With most online services, the idea behind advertising is to get people to come to your site to make some sort of transaction. Most of the time, that doesn’t happen. In fact, even if they click on an ad to come to your site, 98% of the time, those users will leave without buying anything, according to the advertising startup Adroll. A new service they are offering hopes to help with that problem.
The idea of ad “retargeting” is not at all new. A ton of big brands and advertising platforms use it to try to lure users back to sites using the fact that they know they already visited once. The difference with Adroll’s new RoundTrip product is that they are making the practice accessible to any online advertiser to use. Previously, this type of campaign was reserved for those who were willing to spend a lot of money for this much more highly targeted ad type.
With RoundTrip, Adroll is specifically aiming for small and medium sized brands. They’re doing this by not requiring a minimum spend threshold which customers have to pass in order to have access to retargeting ads. This makes sense as Adroll has always been about targeting the so-called “long-tail” brands with its method of rolling up these smaller brands to get to a size that will still attract some bigger advertisers.
And this makes sense for a lot of these smaller brands as most of the time people probably aren’t coming to a site to do an impulse buy. Instead, they may simply be checking out a product to decide if they should buy it later. With retargeting, ads can remind users about this product they’ve checked out in the past and may be ready to buy now.
This has the potential to be profitable as hell, or redundant noise for the user, or both.
Interesting concept — ReTargeter has been doing this for quite some time and has very reasonable price points for small to mid-sized publishers (http://retargeter.com). I haven’t used the service yet, but I have heard of many people having lots of success with ReTargeter.
Retargeter isn’t self service and costs $500 per month, according to their website. OUCH.
Interesting, but couldnt Google implement this in a matter of minutes?
They actually already offer this as well as with yahoo.
If anyone would like to give RoundTrip a spin risk free, we’re offering a free 2 week trial with the promo code FREETRIAL.
What is the difference from FechBack or Criteo ?
Can you set a CPC ? what is the model : Auctions ?
As someone who does a fair amount of online adbuys for small and medium sized budgets, I’ll definitely keep this in mind. Sounds like a great service.
Congrats Adam and Taco!
If you can get back in front of the people that you know were at least somewhat interested in your product, that would be amazing. What a targetted way to subtlely stay in front of your audience. Hopefully it stays subtle and not intrusive, but what a concept for an advertiser!
Hmm…seems a little late?
One of my friends (business owner) has been using http://www.retargeter.com already….they seem to have been doing this quite successfully for a while now.
There are some other retargeting products with low hurdles to sign up like Platform A’s LeadBack service and a couple of others. What is the advantage of this service over other ones like that? Since LeadBack is owned by Advertising.com (ie, AOL), they have large market reach.
Thanks for the comments. We’re looking forward to making this effective technique available to smaller businesses. The key to RoundTrip vs other alternatives is that:
* It’s cross-platform for massive reach
* It’s easy to setup (just a matter of minutes)
* Requires no minimum budget, so anyone can use it
I’ve seen this in action and was impressed before I even realized who was doing it.
Mark my words, Adroll is quietly becoming the premier ad network/services company on the Internet.
or
http://www.veruta.com
its cool and fun stuff. No clue if the ROI pays off, but its cool.
If you can get back in front of the people that you know were at least somewhat interested in your product, that would be amazing. What a targetted way to sublley stay in front of your audience. Hopefully it stays subtle and not intrusive, but what a concept for an advertiser!
I know of FetchBack.com offers this type of re-targeting. And you can get rather specific, you can tell what product pages a customer visited and serve banner ads with the products the browsed. You can also retarget them with the product abandoned in a check out cart. Again, FetchBack already offers a low barrier to entry price wise, and many small e-commerce retailers are already using it.
I also heard that Google is planning on offering some type of retargeting functionality with their display ads and adwords.
Perhaps the greatest thing about this type of advertising is that people don’t know they are being re-targeted so they think that the site they just visited has a gigantic advertising budget because the banner ads are everywhere they go on the web. This aids in the re-targeting effort because it creates the feeling that the website is more reputable.
It’s not clear from the Adroll website what limitations there are on Adroll’s own use of your data. Adroll finds out for free from a pixel on your website that a user looked at product X and didn’t buy (or even added it to their cart and then abandoned it). In theory, you give Adroll this data so they can properly target your ads, but what’s to stop them from displaying a just-as-relevant ad for your competitor instead?
Or if, for instance, the user bought a printer on your site, Adroll could then sell high-CPM inventory to toner sellers, again without compensating you for giving them the data.
It’s a good business for Adroll to be in.
I know that http//www.globalinteractive.com is big in retargeting and drives lots of volume so not sure how Adroll is different, its not really a new product…
It’s very impressive to see this advanced marketing technique brought to smaller businesses thanks to the power of the web. Great source of inspiration.
Fetchback.com also does this.
From my experience http://www.retargeter.com does a pretty damn good job. Cover the long tail, SMBs, etc. and they’re fairly cost effective.
Tried Fetchback before but they were quite pricey.
Nice concept .
http://en.wikip...ral_retargeting
Veruta and Fetchback already do this .I think the only advantage with adroll is that they allow a smaller budget.
Very cool concept and definitely useful for advertisers. Today it is, Retargeter or Veruta or Adroll but tomorrow, it will also be Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. This is a concept that everyone will adopt as it evolves further.
One issue that I can think of is that sometimes advertisers may not want to display certain ads (like of their competitor!) and there should be some filter to manage that.
Techcrunch, I think you should have done your homework and reported on the company who pioneered this space, ReTargeter. ReTargeter ad retargeting is for companies who take their advertising seriously.
Retargeting has been around for a while, even longer than ReTargeter. So being first doesn’t make you better or worthy of more praise. The great value that AdRoll offers is the self-service technology and ease of implementation, which speaks to all those millions of companies neglected by traditional retargeting firms.