Claude hooked up to your Google Search Console, you could

20:24Literally have conversations with Claude about what content is working well for you, what content it recommends you work on, what content gaps you have, which content you should be working on. And so far SEO and GEO, AO, whatever you want to call it, have been working pretty similarly. It's still it's still the same things that make them work, It's still about content. Content gives you the opportunity to come up whether it's on AI search or Google search. So, if you're a car dealership, and you make a page comparing the Honda Accord versus the Toyota Camry, and someone goes and whether it's on AI or whether it's on Google and searches Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry, by having that page, that having that content, you have the opportunity to show up in both of those. So, same logic continues. Creating content is very important. Some people have been using AI to create very shitty content. People call it AI slop. AI is definitely very useful in assisting in creating content. I wouldn't I wouldn't go mass create crappy content that's similar to a lot of other crappy content others are creating. But it's for sure very could assist with that could assist in finding the content you should be creating. And then there's a couple other small pieces. Link building, things like that are still valuable. That's a little bit

21:51Outside of AI. You could for sure use AI to help you do link building, but a lot of the most valuable link building is still done a little bit manually. But for sure new frontier and what's interesting is and again the people the people have been around for a long time. I appreciate this with the new frontier we're back like in the wild west like we were with the with the internet in 90s where there's so many scams going around, so many people like selling snake oil. I had a client forward me a spa spam email they received from a company. Now, I'm not gonna I'm not going to call them out, but it's not a small company. It's a dozens of employees. It's not a oneman shop. A company that emailed him. It was a spam email, but emailed him and offered him to get him to rank number one on ChatGPT. And he literally forwarded this me this email and he's "Do you think I should do it?" And I must have reread the email like eight times. It literally it says, "We'll rank you number one on ChatGPT." And that doesn't even make sense. You can't rank number one on ChatGPT. There's no ranks. So all this craziness going around with the GEO, AEO, I warn everyone to be very careful. I think there's more scams around it than actual companies doing it. You have companies like Google who have come out and publicly Google I think last week published a blog on GEO, AEO they've publicly multiple times now

23:21Both Google and their Google Search Liaison who are probably a little bit more trustworthy than even Google saying it but they've come out and said that AEO go is the same as SEO it's the same things to focus on and be careful not to get scammed so but definitely a new frontier definitely reminds me of the of the 90s where there's like I don't scams going around. There's companies, new companies getting started every day. I don't companies going out of business every day as well. Definitely with that, I guess comes a lot opportunities with these changes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I remember that for years, everybody was sending emails out saying, "We'll rank you number one, in Google or whatever." And it's "Yeah, okay. Maybe you'll rank me number one in Google for, best dentist in, whatever this city that, can do braces. What I mean? Like I'm number one for that entire string. But, it's But it's crazy that they're carrying that to say that one, It's crazy that they're carrying that sales pitch into ChatGPT, though, because you can't rank. There's no number there's no number one on ChatGPT. It's not possible. It doesn't make sense. But the people are buying into it. They're I you think I should try? I'm what? You can't be number one on ChatGPT. That's not how this works. Yeah. Yeah. Or back in the days when you could just like keyword stuff, pages. Yeah. So, when you made you put in your footer and you would

24:48Make the text the same color as your background. Yeah. Remember that? I'm curious though, everybody talks about the AI slop content out there. And I'm curious people so many people are creating these websites filled with AI slop. I mean, you're just it's just tons of, AI generated articles that are clearly, on sites that are probably MFAs, made for advertising sites, right, and all that stuff. And they're just trying to get traffic to it. I'm curious though, like and I know Google has gotten obviously much better over the years at detecting all of this things, all the keyword stuffing and now the AI slop. How's that working with like GEO? Are the are the AI platforms, are the LLMs detecting their own slop and right, and determining that, okay, this is just AI generated content, so I'm not going to rank it. I'm not gonna, quote it, whatever. Yeah, good qu Oh, man. You had so many good questions. I'll try to tackle. There was a couple questions in there. First one is detecting AI. So what's interesting is so I wrote a book a couple years ago. I actually wrote it's automotive. I was going to do automotive search marketing. I was going to do one for every industry but that I had such a bad experience with a publishing company that I took a little bit of a break but may maybe I'll still

