Perfect Audience (YC S11) Makes Facebook Retargeting Easy, Raises $1.1M

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The minimum will be lifted very soon. The reason for its existence is to phase in customers that will generate enough traffic to properly tune our bidding algorithms for the auction system that FBX uses. There's nothing specific about FBX that requires a minimum.

Wondering the same. I love Adroll and have had nothing but great success with them. That said, the more the merrier.

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.