When Ahmed El Naggar set out to scale his own e-commerce brand, he hit a wall many founders know all too well: ad dollars were flying out the door, but visibility into who was actually seeing or converting from those ads was nonexistent. What started as a frustrating problem quickly turned into an obsession, and eventually, a company. With GoAudience, Ahmed is rewriting the rules of marketing intelligence. The platform taps into exclusive credit card spending data and real-time visitor scoring to help consumer brands target smarter, not broader, and close the gap between traffic and conversions. In this interview, he shares the moment it all clicked, what brands are getting wrong about targeting, and how GoAudience is helping marketers lower CPAs by as much as 85%.
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GoAudience is the marketing intelligence platform for consumer brands that want to grow purchases without the guesswork. By combining exclusive credit card spending data, real-time traffic scoring, and actionable insights, it helps you attract better-fit buyers, understand who’s likely to convert, and take smarter, personalized actions to drive more sales.
GoAudience is the marketing intelligence platform for consumer brands that want to grow purchases without the guesswork. By combining exclusive credit card spending data, real-time traffic scoring, and actionable insights, it helps you attract better-fit buyers, understand who’s likely to convert, and take smarter, personalized actions to drive more sales.
I got this moment while trying to scale my e-commerce brand before starting GoAudience. It hit me that there is no way I can know who's actually getting my ads or if I'm just spending money blindly as if I'm playing slot machines. I started to dig deeper and tried to solve the problem for my business first, once I figured out the way to target accurately based on actual credit card spending data not just interests, I thought this could help the problem of millions of other brands.
Brands need to know that Creative is NOT the new targeting. It’s just the only thing you’re allowed to touch. Ad platforms removed precision targeting, then told us: “Just make better creatives.” Let’s be honest, that’s like giving a blindfolded archer a shinier arrow.
Great creative shown to the wrong people = wasted budget.
Mediocre creative shown to the right people = sales.
Targeting still matters. It’s just been buried under the narrative.
This is my 5th time to start a business, I have been doing this for the last 17 years. I spent more than 13 years of them selling to consumers which gave me an exposure to the changing scene of finding and convert the right customers from the days that Facebook gave the power to literally target your roommate until now where all platforms are becoming black boxes.
Hands down the AI targeting tool, we collect the credit card spending data of more than 200 million consumers. This way we can generate a list of audiences for a brand that is based on actual spending history not interests or browse data, and push the list with 1 click integration to Meta & TikTok. We are seeing up to 85% lower CPA!!!
Marketers don’t lack data—they lack answers. Most tools show fragmented data but don’t connect who you target, who visits, and who actually buys. GoAudience closes that loop. It’s the only marketing intelligence platform that helps you find better-fit buyers, understand which visitors are valuable, and take clear, personalized actions to convert more of them—using real purchase data, smart scoring, and data-backed recommendations.
Today’s marketers are flying blind— caught between privacy restrictions, rising ad costs, and fewer targeting controls. The gap between ad targeting and website conversion has become a "black box" where brands spend without knowing if they're reaching the right people or why visitors don't buy.
Customer discovery is the most important part of building a business before putting the first stone. We spent 1.5 years building the product we thought customers would pay for, spent a lot of time and money and at the end we scraped it completely when we talked to users and asked them what they are looking for.
I'd read 2 books and apply them to my discovery phase before building anything: The Mom test & JTBD (Jobs to be done).
Days are long, years are short.
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