Even prior to gaining access to this premium placement, FBX has been an absolute boon for advertisers of all sizes. Our initial group of advertisers saw 16x ROI on the platform, and more recent tests have yielded an 70% lower CPC when compared to standard web retargeting campaigns. We’re currently running campaigns for over 2,000 advertisers on Facebook, and are excited to see how these units take that striking FBX performance to a whole new level. Initial reports out of Facebook reveal Page Post Link Ads garner 20-40x higher CTR than that of standard FBX ads on the right hand side.

Facebook’s News Feed is the reason that billions of users log in to the platform each month. By nature of their premium placement, directly in the News Feed, these ad units are highly-visible and highly-engaging. The News Feed is the first place people go when they come to Facebook and the place where they spend the most time. As an added bonus, these units have all the familiar social elements, which give your retargeted PPLAs additional viral distribution as people like, share, and comment on your ad.

You can see how these new units stack up below:

Please visit our Support Center for more information and, if interested, sign up for our waiting list today. This functionality is still very much in Beta, but we’ll be rolling it out to more customers each week.

As an added bonus for Growth Hacker viewers and blog readers (specifically this post), we’re offering a $100 free trial with the promo code “GrowthHacker.” You must be a first-time AdRoll user.

Lastly, Adam must have accidentally left the ‘Joker filter’ on his webcam — I promise that he doesn’t always look like that.

iMedia Agency Summit | Date: 5/5-5/8 | Location: Hyatt Lost Pines Resort & Spa, Austin, Texas

eTail Latin America | Date: 5/22 – 5/24 | Location: Eden Roc Renaissance, Miami Beach, FL

Digiday Innovation | Date: 5/15 – 5/17 | Location: Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas, NV

Fashion Digital | Date: 5/16 | Location: Director’s Guild of America Theater, West Hollywood, CA

Internet Week | Date:  5/20 – 5/27 | Location: IWNY HQ, New York, NY

Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit | Date: 5/29-5/30 | Location: King Edward Hotel, Toronto, Ontario

Ryan McDermott, Director of Business Development, will be hitting the stage for his session on How to Decipher and Maximize Your Retargeting ROI  on Wednesday, May 29th at 2:15 PM.

RampUp 2013 | Date: 5/30 | Location: Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

President Adam Berke will be speaking at the summit on site and CRM retargeting at 2:45 PM.

So, how did we get here? Over the last six years, we’ve grown from five people crammed into a back closet of another startup, to 175 people (somehow still) packed into a renovated SOMA warehouse. At all stages, we’ve been obsessed with our culture and people. While Silicon Valley startups are notorious for the perks (eg., 50’ slides, onsite massages, private chefs), we really believe it’s the deeper DNA that sets a culture apart.

ShangRolla 2012 (top) v. ShangRolla 2013 (bottom)

As a company grows, headcount and physical expansion can put serious strain on a culture. That’s why we’ve found it important lately to put names to our once implicit values, so we can deliberately reinforce them, measure against them, and debate them.

Below is an abbreviated tour of our key values. We admit many of these are works in progress, but we’ve identified them as the key contributors to our success. Without further ado, “How We Roll”:

Hire Great People And Help Each Other Grow

Our core belief is we are nothing more than our people. With this in mind, we are fanatical about adding the most inspired, smartest people to the team. That can be hard work in a place like SF, where there are plenty of great companies competing for a finite pool of all-stars.

Our main strategy to attract great people (and keep churn at near zero) is to invest heavily in the development of our team. This practice in turns leads to better, happier employees who eagerly refer their friends and colleagues.

A cornerstone of our employee investment is called HonorRoll, a vibrant internal training program in which AdRoll employees teach over 50 classes a month to each other across all subjects. Feedback on class leaders is collected and graded, which leads to continually improving presenters and courses. We think it’s a good thing to actively push people beyond their comfort zones. As our first investor Peter Thiel likes to says about fast-growth startups, “If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably not doing it right.”

Nohana, HonorRoll cadet

The mentoring ethic also spills into our day-to-day team culture. For example, whereas many sales teams are cutthroat, our sales team thrives on collaborating to help all boats rise. We invest in outside training and materials as well. For instance, our product team is excited to attend Marty Cagan’s upcoming How To Make Products Customers Love workshop, and engineering enjoys all the programming books they can grok a stick at.

