The document summarizes an experiment with retargeting and display advertising. It doubled lead volume while maintaining the cost per acquisition (CPA) around $200. However, the cost of scaling up volume was high and there were challenges tracking conversions, ensuring ad quality, dealing with cyclical spending, attributing conversions, and achieving high performance with limited budget and B2B audiences. Attribution and determining the value of view-through conversions remained unanswered questions.

1. OUR EXPERIENCE WITH
RTB & RETARGETING

2. Alex Who?
• Marketing Director Acquisio
• 15 years Internet Marketing
blog.apelletier.com
@apelletier
facebook.com/alexandre.pelletier
linkedin.com/in/apelletier

3. ACQUISIO

4. About Acquisio
Buy
• The leading platform to
buy, track, manage, optimize
and report on media across Report Track
SEARCH
all major Search, Social and SOCIAL
Display networks. DISPLAY
• In numbers Optimize Manage
• +300 Clients
• +20 Countries
• +100 Employees
• +4000 Users
• +9500 Brands
• #46 Deloitte Fast 50

5. How it Works
Agency Agency
Proprietary Data
- Bid Management
White Label Platform - Reporting
- Dashboards
Client Client Client Client Client - Bulk Editing
- Alerts
- Attribution
Othe
r
+
Email + API

6. The Benefits
Be more efficient
• Save time on grunt work (Automate Reporting & Campaign Optimization)
• Focus on Strategic work
• Manage agency growth (Scalability)
Uncover new business opportunities
• Add new channel to your offering (Search, Social, Display)
• Upsell technology
• Accelerate sales process & win more deals
Serve clients better
• Improve campaign performance
• Show transparency
• Solidify client loyalty
Mitigate Risk
• Ensure business continuity
• Reduce employee turnover
• Staff accountability

7. A Few of our Clients

8. THE EXPERIMENT

9. Timeline
• Campaign launch in February 2011 but really picked up in May
• Managed by The Trade Desk
• Still going on today

10. Background
• Mature PPC Campaigns
• 20 Leads per Month
• Generates Leads at $200 each
• Reached Maximum Volume

11. Experiment Objectives
• Test Display Integration
• Increase Lead Volume
• Maintain or Lower CPA
• Budget: $250,000

12. THE RESULTS

13. Results - Conversions
• We generated loads for conversions

14. Results - CPA
• But CPA went right through the roof – Many times

15. Results – Targeting Strategies
• Different Strategies yielded very different results
(CPA for 4 Targeting Strategies)

16. Results – Brand Awareness
• We believe that display supports brand awareness well

17. Results - Creatives
• Huge difference between creative designed solely to generate
leads and creative designed to generate brand awareness.
When we switched to put more emphasis on brand and
exposed tens of millions of banners, brand queries shot up
dramatically.

18. Results - Overall
• Doubled Lead Volume
• Maintain CPA at Approximately $200
• Increased Brand Awareness
• Able to Scale Volume massively
• But Cost of Scaling is High

19. CHALLENGES &
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

20. Tracking Challenges
• Not like Search: Not sure what to make of View Through
Conversion Metric, for example.
• Not Sure what tracking system should prevail: Web
Analytics, Ad Server, Acquisio, TTD or even Salesforce.com ???

21. Quality Challenges
• Need to always keep an eye on the sites that drive the most
impressions and weed out the crap. Every month we removed
dozens, if not hundreds.
• White lists are not enough

22. Display is Cyclical
• End of quarters are rough.
• Agencies have to spend their client budgets, so nothing works
well anymore.

23. Volume Challenges
• We had set aside $250,000
• We spent a little over $35,000
• The rest went to fixed price deals
• Harder to perform well with B2B site

24. Attribution
• How do you give credit for view-through conversions?
• What duration should we consider it?
• Worth the same as click through?
Difficult Questions!

25. Thanks!
Questions?
apelletier@acquisio.com
blog.apelletier.com
@apelletier
facebook.com/alexandre.pelletier
linkedin.com/in/apelletier