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Among early programmatic ad platforms, 10-year-old AdRoll is unique in the breadth of its customer base. With 35,000 mostly small-to-mid-sized companies in its roster, AdRoll claims to be the most widely adopted standalone performance-marketing platform.
AdRoll is profitable, and it expects to surpass $300 million in gross revenue this year. Not too shabby for the retargeting segment, which has seen numerous flameouts in recent years. Only Criteo, arguably, shines as brightly.
“In some ways, we’re the most un-ad-tech ad tech company when it comes to metrics,” CEO Aaron Bell says on the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. “Our largest customer is probably less than 2% of our overall revenue, and a lot of those customers are [paying with] credit cards, so we don’t have to deal with the crazy collections issue a lot of other companies deal with.”
AdRoll is now moving up market, helping larger marketers track multitouch attribution and incremental lift. It’s aided in that effort by a sizable “people-based” data asset, cobbled together through a data co-op that includes both intent and identity data, including 200 million email addresses. More than half of its customers opt in to that co-op.
“It’s a higher-fidelity data point than typical segments. A typical segment might be that someone’s an outdoor enthusiast, whereas we [know if] somebody bought a tent yesterday,” he said. “We build lookalike modeling on top of that and strategic targeting segments on top of that to help us use the strategic asset of smaller customers and the data we have to move up the funnel.”
Also in this episode: Competing with Criteo, competing with Amazon and competing in the header.