Investing in people allows us to recruit hungry, high potential people that can move up, rather than comprising to bring on folks who merely have experience as hallmark.

Be Open And Authentic

Transparency is a key principle at AdRoll and has become popular across companies we admire (see SEOMoz’s TAGFEE and Stripe’s Email Transparency). And for good reason–we’ve learned the more we share, the more employees engage and make better decisions. As such, we push to shed sunlight on all and err on the side of being open.

Revenue, metrics and team/individual quarterly goals (OKRs) are shared with the whole enterprise. Another example of openness is the “Rollywood Squares” segment of our Friday afternoon all-hands. It works like this. In the morning, a Google Moderator board is sent out. Employees can post any question they want and vote up their co-workers questions. You are encouraged to bring forth, in question form, your fear, uncertainties and doubts. You can also post anonymously. (“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde.)

Circle takes the square!

At all-hands, the questions are unveiled to the management team and answered openly and on the spot. This seemed scary at first, but the benefit we’ve seen is material issues can surface and be addressed, rather than lingering behind closed doors as gossip.

Probably the most obvious place you’ll see openness in AdRoll culture is our floor plan. No one at AdRoll has ever had an office. We like working in close quarters, which fosters collaboration and high-bandwidth communication, and is just more fun.

The “authentic” part of this value is an important complement to “openness.” Be real, no egos, no drama, no signaling. Talk in plain English. It’s ok to make mistakes. All of this leads to accountability and helps you avoid the politicking that can occur as an org grows more complex.

Do Right By The Customer, Community, and Each Other

At AdRoll, we work with advertisers of all sizes. We feel great about the work we do, because we help people build their businesses, and we do it ethically. A lot of our customers don’t work at large corporations where they’re spending someone else’s money. We take that trust seriously, and sincerely care about helping them succeed.

In our industry, there is a lot of data and there can be a lot of noise. A classic challenge is the complexity in properly measuring the attribution of your marketing. This goes back to our principle of openness, but we believe in full transparency in our pricing and representation of campaigns (eg, what sites your ads show up on.) We are an agent here to help leverage your data, rather than an outsider that uses your own data to arbitrage against you. We believe in split tests to help you measure real lift. This is rare in the advertising world.

We believe in doing the right thing even if it’s not the profitable thing to do. Sometimes this comes up around another aspect of our industry. Digital advertising lies at the center of society’s evolving debate of privacy vs. personalization. The Internet is great because it allows ideas and content to flow freely. You can hop from your custom Pandora radio station, to your bottomless Gmail account, to a friend’s Twitter feed, to a foreign newspaper, to a game of Scrabble with your mom. We’ve come to rely on these services and advertising makes this possible.

We are passionate advocates for giving web users anonymity, full transparency and control of any data that’s collected. This sometimes requires us to make hard decisions that don’t align with the bottom line. Fundamentally, we believe web users should be in the driver seat, and this will lead to best outcome for the holy trinity of advertiser, publisher and web user.

Lastly, we believe in giving back to our community. ShangRolla is located in an interesting block, also known as The Hinge. On one corner, you have Mint Plaza and Bloomingdales, and on the other… things aren’t rosy and there are a large number of homeless. It’s the kind of block only San Francisco can pull off. As such, we’re exposed to the harsh realities of our city. We’ve established our own Culture Club with frequent volunteer events to give back and do right.

Rollers volunteering at the San Francisco Food Bank earlier this week

Take Work Seriously, But Don’t Take Yourself Seriously

This is another one that’s obvious as soon as you walk in the door. We believe in a fun culture. We think it’s possible to be fiercely ambitious, while also having a good time. We like to celebrate achievements, but continue to set big goals.

There are literally hundreds of pictures I could paste here to demonstrate my point. But, I think just one will do:

Rollers in conga-line formation at our RollerDisco for ad:tech

Do More With Less

In understanding this value, it’s helpful to reflect on where we came from. We raised our Series A round just weeks before the economic pancake-ing of 2008. The bad economy ended up being a blessing in disguise as we were forced to work closely with our customers to make a product that works.

From this early period, we learned the important lessons of creativity and ingenuity over flashiness. We work hard to find a way no matter our resources and realize that there is always room for improvement in everything we do.

The AdRoll winter, before we had heat. Thank goodness for warm Snuggies.

