Zapier joins Tealium and Segment on the list of billion dollar valuations for powering the next generation of ad tech.
As cross-site cookies and browser pixels are increasingly blocked, ad platforms are moving from browser-based tracking to server-side data transfer.
Like those other companies, Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-side APIs. A few clicks allow you to transfer your customer data to/from hundreds of different platforms.
> Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-side APIs
I think that conclusion is a little far-fetched. If you've used Zapier you know how expensive it is to run tasks, so in my experience Zapier is used more to automate little bits of your business that you don't necessarily want to bother your engineer with. It's not like Segment that you can just turn on a firehose of data.
It's incredibly cheap in the context of 6 or 7 figure marketing budgets. It gets budgeted as a new compliance cost to continue doing business as normal even after Apple, Mozilla, and Google block advertising pixels from their browsers.
Except it's not far-fetched at all [1]. If you optimize for conversions, and the value of those conversions is large enough, the returns readily cover the costs.
Zapier isn't necessarily just for ad tech. It can any kind of ad hoc automation between well-defined services. We use it for support ticket automation.
IFTTT was a disaster as a product for laypersons. Zapier is how you have to make things work for normal people to use such automation tools. There will be many more Zapiers across every segment where there is complexity in the tooling and interaction.
If a person wanted to start a great business, find a business segment you know really well and create a niche Zapier for it. Then when the big companies come knocking (which they will right before they try to kill you and take your niche), sell to them. It's a repeat of the great CRM / enterprise roundup wars.
i'm sorry but you, an account named marketingtech, are extremely blinded by your perspective right now. Zapier charges $599 usd for 100k "tasks" per month. you want to use Zapier for adtech?
first of all if you only have 100k pageviews a month you're probably not even making $599 from serving ads
and second i don't understand what Zapier is supposed to accomplish in your mind?
maybe you have been using it in a way I can't think of?
from what I think you are talking about: is zapier supposed to like sit between website & like some SSP or DSP? during the bid!?!?! or just to like establish an audience to target like send your new email based id to a DMP or wherever for a customer who wants a PMP deal or something?
Also I'm almost positive Segment in your example is not used in the way you describe to pass user/device identifiers between ad platforms? Like i think they connect to adwords but only to grab the standard reporting data you can get into bq anyways. not any user or device data (impression level stuff is now complicated in their own odd like 'private' data clearing house thing).
It sounds like you're referring to the sell-side of advertising (i.e. a publisher running ads on their site).
I'm referring to the buy-side of advertising (i.e. an ecomm business running a marketing campaign). Each task could be "Tell Google that person 123 visited landing page X." or "Tell Facebook that person 456 purchased a tshirt." This lets you create targeting segments on the platforms and measure the results of your campaigns.
i think we just have different views of the current ad tech ecosystem.
you can already tell google/fb/dsp/ssp directly no need for zapier - they already have pixels. now fb (and more are building) have server to server. puttin zapier in the middle especially for individual pageviews/impressions would be inconceivably ginormous scale
for sure it's super complicated with the changes google is forcing and a ton is up in the air.
but assuming google's vision of the future comes true this type of data exchange will likely be blocked in whole or minimally as we know it now
from what i understand, in that future the browser holds the 'interest groups' e.g. targetable user data we're talking about for remarketing, interest cohorts etc - i think that's floc + turtledove in action
in thinking from sell side example publisher.com would create a (i think k-anonymous?) interest group in browser.
it looks like google might go so far as to kill something like TTD universal id by enforcing a privacy budget. so there goes that idea of a middle man syncing publisher.com login pii identifier -> ssp/dsp
google's write up says bidding happens in the browser via 'worklet' but i think that can be delegated to a DSP if done to their likeing as a 'trusted 3rd party server' which also gets rid of all these identifiers including IPs/UAs (google will obviously control the market lol). so i guess that could be some product but zapier moving into but totally completely different than now
There's a distinction between being a data controller and a data processor.
The businesses that use these platforms are the data *controllers* and are responsible for implementing consent, "do not sell my information", "show me my data", or "delete my data" flows as required by law. The platforms generally offer APIs to implement these required data flows in a centralized way, which is another major value prop for them.
The platforms serve as the data *processor* and can assume the data is compliantly obtained by the controller until informed otherwise.
The sustainability of that model of responsibility must be in doubt, though. Take a simple case like a website that loads a resource from somewhere else. Given how the technology works, any model where the original site is responsible for everything and the user's data is supposedly protected is obviously misleading, because very often it's the third party services that are run by the bigger, more powerful, data-hoovering businesses, and neither the original site nor the user may be fully aware of what is happening or have any practical control over it. The model assigns responsibility where it's convenient, not where it's reasonable.
In that situation, the third-party that is actively collecting and transmitting the data becomes a controller and is subject to regulation.
Under the predominant data transfer model, the third-parties cede responsibility by making the data transfer an active behavior by businesses. Ad tech companies can say "We didn't actively collect the data from customers - we passively received it from businesses." That makes a huge difference in term of regulatory compliance.
That said, this has been the most common data transfer model for years. "Data hoovering" is a misconception that allows millions of businesses who actively send customer data to Google/FB to shift privacy criticism onto the platforms.
In that situation, the third-party that is actively collecting and transmitting the data becomes a controller and is subject to regulation.
And yet they may have no direct interaction with the user/data subject, who may not even be aware that they exist, so this model is still flawed.
"Data hoovering" is a misconception that allows millions of businesses who actively send customer data to Google/FB to shift privacy criticism onto the platforms.
I would have much more sympathy for this point of view if the likes of Google and Facebook were transparent with businesses integrating with them about what that really means in practice. For example, if we did a survey of local stores with simple websites that include any Facebook asset on their site, how many of them do you think could accurately describe the implications in terms of tracking their users? What about sites that use Google Fonts? I'm not even talking about asking businesses to actively upload their user contact details for targeting or deliberate tracking like Google Analytics or Facebook pixels here, just the incorporation of any third party resource into a website.
It's also important to say that this isn't just about Google and Facebook. Many third party resources you might incorporate into a site for some reasonable purpose could also be used for tracking, while the site operators may or may not be fully aware of what is being done and the visitors may not be aware of the resources at all. Think of a CDN used to improve performance or a payment service that recommends including its scripts across all pages on a site to feed into risk analysis, for example.
The general problem is the same in all of these cases. The way the technology actually works doesn't match with the way authorities are attempting to regulate it. Unless you're willing to interpret the current regulations strongly enough that some behaviours with legitimate uses are also effectively prohibited across the entire Web (at least within your jurisdiction) I'm not sure you can ever square this circle as a regulator operating within the current frameworks.
CCPA/GDPR don't really prohibit you from doing things with data or sharing with 3rd parties you just have to be really upfront about it.
Say you were going to take the "Contact Us" form submissions from your website push those to Zapier to check if they were legitimate (before sending email to the addresses), you would need to disclose what 3rd parties you're using, what data is shared with them, etc.
As cross-site cookies and browser pixels are increasingly blocked, ad platforms are moving from browser-based tracking to server-side data transfer.
Like those other companies, Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-side APIs. A few clicks allow you to transfer your customer data to/from hundreds of different platforms.