Zeke Camusio: 36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why

August 12, 2025 00:37:25
Zeke Camusio: 36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why
The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast
Zeke Camusio: 36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why

Aug 12 2025 | 00:37:25

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Show Notes

Zeke Camusio founded Data Speaks, a measurement platform for brands spending a hundred thousand dollars a month or more on ads. His claim comes with arithmetic behind it. Thirty-six cents of every advertising pound is wasted, and the pixels most marketers navigate by are the reason.

Key takeaways

On this page

How pixels break

The core problem we solve is that for every dollar marketers spend in advertising, 36 cents go to waste.

Zeke Camusio

The failure is not subtle and it is not new. Browsers and ad blockers stop a large slice of conversions being recorded at all. A larger slice gets claimed by two or three platforms simultaneously, because none of them are talking to each other. A third slice happens outside whatever window the platform decided to look through.

These pixels don’t talk to each other. So 53% of all conversions are claimed by more than one platform.

Zeke Camusio

Add those together and the dashboard you are steering by is not a measurement. It is three vendors each marking their own homework.

Which channels get robbed

The distortion is systematic rather than random, which is what makes it expensive. Anything close to the purchase gets credit it did not earn on its own. Retargeting and brand search look extraordinary because they are standing next to the till.

Anything that created the demand in the first place looks poor by comparison. Top-of-funnel video is the usual victim. Cut it, and the retargeting numbers hold up for a while, then quietly deteriorate with nothing in the report to explain why.

Media mix modelling without tracking people

The alternative is to stop tracking individuals and start reading the aggregate. Zeke describes measuring TikTok traffic campaigns against revenue across fifty states a day for three years, which is over fifty thousand data points and no personal identifiers at all.

It suits ecommerce well, because the volume is there and the purchase is immediate. It is a bad fit for a business doing forty deals a year, where the model has nothing to chew on.

Pricing a lead you have not closed yet

For B2B the answer is user-level attribution plus an expected value per lead. Closing rate multiplied by deal value gives you a number to optimise against long before the deal itself lands.

The double-counting trap

One person attending the webinar and then filling in the quote form is one lead, not two. Counting both inflates the top of the funnel and makes every downstream conversion rate look worse than it is.

The unstructured data you already own

The data that you’re going to need one day to make the AI really good, you’ve been creating that for years.

Zeke Camusio

Support email, recorded calls, reviews, product copy. None of it is in a warehouse, all of it describes how your customers actually talk. His practical instruction to clients is simply to record every meeting, on the grounds that the cost of keeping it is nothing and the cost of not having it is a year of catching up.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

EntityWhat it is
Data SpeaksZeke Camusio’s marketing measurement platform
Unified marketing measurementAttribution, media mix modelling and incrementality testing together
Incrementality testingMeasuring what would have happened anyway
Expected value per leadClosing rate multiplied by deal value, used before the deal closes
Attribution windowThe reason 58 per cent of conversions fall outside the count

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Find Zeke Camusio

He is on LinkedIn, and Data Speaks is the company.

Cite this episode

Camusio, Zeke. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/zeke-camusio-36-cents-of-every-ad-dollar-is-wasted-and-pixels-are-why

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