This week, I decided to move our ad retargeting business from AdRoll to Perfect Audience for a number of reasons, which I will explain:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>As I said earlier, both systems are great platforms, but I prefer to use Perfect Audience for the reasons above.
This is us :) <a href="http://perfectaudience.com" rel="nofollow">http://perfectaudience.com</a><p>Really terrific to see folks appreciating the time we spent slaving over the billing system and trying to make it not completely suck.<p>If anyone on HN is curious about retargeting, especially on Facebook, where low CPMs are plentiful, drop on by!
Retargeting as a concept is so counterintuitive.<p>User X visited your site and bounced. Now you need to show an ad to convince him to come back.<p>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.<p>I guess if this is delivering ROI though then I'm totally wrong.
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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>Wish List<p>- 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.<p>- 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.?
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!"<p>#rad.
I use Perfect Audience for Stackify (<a href="http://stackify.com" rel="nofollow">http://stackify.com</a>) 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.<p>As an aside, it would be great to see more posts on HN about "why I chose X over Y"