26:11Do it. So I did this before ChatGPT I think two months before. So I did this the oldfashioned way like one keystroke at a time. And I was familiar with OpenAI. OpenAI has been around was around for a long time before they released ChatGPT. So in the end of the book, I was there's this OpenAI stuff coming that's going to really allow AI to create tons of content for you, but don't do it because a Google's going to know. And my thought was Google and for those that don't know Google bought DeepMind which was probably one of the first AI conglomerate companies probably the some of the most brilliant people in AI work there and that was one of the reasons Google bought them and that was a long time ago. It wasn't it wasn't recent. So Google owns that. It's like a it's they still have it. It's still brilliant people there. I'm like if anyone's going to know that the content's AI generated it's going to be Google. And I knew I thought for sure that Google was going to label it. I think I thought in like in search results it was going to say like AI generated. And then all this came out and Google came out and they said AI content is fine. Their guidance was quality contents quality content regardless of how it's created. So, [snorts] that's been Google's stance and they've cleaned it up a little bit and now they say that

27:37Quality content is still good as long as it's created for people or something. I don't think it says by people. I think it literally just says for people. But, what's interesting is that for we've ran a lot of tests and a lot of times AI content will still rank on Google. It's hit or miss. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It's been so little logic around it and then Google adjusts something and then stops ranking. So, it's been all over the place with the on the Google side. So, you could technically create a lot of AI slop and still have it rank. It's a crapshoot sometimes will work, especially if it's an authoritative domain. With AI, it's actually been a little different. It tends to not reference AI slop. It tends to be a little bit smarter than traditional search. And the way it gets around that is with AI, it values two things much higher than traditional search. So it values domain authority could call it, which Google does as well, but it values domain authority a little bit differently. It instead of backlinks and all of that, it pref it prefers certain domains websites over others. Obviously, Reddit, for example, is one of them. Reddit stock went up like 30% when Google said that they're citing it a lot. So value certain

29:03Domains more than like it's harder to game it. The other piece is the domains that does site. And by the way, SmartSites, there was a lot of studies done. We're actually one of the most cited brands in AI. So whatever in AI search, so whatever we're doing is clearly working. But what helps is you want lots of authoritative websites to also consider you authoritative linking you mentioning you it needs to be like a correct mix just like links spammy links not going to work anymore. So that's a big piece of it. So you want to have a very authoritative both websites and brands. So it's harder to get away with AI slop. You have to be and by the way, I was going to say you have to be like Forbes. Forbes actually does this. And then the econd piece, which is again a little bit unique to AI. And they actually started a sub company to do all of this. And the sub company that does it is now worth more than the parent company. And I think tried to buy the parent company. So it's all they literally like licensed the Forbes.com name. So if you search I don't know Forbes.com. They actually have 67 apple pie recipes on Forbes.

30:34I don't want to point fingers. I don't know how they create them. Many maybe they manually came up with 60 plus different recipes. So on AI along with valuing domain authority the brand AI really values topical authority. So, I don't know if you're a car dealership, if you create a lot of let's say your Honda car dealership, create a lot of content about how to repair Hondas, you AI will now see you as the topical authority on servicing Hondas and they will more likely reference your dealership when people are asking questions related to servicing Hondas. They want you to really become a topical authority as a as a brand or for some people it even makes sense as an individual. If you're a small business you could probably more easily become a topical authority yourself. You are the topic expert on topic A. So that's the way it's been with a with AI search. It's it definitely does a better job of not fighting AI slop. Google still you could AI overviews is still a

32:00Hopefully not AI slop apple pie recipes but I guess you won't know until you bake it. But speaking of AI, like I can't believe it's already 448. We got topic three and tech stack to get to still. So we've talked a lot about AI slop, but what about actually applying AI in modern marketing? Like how are you using AI these days? Oh man, that's a good one. Yeah, and I sorry I go off on very long tangents so I could I could be doing this for like three hours and not notice. Yeah, so I mean I think the way to get the most value from AI as a company is there's a couple of pieces and they'll have to align. I know a lot of companies who literally just buy ChatGPT me paid accounts for their employees and they're like that's it we did AI we did it we're there. I think there's a lot of piece number one you do have to give employees access to AI and you have to encourage them to use it. Some employees are more likely to try new things. Others you really need to encourage to because a lot of employees don't even know how much they could make their jobs easier by using it and they're not going to actively try to find it out some well somewhat. So you need to give them access, you need to give them training. You need to have processes in place.