Sound like the right place for you?

We do our best to make sure these values pervade everything we do, from our marketing, office culture, hiring to AdRoll’s user interface. They are important internally and also are key in how we present ourselves to the world. So, how do they sound to you? Roll with us… check out our jobs page here.

LaunchPoint’s solution categories include: online ads and campaigns (where you’ll find AdRoll retargeting), content marketing, analytics and big data, and social media.

We already provide easy-to-use and tremendously effective retargeting solutions for many Marketo users, and are excited to welcome more to our platform.

Only got twenty dollars in my pocket”

- Macklemore “Thrift Shop” 

While rapper Macklemore hasn’t spent time working in online marketing himself, this chorus couldn’t be more relevant to our space. Today, marketing technology is all about popping tags – specifically javascript tags and pixels – both onto and off of your website.

And for marketers that only have twenty dollars in their figurative pocket, Google’s free Tag Manager product is quickly becoming one of the most widely-used tag management tools. GTM allows companies to easily manage the various vendor tags and pixels they place on their websites through a single interface.

We’re happy to announce that the AdRoll SmartPixel is now a Certified Vendor Tag in Google Tag Manager. This certification process provides deeper integration and additional functionality within GTM for the most widely-used tags in the industry, making placement and management of certified pixels as seamless as possible.

If you’re already a Google Tag Manager user, placement of our SmartPixel is a breeze and won’t require any time or resources from your web development team. To find out how, just follow the instructions on our support center. The integration also allows you to easily pass custom parameters like conversion values and order IDs into our SmartPixel.

If you’re not a GTM user – never fear – there are numerous tag management solutions out there offering marketers a wide spectrum of price points, feature sets, and technical options. We’ve had great success working with customers using numerous enterprise-quality tag management solutions like TagMan, Tealium, and BrightTag.  We also are just now integrated with Segment.io as well. Here at AdRoll, we think tag management is a great tool for the savvy, tag-popping marketer.

Given that B2B companies are earlier on the retargeting learning curve, there is plenty of room for implementing more sophisticated and more effective tactics. To take your retargeting efforts to the next level and truly leverage the wealth of data you already own you’ll want to:

• Strategically segment users based on their interests and level of intent

• Layer multiple campaigns together to guide users through the buy flow using different creative for each campaign

• Bid differently on ad placements depending on the estimated conversion rates and value of each user group

• Use conversion histograms to determine what is the optimal length of time to advertise to a certain group and with what frequency of ad impression

For example, let’s take a common scenario amongst tech companies where a free trial is offered. Here’s how we might set up a retargeting campaign for a company like this:

1. Target “upper funnel” traffic from a website’s homepage and landing pages for a shorter period of time, using general branded ads with a clear value proposition and branded ads with a call to action, with a lower frequency of impressions and at a lower bid to drive users into the free trial (or white paper download, webinar pages, pricing pages, lead gen. form pages, etc.). We might set up ad groups within this campaign showing different product and service offerings to users based on which pages of the website they visited.

2. Layer on a second campaign that targets users during the free trial period with product information, features to highlight, pricing information, etc. to help increase conversion rates from the trial to paying customer.

a. Also target users who registered for a free trial but didn’t sign up for the paid subscription after the free trial period has ended. (As this is a more qualified group who has demonstrated a higher level of intent, we might target them more aggressively for a longer period of time and bid higher on ad placements while using different messaging in the creative.)

3. Add a third campaign targeting users who were not swayed by the second campaign with some incentive, discount, or extended free trial to keep them moving down the purchase funnel.

Retargeting can even be used to target existing customers with upsells, new promotions, products, events, and information, blurring the lines between demand response and CRM. Designing a series of well-thought-through retargeting campaigns in order to drive incremental conversions at the right intersection between volume and CPA while creating general engagement and branding for your company should be the aim of any retargeting program and can be a great way to round out your overall marketing program. 

Want more tips and tricks? We’d love to have a conversation about what this would look like for your business! Feel free to reach out to solutions@adroll.com for more information and to speak with one of our specialists.

What are LiquidAds?

Here at AdRoll, we help businesses of all sizes re-engage potential customers who’ve already expressed interest in a brand with precise display ads across the web and on Facebook with Facebook Exchange.

