AdRoll wants to be known as more than purely a retargeter with its rollout Wednesday of “Prospecting,” a pool of potential customers a brand can reach into to improve incremental reach.
This pool is fed by a stream of anonymized advertiser data called IntentMap, culled from the vendor’s 20,000 advertiser clients who opt in. About 1,000 advertisers are already participating, said AdRoll President and CMO Adam Berke.
While retargeting allows a brand to “win back” consumers who have visited its site by pooling cookie data and triggering follow-up messaging, Berke said clients wanted to drive new traffic into their funnels and uncover new intent.
Traditionally, brands could reach new audiences by purchasing third-party data, but that gets expensive, Berke said.
“The cost of the data is often the same cost as the cost of the media,” he said, “so prospecting lets you use your own data while benefiting from the network effect of [IntentMap] to improve your ROI.”
Customer ZenPayroll is using prospecting in conjunction with traditional retargeting to uncover high-intent leads. ZenPayroll targets niche microbusinesses, and it improved conversions 20% by accessing AdRoll’s prospecting pool.
Although prospecting isn’t designed for brand campaigns, Berke said clients are interested in measuring lift when they add prospecting to their traditional retargeting campaigns.
For the time being, it is priced as a percentage of spend based on performance metrics like CPC and CPA. This might change because advertisers evaluate upper-funnel campaigns based on first-touch CPA, given consumers will likely convert through other channels.
As Facebook develops more of its own remarketing and CRM-matching capabilities, in addition to retail-focused ad units like Dynamic Product Ads, industry experts predict it could put pressure on point solutions that focused squarely on retargeting alone.
AdRoll, like competitor Criteo, says a big priority is updating its bidder technology and algorithms as well as its mobile compatibility, since consumers aren’t sticking to static desktop experiences.
