• Browse Before You Buy? Adroll's RoundTrip Is Targeting You.

    Mg Siegler

    MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

    Thursday, November 5th, 2009

    Screen shot 2009-11-05 at 12.34.40 PMWith most online services, the idea behind advertising is to get people to come to your site to make some sort of transaction. Most of the time, that doesn’t happen. In fact, even if they click on an ad to come to your site, 98% of the time, those users will leave without buying anything, according to the advertising startup Adroll. A new service they are offering hopes to help with that problem.

    The idea of ad “retargeting” is not at all new. A ton of big brands and advertising platforms use it to try to lure users back to sites using the fact that they know they already visited once. The difference with Adroll’s new RoundTrip product is that they are making the practice accessible to any online advertiser to use. Previously, this type of campaign was reserved for those who were willing to spend a lot of money for this much more highly targeted ad type.

    With RoundTrip, Adroll is specifically aiming for small and medium sized brands. They’re doing this by not requiring a minimum spend threshold which customers have to pass in order to have access to retargeting ads. This makes sense as Adroll has always been about targeting the so-called “long-tail” brands with its method of rolling up these smaller brands to get to a size that will still attract some bigger advertisers.

    And this makes sense for a lot of these smaller brands as most of the time people probably aren’t coming to a site to do an impulse buy. Instead, they may simply be checking out a product to decide if they should buy it later. With retargeting, ads can remind users about this product they’ve checked out in the past and may be ready to buy now.

    Screen shot 2009-11-05 at 12.39.30 PM

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