With lots of friendly new faces, a spacious new office ("ShangRolla") and an average of 300 new customers a month, AdRoll is growing fast. Today, we’re excited to share the metrics that prove it. In 2011, we increased our revenue by over 400% to achieve profitability —a huge milestone for any startup. We also grew our client roster to over 3,500 in the US and around the world, making AdRoll the most popular and widely adopted retargeting platform in the world.
We made great headway in the last year with partnerships. Several of the largest e-commerce software platforms, including Volusion, Miva Merchant, UltraCart, and 3dcart—representing over one million online stores—signed on to work with us. AdRoll has been cited as the fastest growing ad technology by third party sources, BuiltWith and W3Techs, and we’re now solidly among Google’s top five largest overall buyers.
All of this was made possible by four years of hard work from our smart, dedicated team. We’ve worked tirelessly to create what we believe to be the most scalable and effective ad retargeting platform around. And, with a 96% customer retention rate, our customers seem to agree.
As we move forward in 2012, our goal is to continue to innovate and further solidify our leadership position in retargeting, one of the most rapidly growing spaces in the $200B display advertising industry.
Here’s to what’s next!
AdRoll’s 2011 momentum, by the numbers:
- 414% increase in overall revenue
- 400% increase in impressions served
- 334% increase in customer base
Did you dust off your TI-82 in 2011? Well, you wouldn't be alone. 2011 was a left-brain year for display advertising. Ad technology businesses rushed to develop tools and methods for leveraging an increased availability of RTB inventory. DSPs and other buying platforms developed and tweaked algorithms to maximize efficiency for media buys across inventory sources.
Fast-forward to January 2012. We've now spent over a year focused on the math side of the problem. There are as many DSPs as ever, and while it would be hard for a new player to enter the market at this point, none of the existing providers are likely to disappear anytime soon. Brands now have myriad options for efficiently targeting precise audiences across large pools of display inventory. However, we're now hitting a wall when it comes to algorithmic media buying—the old law of diminishing returns. So, where do we go from here?
Rejoice right-brainers, in 2012 we’ll see creative become the focus of new technology and data application. Advertisers should stop milking algorithms for a measly ROI bump of 0.001%, and start caring about the actual content they're displaying.
Any experienced media buyer knows that when testing multiple versions of an ad, the winning creative routinely outperforms the worst by 2x-3x. Recently, an extensive research study conducted by comScore found that creative quality contributed to 52% of sales lift—4x the impact of the media plan which came in at 13%. Apply the latest innovations in dynamic ads with personalized product recommendations or dynamic offers, and it’s not uncommon to see ad performance improve five- to tenfold. Can you get that kind of improvement by testing one DSP's algorithm vs. another? Not going to happen, certainly not by those orders of magnitude.
Investment (both VC money and entrepreneur time) has been almost entirely absent from the creative side of the equation in recent years. It's as if the market collectively decided that creative was "solved" when Google acquired Teracent in 2009. But styles change in ad tech just as they do in fashion. Get ready for creative-oriented technologies to be the little black dress of 2012.
This time, though, we stand poised to truly take advantage of awesome creative. The most established creative-oriented technologies—creative optimization, rich media, etc.—were founded in a pre-exchange/RTB world. The next wave of these technologies will provide a blend of personalization and analytics (our friends at the rightfully buzzed-about Moat give a hell of a demo.) Now, we can optimize creative not only on performance, but also on audience data. This is especially true in the world of retargeting where there's plenty of rich first party data for slicing and dicing.
However, there's a huge untapped opportunity to apply both first- and third-party data sets to creative decisions. Finally, left-brain and right-brain strategies unite! Why choose between the software engineer and the supermodel? In 2012, the look and feel of what you say matters just as much as how efficiently you say it.
This holiday season, AdRoll is giving you a gift that will keep giving all the way into the New Year! For a limited time, we’re doubling our free trial for new customers.
Check out the link below to capture more conversions over the Holidays!
Privacy and user control are very important to us here at AdRoll.This is a post that Adam and Aaron wrote for AdExchanger about a vision of how targeted ads can be a big benefit for web users:Dear Internet User,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 the Twitter feed of an historical liberation movement, to a casual game of “Words With Friends.” We’ve come to rely on these services and expect to access them for free, without paywalls or contracts.Advertising makes this possible. Advertising is the lubricant of the Internet.
