Why I Moved From AdRoll to Perfect Audience
This week, I decided to move our ad retargeting business from AdRoll to Perfect Audience for a number of reasons, which I will explain:
1) Better Results A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing the differences between AdRoll and Perfect Audience in terms of performance. Both performed well, but PA performed better, and for less cost.
2) Clearer Billing Practices One thing that frustrated me about AdRoll was their vague billing methods, especially when you are running multiple campaigns for multiple customers. AdRoll would build up a "reseve" in our account, even though the campaigns weren't exhausting it. Perfect Audience sends a very clear, detailed summary of the billing each week by campaign, showing what was used the prior week, and what they need to replenish the campaign to get it to the weekly amount.
3) Easier UI Both systems have similar UI in terms of the setup, but PA is the winner here. I like their UTM tag builder, and the way I can differentiate between clients in what I would call "agency mode."
4) Receptive to Customers I thought that PA did a fantastic job of reaching out to customers and getting feedback. I gave them a few ideas that seemed to get their interest, and I like dealing with companies who value my opinion.
As I said earlier, both systems are great platforms, but I prefer to use Perfect Audience for the reasons above. This is us :) http://perfectaudience.com Really terrific to see folks appreciating the time we spent slaving over the billing system and trying to make it not completely suck. If anyone on HN is curious about retargeting, especially on Facebook, where low CPMs are plentiful, drop on by! Is PerfectAudience going to look into CPC billing in the future? It's possible! We've got so many feature requests rolling in though that it might take a while. Can you explain why CPC is important to you? If we did CPC pricing, we'd still be buying the inventory on a CPM basis. That means we'd have to develop an algorithm that determins what CPM to bid based on your CPC bid. To make sure we don't lose money on it, we'd have to add some safety margin in there which ultimately means you're paying more. Retargeting as a concept is so counterintuitive. User X visited your site and bounced. Now you need to show an ad to convince him to come back. If this is a solution to visitors bouncing, this seems to be going about it incorrectly. You should give them a good reason to stay on your site in the first place. If this is a solution to visitor retention - as in people leaving because they used your site and forgot about it - then you need to provide them a reminder that you exist as well as some ongoing value proposition. I guess if this is delivering ROI though then I'm totally wrong. You're not far off at all. Think about how you use the web. Right now I personally have 9 tabs open in my browser and I'm flitting from task to task. Lots and lots of people browse that way. Imagine you have an online store or a web service. You are working hard to drive traffic to your site, but only 5-6% might be "converting" in the desired way. There's many reasons for this including outright lack of interest. But for many, conversion doesn't happen because the time just wasn't right, or they got distracted, or life intervened. And seeing a reminder about that service a day or two later can be enough to bringing someone back to convert, when they're ready and clear-headed. All that said, at end of day, it comes down to ROI. And with retargeting, folks are able to spend $1 and get $8-12 in sales back from that dollar. It works, and can work really, really well. Happy to answer any other questions you might have! Advertising success is hugely dependent on repetition and retargeting is pretty much the perfect way to inexpensively get repeated impressions in front of a defined audience with a confirmed interest. It's also being used for branding. You see an ad for a service or product everywhere, and you'll think they're big. This is almost always the first reaction from customers. They love that they are able be "everywhere" for relatively little money. There's an old saying about advertising frequency: What a waste of everyone's time and money. This could be brainwashing, but luckily we seem to have developed a sort of banner-blindness to all the visual pollution this kind of marketing had caused. That's why Perfect Audience has invested bigtime in conversion tracking. Most ad platforms build the bare minimum product and then staff up on sales dudes. That often leaves conversion tracking in the dust. With Perfect Audience, our customers can store user data like e-mail addresses or order data like price or ID at the time of conversion, and then browse back through that data in our dashboard to see which orders or sign-ups came from their campaigns. We even show you which ad the user clicks on or viwed. Using tools like this, we make it easy to show how our campaigns are driving ROI and results for the advertiser. No hand-waving. I've been using Perfect Audience for Room 77 for a bit over a month or two now and I have some feedback to share as well. - I appreciate the much better UI for managing campaigns and the funding/billing was all very clear. Kudos for creating an intuitive and simple UI. - I think the CPA metrics should be broken out into click conversions only and click + view conversions as the view conversions are frankly much less attributable without doing an attribution modeling study. You also run into issues around double counting with any other retargeting or display platforms I might be using. Wish List - I'm moving my budgets on display more towards vendors who are providing more support for dynamic ads (feed inclusion, API integration) such as Criteo and Triggit which promises to use information about the products a user was interested in to create more targeted ads that deliver higher CTRs and more relevance. - Maybe I'm missing it but can I adjust frequency caps myself to specific rules like "no more than 7 ads in a 24 hour period" etc.? Hi, Roger! I really appreciate this. Responses: 1. Re: CPA reporting, we do break those numbers out in the campaigns table down below your main reporting graph. Sorry that's not more clearly labeled! 2. Re: Dynamic ads, that's not something we have in the main self-service app that you're using but it is something we offer folks who commit to minimums. 3. Re: Frequency caps. We set sane frequency caps automatically and adjust them over time for self-service customers. This protects our brand and the advertiser's! For folks who commit to minimum spends we can give over full control of those settings if desired. Happy to chat anytime this week about getting you squared away on these fronts. I just wrote to the e-mail address attached to your account to see if we can chat. Feel free to ping me at brad@perfectaudience.com if that's easier. Thanks for reaching out so quickly regarding the feedback. I'll touch base with you as we build out our display and retargeting strategy. Sounds good! Thanks for the info - I was signing up with Perfect Audience (currently an adroll customer) and chatted with their olark chat. After getting pretty technical with the guy on the other end, he said "Sorry, I'm not 100% sure on this - I am the CEO not the lead dev. I like to chat to get to know the customers!" #rad. I use Perfect Audience for Stackify (http://stackify.com) and it works really well. I also used AdRoll before. PA's UI is much better for sure. Their support has been amazing and I highly recommend them. Thanks for sharing this. I had a marginal experience with PA and your post is making me take a second look. As an aside, it would be great to see more posts on HN about "why I chose X over Y" Hi, Gavin, Feel free to drop me a line anytime at brad@perfectaudience.com. Launching a product is one thing. Building a brand and a business is another. We had a ton of companies sign up and check us out during the first few weeks. Meanwhile we kep making our tools better and better. We've launched at least 5 major updates in the last month alone. Would love to see if we can hook you up with more sales and conversions. Did you evaluate any other competitive platforms? I've used Retargeter in the past, but at a $500 per month flat fee, it's not always going to win over our customers. They prefer the smaller, weekly billing based on usage model.
The first time people look at any given ad, they don't even see it.
The second time, they don't notice it.
The third time, they are aware that it is there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they've seen it somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually read the ad.
The sixth time they thumb their nose at it.
The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with it.
The eighth time, they start to think, "Here's that confounded ad again."
The ninth time, they start to wonder if they're missing out on something.
The tenth time, they ask their friends and neighbors if they've tried it.
The eleventh time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
The twelfth time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
The thirteenth time, they start to feel the product has value.
The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting a product exactly like this for a long time.
The fifteenth time, they start to yearn for it because they can't afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
The seventeenth time, they make a note to buy the product.
The eighteenth time, they curse their poverty for not allowing them to buy this terrific product.
The nineteenth time, they count their money very carefully.
The twentieth time prospects see the ad, they buy what is offering.