

How Retargeting Gets Our SaaS $650 for $6 - aculver
https://www.baremetrics.io/blog/saas-retargeting

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dangrossman
The "$650 for $6" part is a bit disingenuous. That's what you spent showing
banners to people that saw your site and eventually converted. You might have
gotten that $650 without spending a single dollar if they were going to
convert anyway. It's not unusual, especially in B2B, for someone to convert
days or weeks after the first visit. You probably also spent more than $0
acquiring some of those visitors to get them on the retargeting list in the
first place -- retargeting doesn't bring anyone new in.

What needs to be compared is conversion rate with/without retargeting (i.e.
retarget only a portion of the same traffic at the same time), and whether the
_added_ conversions, if there are any, bring in more revenue than it cost to
do the additional advertising. That's something you can measure rather than
guess or speculate based on anecdotal feedback.

Not to say that retargeting isn't probably working out for you. I use it as
well (also with Perfect Audience, they're great). But I have also wasted
enough money on ads that felt like they were working but really weren't that I
take the time to measure results now. For example, I don't retarget every
visitor to the site. Only hitting people that viewed the pricing or signup
pages works just as well.

~~~
Shpigford
Dan, I don't spend any money on bringing in new customers. The only money I
spend on any marketing at all is via retargeting.

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brandnewlow
Hey folks. This is Brad from Perfect Audience. Happy to answer any questions
about Retargeting.

If anyone on HN wants to get started, go ahead and ping us at
support@perfectaudience.com with the subject line: "Hello from HN" and we can
hook you up with some extra trial credits.

[http://www.perfectaudience.com](http://www.perfectaudience.com)

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kyledilger
You glossed over the part where 38/41 of your conversions are view through
conversions.

A view through conversion occurs when a user sees your ad, returns to your
site through another channel and then converts.

How often do you see an ad banner, don't click on it, then go back to the site
because of the banner? View through conversions are a bullshit metric.

~~~
Shpigford
Kyle! Thanks for the comment. As with anything anywhere ever, YMMV. Just
because a metric is bogus for one business doesn't mean it is across the
board.

I have a phone call with almost every new customer and the data from those
calls supports VTC as a metric...nearly all new customers saw Baremetrics
everywhere before they ultimately converted.

Lots of reasons why that's the case for our business (goes back to the value
proposition I mentioned in the article).

Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but I'm confident in that metric
for us.

~~~
spamross
A way to attribute view through conversions is to have Perfect Audience run a
test for you:

Keep cookie-ing people but don't show half of them any ads. Then compare the
conversion rate to the people shown ads and come up with VTR attribution
coefficient.

~~~
dhfromkorea
Does Perfect Audience support such testing feature natively? Would be
fantastic if I could do that without any configuration on my end.

~~~
brandnewlow
Not currently but we're working on it! Drop us a line at
support@perfectaudience.com. I can say for certain that our support team would
love to "roll" you away from our distinguished competitor.

~~~
dhfromkorea
Thanks. We(Plivo) actually tried PA out for the dev-targeting display ad
option. (not retargeting). We didn't feel we had the kind of ROI we wanted at
that time.

Incidentally, would the reports from Conversion Explorer be more granular than
the conversion reports at Adroll? (with Adroll, it's not possible to see the
"who" part, but when and where, yes)

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ntaso
A few weeks ago, I searched for an email newsletter service that was based in
Europe, preferably in Germany. I landed on a couple US-based sites and since
then, I was retargeted by their ads all the time. But them being located in
the States was a dealbreaker. All these ads never worked on me, because there
was a specific reason I left the sites in the first place.

Leaving a site is a signal of disinterest, which is completely ignored. So, it
would be interesting to take retargeting to the next level, by understanding
why someone left the website and build up a bunch of triggers that would
exclude some visitors.

E. g.: Person visits our blog, but leaves after that. Person reappears on
another site of the same ad network that has keywords like "free", "open
source" etc. in it -> strong signal that he doesn't want to pay -> remove from
retargeting.

~~~
jhonovich
To deal with this, we check if a visitor is coming via search and if so do not
show the tracking code / tag. We just focus on people who are coming direct to
our site, which is a stronger interest gauge.

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itengelhardt
I like the transparency in this post. It's great that you let us look at your
numbers so willingly (e.g.
[https://demo.baremetrics.io](https://demo.baremetrics.io))

It will be interesting to see, if there is a "ad blindness" effect kicking in
after a few months. I would love to read a report in 3-6 months.

BTW: Your style of writing is great :-)

~~~
hagbardgroup
That's why you rotate the creative and continually test new variations.

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jhonovich
I've been using retargeting (perfect audience) for the last 2 months and find
it useful.

First of all, it is extremely inexpensive and highly qualified. Compare to
LinkedIn or Twitter where the CPM is 5x to 10x greater and, in my experience,
less qualified than people who have already come to our site.

The dollar amount is quite low. In the last 30 days, 176,333 impressions were
served for a total of $377.68 That's a lot of eyeballs for less than $400 a
month.

To me, even if no one ever converted, that is worth it simply as an investment
in brand building.

We have also done a special offer only available as a retargeted ad, that is
converting very well (17 in the past month directly from the ad / special).

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benlarcey
How much weight do you put on assisted conversions (VTC within perfect
audience)? I've found that aCPA for my site is great at also around $5 but the
vast majority of these conversions are assisted conversions, i.e. not direct
click throughs.

~~~
brandnewlow
Have you sanity checked your conversion rates?

One thing that comes up with our customers is they say they'd like to see more
click conversions, but it turns out, the landing page they're sending traffic
to is bad or over optimized.

Meanwhile, people simply SEEING the ads are going to their main home page and
signing up normally.

So we've found it helpful to recommend folks compare post-click conversion
rates to their other channels to see if that makes sense.

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nraynaud
Retargeting is a pain in the butt, you click on an interview of an actor that
happens to be in a women's magazine, and then you get ads for dresses and
bikinis for week. You click one popular song, and you're flagged as a
teenager.

~~~
Shpigford
That's because those folks are doing it wrong. :) They're throwing crap-tons
of money hoping something will stick.

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fsk
One site has been continually spamming me with ads after I visited their site
once.

Now I click on their ads whenever I see them, just to cost them $1 (or
whatever they're paying per click).

