We’ve already seen that the new Facebook Exchange for retargeted ads is delivering impressive results for advertisers. Now a startup called Perfect Audience aims to make those campaigns accessible to a broad range of startups, small ad agencies, and other advertisers.
Co-founder and President Brad Flora says the current batch of ad companies offering access to Facebook Exchange are serving large advertisers — it usually takes a few days to learn how to use the product, and there’s often a minimum ad buy. With Perfect Audience, on the other hand, anyone can run a campaign of any size. You just create or upload the ad, fill out a form with the basic campaign information, provide a credit card, and you’re good to go. And if you still have trouble, the website includes pointers explaining each component of the campaign.
Like other forms of retargeting, Facebook Exchange offers a way for business to deliver ads to people who visited their site but didn’t convert (whether they’re looking for a sign up, a purchase, or whatever) — in this case, of course, those retargeted ads are appearing on Facebook.
Lots of ad companies, especially those offering products for small businesses, like to say that they’re easy to use, but Flora illustrated the point by asking me to create a campaign of my own. It really did only take a few minutes to set things up, with a minimal amount of hand-holding (basically, I just needed Flora to reassure me that my credit card wouldn’t actually be charged).
So after you read this post, if you visit Facebook, you may see an ad pointing you to more Facebook-related coverage in TechCrunch. That’s the magic of retargeting. (And if you don’t like retargeted ads, uh, my apologies.)
Perfect Audience was actually part of the summer 2011 class at incubator Y Combinator. It has also raised a $1.1 in seed funding from SVAngel, Start Fund, New World Ventures, YC, The Knight Foundation, WGI Group, and various angels including YC partner Paul Buchheit, Stuart Larkins of the I2A Fund, Northwestern Business School lecturer Andrew Razeghi, ShopLocal founder Brian Hand, Lon Chow of Apex Venture Partners, and Kevin Willer, president of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center.
Flora, who previously worked as a journalist (he went to grad school with TechCrunch’s Leena Rao), says Perfect Audience has been working on a broader suite of retargeting products, but it decided to focus on Facebook for now because there is “a huge hunger” for it. More than 250 advertisers, including tech companies New Relic and Tagstand, have already signed up, and Perfect Audience says it’s seeing 30 new sign ups per day.
Those campaigns are delivering a great return, the company says. One customer normally pays $1.65 for clicks on Adwords and $1 for clicks through Perfect Audience’s web retargeting, but they only paid a 19 cent CPC for Facebook retargeting.