Unfortunately, much of the advertising you’ve seen sucks. That’s because the first phase of online advertising was dominated by direct response marketing. Without robust targeting capabilities, advertisers developed an overreliance on obnoxious practices such as dancing aliens and obtrusive popups.
But ads can be much better. New technologies are enabling ads that are relevant, interesting and provide you value. These technologies can lead us into a new phase of online advertising, where marketing is effective because it’s personalized, not because it’s intrusive. However, the key to this new phase is that you, the user, must be in control.
To illustrate: remember how everyone used to hate email marketing? That’s changed. Now people liberally share their email addresses to access daily deals, sales, and last minute concert announcements. When they don’t want to receive email anymore, they unsubscribe. The rules are clear, abuses are more easily identified and addressed, and the system works well for both marketers and users.
The same systems can work in display advertising. You choose which brands you’re interested in and when to unsubscribe. Advertisers won’t know who you are personally, but they can be confident you are a person receptive to their message. With this confidence, advertisers help your favorite sites flourish by paying them more.
And you will be in the driver seat, with an inside track to products, services and specials that you want. This partnership between users and advertisers will ensure that information and content remain free, as they’re meant to be.
- AdRoll
Double dose of love from our peers at
AdExchanger, a leading digital media optimization blog.
First, our fearless CEO, Aaron Bell, and President, Adam Berke, are featured in a piece answering the provocative question “Why is tracking good?”. Check out
their thoughtful insights on the topic of Internet privacy/ tracking.
According to the Google report cited in
another AdExchanger piece, AdRoll has the highest CTR of any third party ad network in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We're second only to AdWords, and they own the network!
There are many ways you can tell your startup is growing. Of course, we have our own internalmetrics around the hundreds of new retargeting advertisers who start using AdRoll every month. We’ve also found that two additional growth indicators are an increase in number of ramen packages consumed and an increase in boxes of gear delivered.
As much as we love ramen and gear, there’s one thing we love more: neutral, 3rd-party data validation.
This week we’re especially excited about topping BuiltWith.com’s list of fastest growing online advertising technologies over thepast year. BuiltWith is a leading provider of website technology trends analysis and competitor intelligence products. They crawl the web, inspecting each site, and figure out which tech said sites are "built with", so to speak. It’s a great feeling to be acknowledged by esteemed peers in the tech world. Without further ado....
3DCart, one of AdRoll's ecommerce software partners, recently announced the launch of version 4. As the biggest rollout to date, 3DCart 4 capitalizes on the group buying trend by putting control of group deals in the hands of online businesses. The new version also features tight integration with AdRoll.
As part of the release, 3DCart is inviting merchants to use AdRoll and 3dcart with a special promotion:
sign up for one month of service and get two months free.
The biggest new features of 3DCart 4 include:
- Daily Deals – By featuring a “daily deal” on their sites, online stores gain the ability to drive more conversions by adding urgency, pique customer interest with exclusivity, allow partner sites to promote deals, generate more content for social media channels and more easily clear stock of outdated products.
- Group Deals – The new “Group Deals” tool gives online stores the ability to feature their own group deals without paying out to a middleman. Businesses have the ability to run their own group promotions whenever they want and control how those deals are promoted.
- Make An Offer – This feature allows customers to place a bid on items. If the bid falls within a pre-designated percentage margin, the sale is closed. If not, the administrator has the ability to accept or decline the sale. The feature is meant to appeal to comparison, bargain and haggling shoppers.
- Autoresponders – Set and forget autoresponders—preprogrammed emails that go out based on customer activity and designations—to build brand loyalty.
- Feedback – Collect more leads, generate more sales, reduce cart abandonment and keep customers happy with easy-to-implement feedback tabs.
3DCart 4 also includes new features like “Quick View” to preview products and buy directly from the category page; “Quick Cart” to preview products in the customer’s shopping cart without leaving the page; “Facebook Send Button” to allow customers to quickly and easily share products over Facebook; “Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags” that allows customers to “Like” your store directly from your website; “Recently Viewed Items” for customers to return to product pages they previously visited; integration with Australia Post; warehouse location updates; and updated order sorting. Head
here for a more detailed look at the new release.
The new features on 3dcart 4 together with AdRoll’s retargeting solution can help online businesses increasing conversions and recovering sales.
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Sergey Nekipelov from DesignContest.com. We hope you find these tips useful as you develop creative strategies for your retargeting and advanced display advertising campaigns.
