MarTech Interview with Vladyslav Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-founder of RedTrack.io

Vlad, you’ve had a remarkable career leading up to your role as co-founder of RedTrack.io. Can you share some highlights of your professional journey and what brought you to the CEO position?
I’ve been in the digital advertising industry since 2000 in a number of different capacities, so my journey to CEO was not precisely linear. Things really took off in 2004 when I joined Boston-based ExtremeForm.com, then known as KeySurvey.com. Compared to now, it was the Stone Age. There were no databases, no advanced tools, and we were scaling with basic tools like Excel. Scaling SaaS through paid ads only taught me how critical it was to align media buying, automation, and analytics. I began to think seriously about how I might design and run the kind of media-buying platform that would align these elements. I explored opportunities with several ad tech startups and eventually co-founded AdxGeeks in 2015, a white-label DSP SaaS. Four years later, I co-founded RedTrack specifically to make digital marketing analytics and automation more accessible to SMEs. I haven’t strayed far from digital marketing in the last 25-odd years, so I have seen every side of it and every tool it uses. I guess that cohesive vantage point is what made me want to do it myself, and do it right.

Could you explain how AI benchmarks drive smarter decisions and enable brands to maximize their return on ad spend and how at RedTrack you help e-commerce media buyers scale ad campaigns more efficiently?
RedTrack provides digital media buyers with clear campaign data, so they can make better decisions to get the most out of every dollar spent. We do this with our suite of AI-driven products, which give users with the most up-to-date analysis. These products work in tandem to continuously evaluate every aspect of a cohesive media buying strategy. This level of automation allows our users to turn insights into actions. Within this suite of products we maintain optional AI agents that clients can use. Those agents allow users to generate insights from complex data sets in minutes and visualise them on the fly. It speeds up time to result and allows our users to fully leverage their data. On top of this, our platform can give insights on how to improve underperforming campaigns and avoid making costly budget allocation mistakes.

How do you help clients ensure they retain control of their data while benefiting from the insights and automation that platforms like RedTrack offer?
Businesses own their performance data through our proprietary big data and high-load data collection technology that allows them to collect, store and process it without sampling or aggregation. RedTrack allows users to own the raw data, not just a snapshot of the information it provides. I believe data ownership is evolving as people realize the utility in leveraging the data they have to train an increasing number of AI models. Businesses already don’t own the data on most platforms. No one owns their Google Analytics data, for instance.

When you own raw data, you can use it to its full potential no matter how small your business might be. You can transfer it to other systems, build your own reports, and train your own business intelligence models. That’s not just owning a report, it’s a level of control that doesn’t exist on traditional analytics platforms. Those platforms use your data to inform their own decision-making, and you have no say in what they do with your data, including selling it to ad networks. As opposed to just owning aggregated reports, owning raw data gives you the ability to influence what’s being fed to your media-buying partners without interference.

In your experience, how can small and mid-market businesses successfully navigate running a multichannel campaign landscape, as these are often seen as complex and resource-heavy tasks?
The basic idea behind RedTrack is to make running a multichannel campaign landscape less of a complex and resource-heavy task. This applies to every company that chooses to use RedTrack, whether they have ten employees or a thousand. Small- and medium-sized businesses with limited resources have all the more incentive to utilize anything that does the heavy lifting of campaign measurement and analysis for them. They do not have time and resources to establish and maintain the data storage and relevant API integrations. We make that possible.

How do you strike a balance between automation and the creative, strategic aspects of running an effective ad campaign?
That depends on the individual business and their specific goals. Our platform works whether the marketing team in question are risk-averse or super ambitious. To be clear, good automation will never replace the part of advertising that rests on human creativity. But by getting rid of the routine and repetitive tasks like consolidating performance data, RedTrack gives marketing teams more time and energy to work on the creative and strategic side of the work.

What key trends do you see emerging in media buying, particularly with the rise of platforms like TikTok, and how should marketers adapt to stay ahead?
TikTok is the newest major player, but it hasn’t unseated the other social networks. This is a matter of expansion rather than substitution. Media buyers tend to add more channels rather than switching from one to another completely. So what we’re not going to see is some exodus from Facebook or any other platform over to TikTok. Bluesky and X are already low priority and likely to stay that way because they just don’t deliver great results through targeting based on vast collections of individual behavioural data. TikTok’s massive personal data sets and behavioral analysis capabilities are a boon to marketers with tight budgets, since they can pinpoint groups likely to make purchase decisions. Expect those types to go all-in.

What are the best practices that you inculcate to optimize ad spending across multiple platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok, and how at RedTrack do you simplify this process for its users?
When you’re dealing with multiple platforms, you need data clarity and what we refer to as a single source of truth. That’s what RedTrack provides by consolidating the data into one place, thus providing a single independent source of attribution. That data is then turned into reports where it can be evaluated and compared. When you’re not juggling four different platforms’ individual analytics reports but truly seeing things side-by-side, you can make better decisions. Analytics and automation are RedTrack’s bread and butter, but the entire point is to turn the insights provided into action. Everything we consider best practices within ad buying exists downstream of total data clarity.

With RedTrack managing over 60,000 ad accounts and driving $2 billion in revenue, what’s one of the most surprising insights you’ve learned from the data RedTrack has collected?
Most media buyers focus on results and overlook the forces that drive those results. Establishing a proper data collection process that feeds that data from, for example, Meta’s Conversions API back to ad networks is key to successful scaling. Feed your ad network with large volumes of quality conversion data and it will find customers for you more effectively. Put it on a bad diet and your conversions will dry out.

Given your extensive experience in ad tech and martech, how do you think marketing technology will evolve to better serve the needs of businesses?
Ecommerce businesses and affiliate marketing agencies are going all-in on multi-channel strategies. They’re adding, not subtracting, channels. The downside of this is that more channels means more manual admin work trying to consolidate data needed for decision-making. AI is surging, and it’s going to be directed at removing as much repetitive work from the daily agenda as possible. That’s what we’re already doing at RedTrack.

We’re also approaching a day when pocket LLMs will be as widespread as search engines were a decade ago. These require lots of training data, making data ownership no longer a niche concern but crucial to generating insights and training AI. A broader toolkit is emerging, and it’s going to make decisions, generate insights, and turn those insights into action through analytics and automation.

What’s your advice to e-commerce businesses and marketing agencies who want to implement AI automation in their ad campaigns?

Of course I’m going to recommend they do it. But I’ll add this caveat: AI is an unbelievably powerful tool, but it isn’t a magic bullet that will solve all your problems. Knowledge is power, and AI tools provide you with incredibly detailed knowledge, but ultimately you are the decision maker, and your business’ marketing will sink or swim on the savviness of those decisions.

A quote or advice from the author

AI is an unbelievably powerful tool, but it isn’t a magic bullet that will solve all your problems. Knowledge is power, and AI tools provide you with incredibly detailed knowledge, but ultimately you are the decision maker.