33:29And then I think it's connecting all your data. I think AI becomes powerful with the data, if all of our employees have Claude, we pay for it. They all have Claude. It cost us a ton of money. If we don't have the data connect to it, they're not going to get anything valuable. I mean, they could have conversations with Claude like they would with ChatGPT about I don't know, it's slow for my dentist. Do you think it's weather related? And ChatGPT will say, "Let me check the weather in your area. It's been very warm, so maybe people are at the beach." Like you have those conversations, but the whole value comes from the data, So we have literally all the data sources possible linked in there and with the data and you could build skills for it and once you literally build around it I think that's a game changer. I think that's where it could do crazy things for you and pe people don't I don't some people are afraid right oh I don't want to look up data but of course you need you need guard rails you need processes in place you can't just have it like let's link it up to everything. But I'll give you a very crazy example and this is the stuff that people don't even realize AI could do. So, I have it hooked up to my email to my Gmail, in a what I think is a safe way. It doesn't necess can I say there's guard rails in place. I don't want to go into too much I don't want to encourage people to try to hack my email by [laughter] by giving too much details, [clears throat] but guardrails in place.

34:55I'm a big car person. That's why that's why I have the book on automotive search marketing. I do a lot of things in automotive marketing. So, I'm a big car person. I expensive hobby, but I change cars often and that's I like to say that I don't have a lot of other hobbies. Like I'm not a big sports person, so I save money on the sports tickets, but I spend on cars. So I'm always like upgrading cars, getting a new car. So, I was with this whole AI stuff, let me try to use Claude. And this is completely this is completely different from data, PPC, SEO. This is just like a cool thing that I just want people to know the crazy things they could already do. And it's a regular Claude. It's not like we're it's not like I spent a million dollars on it. It's the same thing that you guys got. I had to build a website from for my existing car. So, literally built out a whole website with pictures, information that I think looks better than most car dealership websites. It really looks professional, sharp. It did that in about a minute and a half. We have hosting hooked up to it. So, it literally uploaded to the internet. It's now live. Then I said, then I told it to go and find the companies that buy luxury cars and email them the listing of my car and asked them for trade in values which it literally connected to my email. It literally found it went out, it found all these websites. It found the emails. It submitted the forms. It went to them submitted the forms. So it sent like 20 different places these emails. They started replying back with treatin

36:24Values. And I told it to use these emails to negotiate the best price. So it literally started quoting prices that one guy gave me to another guy like including screenshots saying that this actually company gave this price. Would you be able to beat it? Having all these conversations behind the scenes and it was doing in I forgot I even told it to do this. I was doing it in the evening. I turn on my computer in the morning. I have like I think like three people send me contracts of like we're ready to pick up your car tomorrow. Here's our contract to sign. It bid people up by like $15,000. Is that crazy? And it's I don't think it's a sometimes I tell I told the story to a car dealership and they were worried that their industry is being disruptive. I don't think it's a disruption thing. The reason I give that example is there's so many outside of the box ways to use it. And that's not even like a company example that just literally like so really cool things, but for it for it to do that need to be hooked up to my email. So, you really have to hook it up to all the things you do. You could hook it up to your calendar. It could literally have it move your meetings around. You really have to have you have to have it hooked up to everything and have to be have to have, I guess, some level of trust, but it's so powerful and has gotten I AI's been around for a couple years now, but the stuff we're doing now with Claude and MCP connections, we couldn't do three, four, five months ago. This is all and I know I'm

37:53Going off on a tangent again, but I'll give another really cool example really quick. Will be 60 seconds. 60 seconds or less. With Google with Google Ads, for those that are in Google Ads all the time, you could go into your campaign, you could go to ad groups, you could go, look at keywords and ads, each ad group has keywords and ads. So, you have an ad group, let's say, has 20 keywords, and then you have 10 ads within Google Ads. You can't know which ad does the best for a specific keyword. So you have a lot of keywords and you have five ads. Let's say one of those ads could be terrible and one could be really good for one specific keyword and there's no way to get that information. The Google Ads UI interface gives you no ability to look at ad performance and keyword level. With the Claude MCP, you could literally ask it that and it will tell you right away. That's the power that you have with AI by hooking it up to different things. It's really powerful. Yeah, that's a that's a perfect way to top off this topic, applying AI in modern digital marketing. There's just so many things that you can do and we've only touched the tip of the iceberg. Like you said, this is something that's just begun.

