The $1,500 Ad Leak - Keith Perhac on Auditing Your Ad Spend

Three agencies ran Keith Perhac's ads for about eight years. None of them noticed $1,500 going to mobile ads inside a Mahjong game in the Philippines. Claude found it when Keith asked why the numbers looked too good. Keith, founder of SegMetrics, tells Jeremy Rivera how he audits his ad spend with AI now, and what every small business owner should know about attribution.

The clue was a report showing about 300,000 retargeting clicks in a week, far more people than Keith's business could ever retarget. Claude traced it to settings buried below the main ad that overrode everything above them. "It's no one's fault, but it's just marketing is so complicated right now that it is impossible to see." The full episode recap walks through how he runs the audit three times a week and pushes back on Claude's advice before anything changes.

In this episode

• Attribution is two questions - "it's not a panopticon." Ask where people first found you and what they did right before they bought. The messy middle only matters when you have a decision to make.
• Your website is the end of the funnel - awareness now happens in ads, social, Reddit and AI answers. "It's the end of the funnel. It's that conversion play is your website."
• AI hides your referrers - clicks from AI tools land as direct traffic, so your reports undercount where customers really found you.
• Reviews feed the AI answer - when someone asks if your business is any good, AI reads Trustpilot, social media and Reddit, and one bad review can follow you.
• Chat is the new interface - Keith asks Claude about his numbers instead of logging in, with "trust, but verify" and a warning about confirm fatigue.
• Let AI do the grunt work - 30 ads in 50 to 60 sizes each, built and published in about 20 minutes. "AI is an average machine," so the new ideas still have to come from you.
• Japan vs America on AI - Keith compares companies that keep everyone and add AI with the push to cut staff. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky covers why employees resist it.

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Keith Perhac of SegMetrics
• (04:01) Attribution is not a panopticon
• (09:28) Chat is the new user interface
• (12:46) Trust, but verify
• (15:24) Japan vs America on AI
• (25:08) AI hides where visitors came from
• (27:21) Your website is the end of the funnel
• (33:55) Why your business needs an API
• (35:15) The $1,500 Mahjong ad leak
• (38:35) 30 ads in 20 minutes
• (44:30) SegMetrics.ai, the doing layer

Notable quotes

"You can't do the same thing as everyone else and succeed in marketing. You have to do something different." - Keith Perhac

"And I was like, we did who with the what now?" - Keith Perhac

Keith is launching SegMetrics.ai, built so "your marketing becomes proactive, not reactive." This conversation first aired on Unscripted SEO.

This episode is supported by uSERP, a GEO agency; Oleno, marketing governance for B2B teams; ClearLead Digital, property management marketing; and Blawgy, white label SEO content for agencies.

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno, ClearLead Digital and Blawgy are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.