

Perfect Audience (YC S11) Makes Facebook Retargeting Easy, Raises $1.1M - brandnewlow
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/04/perfect-audience-launch/

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toast76
We've been using perfect audience at BugHerd for a while now and I'm an
unashamed fan (first twitter follower even!). Great product with amazing
support! Best of luck guys!

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brandnewlow
Thanks for annihilating all our preconceived notions about how people would
use our app. It's painful at times but incredibly useful in making our app
better.

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aaronharnly
I'm almost entirely ignorant of what "retargeting" is and how it works. My
impression is that the ad network serves me a cookie when I visit the client
page (acme.com). Then, on Facebook, I am shown an ad (from Acme? Or from
anyone), placed by the ad network, who has identified me as an acme.com
visitor.

Is that roughly correct, or could someone explain it to me like I'm simple?
Also, does this technique still work if my browser blocks 3rd-party cookies?

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brandnewlow
So if you've got a web app that sells widgets you work hard to get visitors to
come to your app and sign up.

If your web app is really awesome, maybe 10% of the people who visit on any
given day will sign up. For most of us, that sign up rate will look more like
5 or maybe 3%.

So that leaves 97% of your visitors leaving.

With retargeting, you add a code snippet to your source. It places an
anonymous cookie in the web browser of people who visit with a unique ID.

You then create ad campaigns with the ad network hosting the code snippet.
They have what's called a "real time bidding" platform that is plugged into
various ad networks. it might be Google's network. It might be Facebook's
network. And that real-time bidding platform can be given very specific
instructions like "show these ads only to people with this specific cookie
ID".

So then when you, the person who visited the web app and left without signing
up, visit a web site with ads connected to the retargeting platform, your
cookie signature is "spotted" and the retargeting platform bids aggressively
in a 50milisecond auction to win that specific ad impression. That's
retargeting.

So when you load web pages online, thousands of bidder robots are analyzing
the information available about you through the browser, and deciding whether
to try to buy that ad impression. It's like high frequency trading for ads.

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brandnewlow
Brad from Perfect Audience here. I owe so much to HN and all the great advice
I've received on here over the years. Happy to answer questions about YC,
online advertising for startups, or anything else. We're really excited to get
out of the gate and "on the board."

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hnwh
Can we enter multiple targeting sites? It seems as if its limited to 1 per
account right now

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brandnewlow
Yes, for now, it's one site per account. We're working on multi-site support
very soon! If you make multiple accounts we can aggregate them all under the
login of your choosing after an e-mail to support@perfectaudience.com

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robryan
Is their support for multiple domains at the moment? I see that you enter a
domain, not sure if it will only record from that specific domain then? We
basically have .com, .co.uk, .com.au etc

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brandnewlow
You can definitely drop our tag on all your sites and it will work fine. Our
tag checker is pretty "limited". It'll check the domain you list for your tag.
It's not going to flip out if your tag is on other sites.

Creating lists will require you to use the javascript API since path-based
segmentation won't work that great with multiple domains.

But if you're running multiple domains to begin with, then I suspect firing
javascript events might not be too tough for you.

Shoot me an e-mail at brad@perfectaudience.com and one of our devs will be
happy to get you all squared away!

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josh2600
This looks cool.

I'm managing a bunch of sites so multi-domain retargeting would be awesome,
but I'll try it out on a domain we're putting up next month.

Looks cool. Are there any 'under-the-hood' improvements relative to other
retargeting platforms?

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brandnewlow
Hey, Josh,

So one of the ideas we're bringing to the table is that retargeting is really
a pretty typical web service/product that happens to involve advertising. It's
SaaS masquerading as ads.

If you follow that line of thought through and try to think of things that are
awesome about SaaS products you love, you get a retargeting platform that
works a bit different:

1\. Our product isn't designed to make you dependent on an account manager
over the phone. We see that with a lot of ad products. A big reason this
happens is because ad companies want to keep open an upsell channel and
control client spend to a degree.

That creates opportunity for us. I don't need an account manager to use
Mixpanel, or Optimizely, or Stripe. Those companies invest in great
documentation, good support, and great UI.

So that's what we've done as much as we could. Example: Advertisers get an
automated "campaign manager" page that analyzes your campaign performance
relative to global benchmarks set by all our users campaigns. It makes
recommendations on when to update your ad creative, which domains to
blacklist, and when to narrow your targeting based on real performance stats.
Ad smarts at your fingertips.

This is all basic stuff an account manager does at other companies. At Perfect
Audience, we automated it. We think that's cool.

2\. Our segmenting tools are pretty great. You can create retargeting lists
based on path or Querystring (for retargeting people from an ad campaign, for
example). We've also written a simple, elegant Javascript Tracking API that
lets our customers fire conversions and segment pixels based on arbitrary
javascript events. It's getting heavy use right now and was something a lot of
people asked for. Instead of us telling you how you can segment your traffic,
we give you the tools, document them, and you tell us when you want to fire
off your conversions and segments.

We have a loooong list of things we're working on that are coming out in the
next few months. Some of these things don't exist in any way shape or form on
the market, and we're stoked about them.

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robryan
Just wondering, is this product just putting a better interface/ aggregation
on Facebook retargeting or giving companies access to their retargeting
features that aren't available to all yet?

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brandnewlow
Facebook opened up its ad inventory to third party companies with real-time
bidding platforms a few months ago. Those companies can now help advertisers
cookie web visitors and serve ads to those people on Facebook. Facebook is not
selling this directly, only the vendors plugged into their "Facebook
Exchange."

There's a bunch of enterprisey companies out punching eachother in the slide-
deck to get big brands and the giant agencies using them for access to this.

We're the first company to roll out a fully functional solution with a free
trial and consumer-quality UI.

Our product also does web retargeting across all the ad exchanges. We've been
doing that for awhile when Facebook opened up and impressed us with the
results we were seeing. So we doubled down and moved these features to the
fore. Folks are digging it.

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cristianpascu
Are you competing with adroll.com? They told me that they've also partnered
with Facebook on retargeting. But they said there's like a $2k minimum right
now. Why there's no minimum with you?

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brandnewlow
We're competing against the "back" button, aka apathy. That's a way bigger
obstacle than any other company could be for a startup, right?

I have no idea why they're requiring a minimum.

We are not. That's why we're signing up hundreds of advertisers at the moment
and people are firing up campaigns left and right. Today is a good day.

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aaronjg
We use Perfect Audience at Custora, and are really happy with it. Couldn't be
easier to set up ad retargeting. And they have excellent service and support.
Congrats guys!

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brandnewlow
Here's our URL: <http://perfectaudience.com> (just realized it's not in here)

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kunle
Solid product. Brad and team are doing great work and we're super happy with
them.

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davidwhodge
Congrats brad!

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brandnewlow
Thanks man. It's weird being one of the last companies from our batch to
"launch." It's a huge relief to get it out of the way.

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lurker14
I am entertained that Firefox gave me a "Ghostery's tracker list has been
updated." notice at the same time I read this article.

Retargeting is one of the creepiest abuses of the web, chasing people across
the Internet after visiting your site once.