39:21And it's only going to get better. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. 100%. Well, topic. Should we switch gears to the last topic, tech stack? Something we ask all the guests on all 200 plus episodes now of Deconstructing Data, which are, what are your favorite tools in your tech stack that empower you and your team? Yeah, it's a very good segue from the conversation we just had. Honestly for me and for most of our company, it's literally Claude with MCP connectors. It's become it's not even close on the most valuable tool. I can't say it replaced a ton. Like it's a lot of what it does is connecting to other tools. Like it doesn't res replace HubSpot for us. It connects to HubSpot and lets us be more efficient with the HubSpot data and do stuff that we couldn't before. But without a doubt, it's Claude and the MCP connectors. And again, a lot of people use ChatGPT, they use Claude and they use it without the data connectors. They It's literally they just have conversations and they think they're using AI and it's really not the same. And again, it's come such a long way in the last couple months. We had accounts spending a million a month that were banned who are using Claude MCP

40:48Connectors because of how powerful they were. They would literally let you with Claude see what audiences are working well and aren't and not spend money on the bad audiences. And if you think about it for Facebook, if all of a sudden everyone is not spending money on certain audiences, they can't monetize them. So that's why they were banning people. But it's literally all in the last couple months. And what you could do with it just blows anything else out of the water. And you could see that in you ask which tool if you look at SAS evaluations it's dropped a lot because it's again for us not necessarily replacing a ton. Working with the existing tools and using the data in a better way, but certainly could be replacing and will be replacing a lot of a lot of tools. Yeah, I agree 100%. I'm a Claude user as well. I use a bunch of different AIs, but Claude is really the one I use the most. And I've been I'd say each week, this in the past few weeks, I've been connecting it to something else and I just keep adding more and more connections and I keep realizing then I spend a week just playing with that being okay, how many more ways can I use this? Yes. Yes. Yes. And I what's crazy that a lot of people don't when I talk to a lot of people u who are use using AI they're using Claude they're using ChatGPT but not connecting it to their data sources for various reasons and a lot of them have really cool data and

42:20They're just not so I think that's for sure the next the next frontier in AI connecting it to data sources and all of a sudden you're now able to actually use all the data that you've been collecting and that you have that you really haven't been using. Yeah, I we built an MCP server. We haven't officially announced it yet, but I'll talk about it. We built an MCP server for our platform which basically gives anyone access to our entire identity graph, all of our consumer audiences, you build audiences off of it, you can map identities, you can it's amazing do a ton. So and it's I'm amazed at how powerful it is and how many things we've been able to do with it that previously we used to have to like somebody in our account management team would have to ask an engineer to go get counts for how many people would be in this audience just to give it like a real application you a dealership in this area they want to know everybody that's within this radius that owns a BMW whatever it's like we used to have to go and ask engineer to get counts for these things and now it's just you ask claud tells you. Yeah, it's crazy. And what's crazy is that claude itself could build a lot of these things for you to use your own data. It's Claude code co-work it literally could help you build all of these tools itself.

43:48Yep. Yep. Awesome. It's a new day. Yeah. Well, in closing, Alex, would you like to let listeners how they can reach you after the show? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, if you go to alexmelen.com, I have all my social media things at the bottom. You could connect with me. I'm most active on LinkedIn, but I'm pretty much everywhere. So, alexmelen.com. Of course, you could go to SmartSites.com, check us out there, all the cool work we do, or search for us on Google. I used to say you could search for me on Google or search for me on AI. Awesome. Awesome. Alex, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. This has been a great conversation. I think our viewers and listeners got a wealth of information thanks to you. So, thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you for having me. Yes, absolutely. I'll close us out with the video. So, audience members, we want to invite you to get powered by BDEX / bdex.com. Build authentic connections with your audience and drive unprecedented [music] engagement. So, just imagine harnessing the power of AI to craft your audiences that truly resonate with your brand, ensuring that your marketing is hitting the mark every time. We want to bring you closer to those marketing goals, and we're eager to guide you. So, just visit [music] BDEX / bdex.com. You can click on the talk to an expert button and get powered by VEX. Deconstructing data is the show that makes data make sense. Every Thursday, David Finkelstein and myself, Jesse Leisac, sit down with industry experts

45:18To unpack how data really drives marketing. We do this in plain language anyone can understand. If you want real insights, real conversations, and zero jargon, tune in to Deconstructing Data Live on LinkedIn every Thursday at 4:15 p.m. Eastern time. Yow, yum.