Desktime CMO Elvis Ābeltiņš: “AI Is Shifting Budgets From Google Ads to Content”

DeskTime is a Latvian time-tracking and productivity app that automatically records how employees spend their working hours on apps, websites, and projects. It helps teams analyse productivity, manage attendance, and track project time with minimal manual input. Originally built by the Draugiem Group, DeskTime now serves companies worldwide seeking to balance efficiency and employee well-being.

Please describe your ideal customer profile (ICP).

It depends on the market, so we work with a dual ICP by region. Ideally, our customer is a company with a few hundred employees that operates in a hybrid model, with people partly in the office and partly remote. Our strongest markets are the United States, the largest European countries, and India. 

Who exactly is the decision-maker in your ICP? If an organization has 500 to 1,000 people, who decides to subscribe to DeskTime?

It depends on company size, but typically HR or operations makes the call. Sometimes product managers or IT project managers responsible for large developer teams look for a solution to specific challenges. Job title matters less because whoever searches for the solution becomes our user and internal champion. As we now shift toward a sales-led approach, job roles start to matter more.

Describe the customer journey: from someone knowing nothing about DeskTime to signing up and using it?

DeskTime has been predominantly product-led. For more than ten years there was not even a formal sales team. Users searched for terms like “productivity tracker” or “employee tracking”. In the Indian market, “employee monitoring” is sometimes a relevant keyword.

For most customers the journey starts with a need to improve productivity, to monitor and track work, or to implement remote work policies. Remote work has been a major driver. During COVID, everyone went remote and many companies needed a system to measure and build trust. We had very high inbound interest then and almost no need to advertise.

Product-led growth means word of mouth and referrals?

Yes, plus advertising that supports intent capture, particularly search ads. If someone searches for “productivity monitoring” or related keywords, we want to be found. Sales-led growth in contrast is about proactive outreach, cold emailing, and account-based marketing to specific companies. For a long time we focused on capturing existing demand.

Those keywords must be expensive and competitive. How do you choose markets?

Competition is intense, but we still run globally. The United States and India are major priorities. Our website is fully localized in Spanish, and because of government projects here, it is also in Latvian. We test worldwide campaigns, but the main selection is based on past results and the organic interest we see.

PR can create interest and organic growth. What is your PR strategy, given that global media is fragmented? 

DeskTime pushes the limits of what a global PR engine can be. Since the start we have worked with the agency TrueSix and we invest in PR more than many would expect. 

We run two streams: Latvian/Baltic PR, and international PR, each with its own agency. For global PR, we localize stories and use our data by region. We collect and analyze the same anonymized datasets for Spain, the United States, India, and more. The campaign approach is the same, but we send press releases with insights from each specific market to that market’s media. We might tell Spanish media what Spanish users do on average, and do the same for India or the United States.

Because we have millions of hours logged, aggregated data yields many insights. That becomes a form of global PR. The product’s nature gives us data that can underpin interesting, data-driven stories. We use those stories for PR, which generates awareness and organic demand. We then analyze organic traffic to identify markets where we put more advertising effort. PR supports the overall strategy, although it is hard to measure precise monetary impact. 

In some markets media do not link back, so press coverage may not deliver steady traffic, but it does build awareness.

Do you still see traffic lifts even when articles do not link to you?

Sometimes yes, especially in smaller markets. In Latvia it is most visible. For example, when the Latvian Ministry of Economics adopted DeskTime, our traffic from Latvia tripled almost instantly. We have seen benefits in other markets too. The key is to make the stories interesting rather than dry. We brainstorm angles that make the data engaging. 

Recently, we studied whether Mercury retrograde and moon phases affect productivity, arrival times, and departure times. The results were not conclusive, but there was enough to share. 

We also consider ideas like whether the Spanish market truly has midday siestas, or topics such as AI usage and tool adoption. Even after 14 years we keep finding more topics when we brainstorm. If you have the data and analyze it legally and in aggregate, you can generate useful insights at essentially no additional cost.

There is a lot of talk about Google traffic declining while AI drives more discovery. Is that your case?

We see the impact and it comes up in almost every management meeting. You need to get ahead of it, but it is important to realize that AI visibility is similar to SEO in both effort and payoff time. It is not a quick technical fix on the website or a piece of content you buy from an agency. It is a longer process that requires consistent work.

A practical first step is to ask AI chatbots about the time tracking industry and see what they recommend. Early on, we discovered that because of our content history, models tended to think DeskTime was mainly for freelancers and small teams rather than hundreds or thousands of users. That was a clear signal to rework content. Social mentions matter a lot, especially on Reddit. Models weigh what people discuss in forums, not only formal articles. Review sites like G2 and Capterra also matter, because AI tools often cite them as sources.

If people use Google less, paid search should also decline. Have you seen that yet, and what replaces it? 

