The Skai 5: Five Questions with Fixel Co-Founder, Etgar Shpivak 

There’s an old adage that digital marketers should remember, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

So often, the goal of digital advertising is traffic to a website. Practitioners work hard to optimize their programs to drive high-quality, low-cost visits to their sites as they know that if they can fill the top of the funnel, eventually, some of those people will convert at the bottom.

But, not all traffic is good traffic or relevant to the marketer’s business goals. There’s a lot of window shopping on the internet, and based on what those people do once they arrive at your site, there should be enough signals to separate the people who are most likely to buy and the people who aren’t even close. 

If you consider all of your web visitors as a haystack, the needles are the people with the highest probability of converting. Fixel helps marketers find those needles in those haystacks by tracking each user’s site engagement actions to predict conversion intent. This way, marketers can spend their retargeting budgets wisely and focus on the most valuable consumers rather than continue to spread the budget too thin on people who aren’t likely to convert. 

Today, we chat with the Co-Founder of Skai partner, Fixel, to learn more about its mission to help marketers find and segment their most valuable audiences via site engagement. 

Five Questions with Fixel Co-Founder, Etgar Shpivak 

Shpivak is a seasoned marketer with over 15 years of hands-on experience and is recognized as one of the Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts by PPC Hero. He is a keynote speaker and college lecturer on paid advertising and serves as Fixel’s CEO.

He co-authored the bestseller, “Marketing in the Digital Era,” which serves an essential part in the syllabus of Marketing studies in academia.

What is Fixel, and what challenges was it built to solve?

In the post-COVID-19 era, brands, retailers, and eCommerce businesses see an increase in their traffic, but not all of their site visitors are truly relevant to their business goals. 

Fixel enables marketers to understand the conversion intent of visitors on their websites. Our data shows that 50% of the visitors with a minimal site engagement score generated over 98% of sales. Additionally, the top 20% of engaged visitors generated over 80% of sales. 

On average, we see that most site visitors navigate to the product page, but only a small portion (approximately 5%) start the actual purchase process (added to their cart).  Fixel can find the top 20% of the visitors with the highest probability to complete a purchase and to allow marketers to dramatically scale their website’s high-quality audience.

How do marketers use these insights to optimize their advertising investments?

The primary value to marketers is better performance in their retargeting and lookalike campaigns within social ad networks.

Most of the marketers’ default to one of two options:

1. They don’t segment their audiences, and they rely on ad platforms optimization.  This results in a massive waste of marketing budgets.
2. They spend a significant amount of resources implementing and analyzing rule-based segmentation through hundreds/thousands of different funnels. This results in a tedious and time-consuming process, which often is outdated by the time it’s complete.

Fixel enables marketers to easily and automatically distinguish between the visitors who are relevant to their business KPI’s and those who are not.

What is the value of using engagement signals in segmentation?

Most of the website has two groups of visitors: wide audiences like “page viewers” or “product viewers” that represent 90%-95% of the visitors and “high-intent” visitors who added to cart or started the checkout process.

The main challenge we solve is focussed around the gap between low and high intent-based audiences in eCommerce sites.

Fixel uses engagement signals to predict the likelihood of future purchases and enables marketers to dramatically improve their retargeting and lookalike campaigns.

How does artificial intelligence help Fixel to provide the most value to marketers?

Our AI builds a unique predictive analytics layer for each site according to the actual engagement in the sites. This means that we can predict the future value of clients before they started their journey on the site.

We analyze 1st party data points such as the traffic source, location, device, hour, landing pages, and others to predict the potential value of the customer.

After this initial prediction, we also analyze the actions of each site visitor by measuring on-site actions like clicks, form engagement, scrolls, page views, and more. These actions are calculated in real-time and sent directly to ad platforms like Facebook, Google, and others.

Websites are live organisms that are continually changing. The changes may include site content, traffic quality, seasonality, and many additional factors. Our AI algorithm regularly updates its prediction, both in the probability of the visitors to buy before they start their journey in the site and the weights of the actions they are doing in the site.

With more and more limitations on cookie tracking, how can marketers continue advanced customer targeting strategies?

The new “privacy-first” reality that we’re experiencing today with consumer data restrictions like CCPA, GDPR, in the upcoming 3rd party cookie blocking by Google Chrome, is forcing marketers to spend more effort on their 1st party data.

Fixel is a privacy-by-design, 1st party, AI-based, engagement and scoring platform designed for websites. Fixel’s solution scores the visitors while all the visitor’s data belongs only to the marketers.

Marketers can see the improvement in their campaigns in a number of ways:

• Removing low-quality visitors from their retargeting campaigns, like Endurance who improved their CPA by 20% 
• Scaling high-quality audiences beyond cart abandonment like Watches.com that managed to triple their revenues by using Fixel highly engaged visitors.
• Improving lookalike audiences by building a “seed” of high-quality audiences instead of visitors who saw product pages

What signals are you using to drive your optimization strategy?

In the first era of digital advertising, marketers were able to stay ahead of the competition with smarter bidding, more engaging creative, and savvier campaign management. But, today, every marketing organization has experts in these areas.

In the next era of digital advertising, the real performance gains are going to come from insights—who can bring in the right data, mine valuable insights, and apply that intel to their advertising strategy. 

Skai’s Fixel relationship is an example of how best-in-class data partners can help marketers make the best data-driven decisions to stay one step ahead of their rivals and get the most return out of their advertising investments.

To learn more about how Fixel and other premiere data vendors can drive performance for your marketing programs, contact us today to set up a brief demo.

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