Last week Brad Flora, co-founder and ceo of startup Perfect Audience reached out to me to offer a guided demo. He had seen my recent article on retargeting, and wanted to show me how Perfect Audience was making retargeting easy for companies of any size.
It was an impressive demo. Working with Facebook’s FBX Ad Exchange (good background here), Perfect Audience allows companies to retarget web visitors on Facebook. Reflecting a broad trend in technology, Perfect Audience has written software that productizes a service, in this case online retargeting.
This was a demo more than an interview, so I didn’t take notes in an Q&A format. Here are some of Brad’s comments that stood out to me:
- More transparency for the consumer — typical Facebook ads are targeted at users using demographic information. Retargeted ads use previous online activity, not profile information
- More for the advertiser — the reporting dashboard clearly lays out number of ads presented and various ROI metrics like CPC (cost per click), CPC (cost per conversion) and VTC (view to conversion, a new one for me)
- Launched in October of 2012, Perfect Audience claims over 2,000 clients
- Monthly budgets range from $50 all the way to $1ooK+
- Campaigns require just a single piece of tracking code and can be set up in minutes
- Perfect Audience offers retargeting campaigns across the Internet as well, working with networks like Google Doubleclick, Rubicon, Rubicon and OpenX
Reporting screen shot, courtesy of www.perfectaudience.com
There are two questions that came to me after the demo was over. One was pricing — Perfect Audience buys advertising on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, and charges their customers using the same metric. Why not some kind of CPA type pricing? Back in my Advertising.com days we created the CPC network advertising model and positioned it as offering far better value than CPM, a model carried over from the print world.
The second question was about the VTC metric. It makes sense that showing an ad makes it more likely for a visitor to return to a site, but without a click how can it be proven? It seems like a metric based on an assumption to me.
I’d recommend any company considering retargeting to sign up for the Perfect Audience free trial. The company offers it as a way to demonstrate their ROI prior to the client paying anything out of pocket. Facebook isn’t currently a major target for my B2B and B2G clients, but the web retargeting is a definite possibility.
Retargeting online is taking off — does Perfect Audience have a better (software driven) mousetrap? Time will tell, and the product looks very promising.