How Retargeting Gets Our SaaS $650 for $6

The &quot;$650 for $6&quot; part is a bit disingenuous. That&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t bring anyone new in.<p>What needs to be compared is conversion rate with&#x2F;without retargeting (i.e. retarget only a portion of the same traffic at the same time), and whether the <i>added</i> conversions, if there are any, bring in more revenue than it cost to do the additional advertising. That&#x27;s something you can measure rather than guess or speculate based on anecdotal feedback.<p>Not to say that retargeting isn&#x27;t probably working out for you. I use it as well (also with Perfect Audience, they&#x27;re great). But I have also wasted enough money on ads that felt like they were working but really weren&#x27;t that I take the time to measure results now. For example, I don&#x27;t retarget every visitor to the site. Only hitting people that viewed the pricing or signup pages works just as well.

Hey folks. This is Brad from Perfect Audience. Happy to answer any questions about Retargeting.<p>If anyone on HN wants to get started, go ahead and ping us at support@perfectaudience.com with the subject line: &quot;Hello from HN&quot; and we can hook you up with some extra trial credits.<p><a href="http://www.perfectaudience.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfectaudience.com</a>

You glossed over the part where 38&#x2F;41 of your conversions are view through conversions.<p>A view through conversion occurs when a user sees your ad, returns to your site through another channel and then converts.<p>How often do you see an ad banner, don&#x27;t click on it, then go back to the site because of the banner? View through conversions are a bullshit metric.

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.<p>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.<p>E. g.: Person visits our blog, but leaves after that. Person reappears on another site of the same ad network that has keywords like &quot;free&quot;, &quot;open source&quot; etc. in it -&gt; strong signal that he doesn&#x27;t want to pay -&gt; remove from retargeting.

I like the transparency in this post. It&#x27;s great that you let us look at your numbers so willingly (e.g. <a href="https://demo.baremetrics.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.baremetrics.io</a>)<p>It will be interesting to see, if there is a &quot;ad blindness&quot; effect kicking in after a few months. I would love to read a report in 3-6 months.<p>BTW: Your style of writing is great :-)

I&#x27;ve been using retargeting (perfect audience) for the last 2 months and find it useful.<p>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.<p>The dollar amount is quite low. In the last 30 days, 176,333 impressions were served for a total of $377.68 That&#x27;s a lot of eyeballs for less than $400 a month.<p>To me, even if no one ever converted, that is worth it simply as an investment in brand building.<p>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 &#x2F; special).

How much weight do you put on assisted conversions (VTC within perfect audience)? I&#x27;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.

Retargeting is a pain in the butt, you click on an interview of an actor that happens to be in a women&#x27;s magazine, and then you get ads for dresses and bikinis for week. You click one popular song, and you&#x27;re flagged as a teenager.

One site has been continually spamming me with ads after I visited their site once.<p>Now I click on their ads whenever I see them, just to cost them $1 (or whatever they&#x27;re paying per click).