Not yet in a clear way, but the logic points in that direction, and my own behavior has shifted heavily to ChatGPT and Gemini. You cannot buy ads in AI chat the same way, but you can invest in being more visible to models by working on PR, content, technical site improvements, social visibility, and review platforms. Over the next one to three years it makes sense to allocate more budget from Google Ads toward content and related efforts.

It is tricky to make that decision fully because paid advertising has clearer ROI, and it is difficult to prove the return on, for example, sustained Reddit engagement when the way models collect information keeps changing. 

Brand awareness and trust matter more than ever.

Why move toward a sales-led approach when the world is big and your product-led model still has room to grow in many countries?

Enterprise customers are generally more profitable because of license volume, although very large corporations can exert pricing pressure or require procurement processes that add cost. Working with government can be similar.

For example, winning the Latvian Ministry of Economics was not easy and the immediate profit was likely minimal, but the credibility is valuable. Showing that we can work securely with a government increases trust in other markets, so it is worth the extra resources.

My colleagues joined a Latvian delegation to India with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The trip created different access to partners and contacts. In markets like India or Japan, this kind of official backing is especially powerful. That trip yielded potential clients, reseller partners, and many connections.

What is the biggest work challenge for you right now? What keeps you up at night?

The shift to AI. In five to eight years, people may stop using traditional search and type questions directly into AI systems. That would change the rules. The core struggle is to stay visible in an AI world where visibility depends on content and reputation rather than advertising.

This also raises the question of the website’s future role. At the same time, platform dependence is risky.

Companies built entirely on Meta or Amazon can be cut off overnight. I have friends whose businesses relied on TikTok ads until a policy change prohibited their category. Political ads illustrate the same risk. Rules change quickly, and if your whole strategy depends on a single platform, you are vulnerable. You must avoid putting all eggs in one basket.

Desktime case study: Golden Parrot Awards 2025 winner in PR category

BACKGROUND

DeskTime has recently developed a new growth strategy with new target markets – India and Mexico among them. Without a physical presence in either of the markets, the question was simple – how can we increase our market share in these markets most effectively?

As anyone who's tried will tell you – India is a difficult market to penetrate, without a strong in-person presence and local connections. This extends to media, too.

Therefore, a PR campaign would have to be extraordinary to find success.

The overarching business goal was to increase brand awareness and recognition in the Indian and Mexican markets, with the eventual goal of increasing paid users in each of the markets.

This campaign was held two months ahead of a business exploration trip with a Latvian delegation to India, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Baiba Braže. A sub-goal of the campaign was to drive visibility and awareness ahead of the trip in order to establish legitimacy and increase the productivity of arranged business meetings in India.

THE STRATEGY

The topic of the campaign was: which country has the highest adoption rate of ChatGPT in the workplace?

The strategy was to develop country-targeted data-driven campaigns, aiming to see substantial increases in story pickup rates in the respective countries. To further drive interest in the story, we centered the data around the latest hot topic – AI, and more specifically, ChatGPT.

DeskTime’s global user base means that it is able to aggregate office behaviour data from all around the world. In this case, we were able to isolate the target markets that were of interest to us, as well as the average global rate, which served as a base comparison rate.

Data was pulled for every month starting from January 2023 to December 2024, showing the number of offices that use ChatGPT, as well as the hours employees spent using it. This allowed us to observe a trend in growth and adoption of the tool over two years. By completing the same analysis for India, Mexico, the USA, each Baltic country, and the world in total, we were able to observe trends as compared to other countries.

With a dataset of ChatGPT use over two years across several countries, we were able to identify which country has experienced the highest growth and adoption of the tool. And that was India, with 92% of workplaces having adopted ChatGPT in 2024.

We prepared a press release for each country separately, based on its findings, created a media list for each, and distributed the press release to the various media outlets around the world over February and March of 2025.

RESULTS

The campaign resulted in 36 publications in global media like TechRadar, MSN, as well as local media, like People Manager (IN), lado.mx (MX), Yahoo Tech (USA), etc.

It resulted in traffic spikes from each respective country (see submitted graphs) and sustained traffic growth. A growth in new paying clients was observed: 30% in Mexico, 5% in India when comparing new client onboarding between Jan-Apr of 2025.

Moreover, when the DeskTime delegation went to India on a business mission in April, they encountered widespread brand recognition. They were not once required to explain what DeskTime does, as it was already well known among business circles.

“Usually when we’re at events, we’re prepared to have to give the spiel about DeskTime. In India, we would start explaining, and our meeting counterpart would immediately stop us. It happened once, twice, three times, four, five, and then we understood that, wow, they really know DeskTime. This is a testament to the investment in PR.” –Sintija Pētersone, COO at DeskTime

The DeskTime team returned from the India trip with 13 new resellers in the pipeline, several large companies with 1000+ employees in the pipeline.