When they were first introduced, banner ads were a revolutionary tool for marketing on the internet. Banner ads are a cost-effect and efficient way of both marketing products and services of a company as well as providing a direct source of traffic to your site. However, excessive use of banner ads in recent years has caused consumers to overlook these ads, even avoid them, a term often referred to as “banner blindness.”
But, banner ads still remain a highly effective internet marketing tool when designed and used correctly. A well designed banner ad, properly placed, can drive increased traffic to your site, create brand awareness and ultimately boost sales. Below are 5 tips for creating an effective web banner to successfully promote your site:
1. Keep it Simple: Banner ads are displayed among a large amount of information and must often complete for the viewers attention. Your customer may scan the page quickly, only laying eyes on your banner for mere seconds. Make those seconds count. An ad that is simple and to-the-point will get your message across in a short amount of time.
2. Keep your File Size Low: Web banners need to load quickly or they may not be seen. Make sure your file size is around 45-70kb so that it loads before your target audience has moved onto another web page and missed it.
3. Include a Call-to-Action: Getting visitors to click on your ad could be as simple as just telling them to do so! Using a simple call-to-action, such as “Click Here” or “Find our More” reminds your viewer that there’s more information or even a special offer available with the click of the mouse.
4. Build on Your Brand: Your web banner is a great way to build upon your brand’s image. Make sure to design your banner using your corporate colors, fonts, and aesthetic – and always include your logo and tagline. Even if the user doesn’t click-thru this time, they’ll recognize your brand in the future.
5. Use Proper Placement: Make sure you place your banner ad on relevant websites, with customers that are already in the market for your product. You can be creative in your placement, advertising where your competitors aren’t, but make sure you’ve got the right audience.
Above all else, make sure your banner ad is designed to attract the right attention. Using crowdsourcing for your banner design is an excellent way to both get the design you’re looking for and to explore design options you may not have considered. Using DesignContest.com, for example, gives you direct access to tens of thousands of talented graphic designers with years of experience in effective web banner design. Create a simple design brief that outlines what you’re looking for and let designers compete for your business. The result will be a highly effective, well-designed, custom web banner that effectively captivates your audience and increases traffic to your site.
Almost exactly a year ago,
Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital
asserted that e-commerce has “seen more innovation in the last 10 months than in the last 10 years.” In the year since that blog post, the pace of innovation has only accelerated. Through our focus on developing high performance
retargeting and display advertising solutions for e-commerce businesses, we have the pleasure of working with some of the companies leading this shift.
One company that we find particularly impressive is
Shopify; the
ecommerce solution that makes it quick and easy for businesses to setup and launch a “gorgeous storefront.” Just as Wordpress and Blogger democratized content publishing online in 2003, Shopify is doing for online commerce.
Using Shopify, you can take advantage of their 30 day free trial, and
start an online store in just a few minutes. In fact, they believe they’ve made it so easy to build a business online that they’re holding a
Build a Business contest with over $500K in prizes and giveaways. Anyone with something to sell online can launch a store on Shopify, and the business with the most revenue wins.
Here’s a free hint for contestants, don’t forget to install the
AdRoll Retargeting App!
Display is evolving, and
retargeting is now very much in the main stream. Brands are starting to recognize that this technology is another mandatory arrow in their marketing quiver. The reality is that retargeting greatly strengthens your other marketing efforts, and more and more brands are recognizing that. Because of this shift, we decided to overhaul our marketing pages. Previously, we focused our attention on educating potential customers on how retargeting works. Now, we are focused on showing customers why we are the best retargeting platform in the industry.
Our new marketing pages highlight the fact that we have the most advanced features out there. From advanced segmentation with a single pixel, to scientific A/B testing, we are leading the pack when it comes to retargeting solutions. Each product or feature has it's own page highlighting its' benefits. We've created informational / educational screen-casts for many of our products, allowing customers to see what they'll be getting once they sign up with AdRoll. Check out the new
Product Matrix and then dive into the specific product pages from there.
We've also updated our
FAQ section. One of the benefits of adding live chat via
Olark to our site has been that we get to really see what questions continuously arise. Now our FAQ contains very helpful information, and should make the user experience even smoother. We are going to continue improving our support section in the coming weeks, but I think this was a great first step.
Finally, we've streamlined our navigation quite a bit over the past month. Both the dashboard nav and the marketing layer nav have gotten overhauls. Everything is much more accessible and intuitive as a result. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.
- Greg
