Why I Moved From AdRoll to Perfect Audience
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.
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.
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."
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.
As I said earlier, both systems are great platforms, but I prefer to use Perfect Audience for the reasons above.
22 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadReally terrific to see folks appreciating the time we spent slaving over the billing system and trying to make it not completely suck.
If anyone on HN is curious about retargeting, especially on Facebook, where low CPMs are plentiful, drop on by!
Can you explain why CPC is important to you?
If we did CPC pricing, we'd still be buying the inventory on a CPM basis. That means we'd have to develop an algorithm that determins what CPM to bid based on your CPC bid. To make sure we don't lose money on it, we'd have to add some safety margin in there which ultimately means you're paying more.
User X visited your site and bounced. Now you need to show an ad to convince him to come back.
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.
I guess if this is delivering ROI though then I'm totally wrong.
Imagine you have an online store or a web service. You are working hard to drive traffic to your site, but only 5-6% might be "converting" in the desired way.
There's many reasons for this including outright lack of interest.
But for many, conversion doesn't happen because the time just wasn't right, or they got distracted, or life intervened. And seeing a reminder about that service a day or two later can be enough to bringing someone back to convert, when they're ready and clear-headed.
All that said, at end of day, it comes down to ROI. And with retargeting, folks are able to spend $1 and get $8-12 in sales back from that dollar. It works, and can work really, really well.
Happy to answer any other questions you might have!
This could be brainwashing, but luckily we seem to have developed a sort of banner-blindness to all the visual pollution this kind of marketing had caused.
With Perfect Audience, our customers can store user data like e-mail addresses or order data like price or ID at the time of conversion, and then browse back through that data in our dashboard to see which orders or sign-ups came from their campaigns. We even show you which ad the user clicks on or viwed.
Using tools like this, we make it easy to show how our campaigns are driving ROI and results for the advertiser. No hand-waving.
- 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.
- 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.
Wish List
- 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.
- 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.?
1. Re: CPA reporting, we do break those numbers out in the campaigns table down below your main reporting graph. Sorry that's not more clearly labeled!
2. Re: Dynamic ads, that's not something we have in the main self-service app that you're using but it is something we offer folks who commit to minimums.
3. Re: Frequency caps. We set sane frequency caps automatically and adjust them over time for self-service customers. This protects our brand and the advertiser's! For folks who commit to minimum spends we can give over full control of those settings if desired.
Happy to chat anytime this week about getting you squared away on these fronts. I just wrote to the e-mail address attached to your account to see if we can chat. Feel free to ping me at brad@perfectaudience.com if that's easier.
As an aside, it would be great to see more posts on HN about "why I chose X over Y"
Feel free to drop me a line anytime at brad@perfectaudience.com.
Launching a product is one thing. Building a brand and a business is another. We had a ton of companies sign up and check us out during the first few weeks. Meanwhile we kep making our tools better and better. We've launched at least 5 major updates in the last month alone. Would love to see if we can hook you up with more sales and conversions.
#rad.