With our LiquidAds dynamic ad product, we take personalization to the next level—enabling advertisers to retarget visitors with ads featuring the exact products they were recently browsing and recommended products for that specific person. With LiquidAds on Facebook Exchange, advertisers saw their click-through rates double.

Our Magento extension brings this sophisticated technology, previously available to only the largest brands and agencies, to any merchant using the Magento platform. We’ve also eliminated the complicated setup and time-consuming integration required when implementing dynamic retargeting. This saves merchants time and money, and requires no involvement from engineering teams.

Skullcandy is just one example of a brand leveraging stunning, yet simple, LiquidAds

What does our extension do?

Our extension makes dynamic retargeting a snap. When you install the extension, we automatically:

1. Create an account, place the necessary JavaScript snippet on your site and set up conversion tracking to measure advertising success.

2. Seamlessly import your site’s product information without the need for a feed or any integration work.

3.  … and produce stunning LiquidAds with the products users last viewed and recommended products. No extra technical legwork or financial commitment is required. Merchants can then tweak various elements of the ad creative to achieve their desired look.

And voila! With just a few clicks, Magento merchants can now easily launch their campaigns in minutes.

 Visit our AdRoll retargeting through Magento page for more information.

Facebook’s oft-publicized reach is undoubtedly impressive – over 1 billion people use the site each month. What’s arguably more impressive though is the time that each of those users spent scoping their friends’ profiles, pictures and recent check-ins. Facebook attracts a massive audience throughout the day for extended, though not always undivided, periods of time. This gives advertisers of the newly-minted Facebook Exchange (FBX) a great opportunity to connect with potential customers who have already visited their site, and a better chance that those prospects will interact with the ads and finally purchase.

Reach is one thing; quality is another. FBX ad units are above the fold, which is a big CTR advantage. This is further enhanced by the fact that for a user to see an ad on Facebook, they need to be logged in – which helps ensure that ads are seen by real people, thus eliminating waste from fraud, bots, etc. We’ve seen engagement with the channel soar since its inception last June. In fact, we now serve over half of our retargeting impressions (63%, to be exact) on Facebook.

Because I already spoke about performance metrics (when compared to standard web retargeting campaigns) last month, I’m going to talk a bit about the types of advertisers that we’re seeing effectively use FBX this time around:

• Of the campaigns we’ve run on FBX last year, around 50% of advertising spend came from the apparel, sporting goods and tech verticals. This is not entirely surprising given those seeking these products tend to be a younger, more tech savvy crowd. 

• Interestingly enough, ads coming from the home and CPG verticals have resonated extremely well, garnering higher-than-average conversions rates. These verticals have been traditionally print and tv ad heavy and stand to do very well as newer direct-to-consumer business models evolve and intended audiences become more connected on multiple channels.

• Though traditionally a strong direct response segment easily using stunning imagery for display ads, the travel industry has been slow to adopt the new platform. However, over the past few months, we’ve seen the sector dramatically ramping up with great results.

Given the success we’ve seen across a diverse set of customers, it’s become increasingly evident that with the right approach, FBX is a no-brainer for any business regardless of size or vertical.

Mountain Travel Symposium | 4/7-4/13 | Westin Snowmass Conference Center, Snowmass, Colorado

Marketo Summit | 4/8-4/10 | Hilton Union Square, San Francisco, CA

Imagine 2013 | 4/8-4/10 | M Resort, Las Vegas, NV

We’ll be available to demo and meet at the Magento Marketplace throughout the conference.

ad:tech SF | 4/9-4/10 | Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

Drop by booth 2739! Also, our President, Adam Berke, will be presenting with Ryan Bonifacino, Vice President of Digital Strategy at Alex and Ani, on the Social Ad Crash Course: How to Create Great Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Campaigns. See him speak on Wednesday, April 10th at 1:15 PM.

Campaign Tech 2013 | 4/18-4/19| The Washington Marriott, Washington D.C.

Digital Hollywood Spring | 4/29-5/2 | The Ritz Carlton Hotel, Marina del Ray, CA

Adam Berke will be presenting at Hypertargeting: Ad Networks, Ad Serving and Ad Targeting on Monday, April 29th at 1 PM.

eTail Canada | 4/29-5/1 | Hyatt Regency on King St., Toronto, CA

NetFinance | 4/30-5/2 | The Wigwam, Litchfield Park, AZ