The Evolution of Retargeting: Interview With Meteora’s Nicholas Waken-Paschal

It’s no secret that retargeting is all rage right now. In fact, it’s now gone mainstream with 3 out of 4 customers noticing retargeted ads. How is it used and just how effective is it?

If you’ve been selling products online or involved with digital marketing for over the last decade or so, you probably can recall how difficult it was to reach your particular audience. Before we had all of these wonderful tools and resources at our fingertips, marketers would have to undergo the tedious task of finding websites or blogs that they believed were relevant to their business. For example, if you sold basketball sneakers, you’d find the locations where you believed people interested in basketball sneakers would visit and then purchase ad space.

Image Source: Surendar Kumar B via Wikimedia Commons

As technology advanced, targeting got a bit easier – doubleclick, pop ups, and affiliate ads also helped. Eventually you were able to narrow your audience based on demographic or geographic information. Then it was discovered that web cookies had useful information, when combined with special pixels could be used for marketing purposes.

So, whenever you visit a website, that info is stored and sent to a third-party network. Then this information is used to display ads from that advertiser across the web. That’s why if you search for basketball shoes on Amazon you’ll continue to see that ad wherever you go online.

More recently, search engines like Google and Bing have embraced the concept of retargeting – or, remarketing, remessaging – it depends who you’re talking to. Even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have gotten into the practice.

According to a comScore study, retargeted ads led to a 1046% increase in branded search. It also resulted in a 726% lift in site visitation after only four weeks of retargeted ad exposure. Furthermore, Digital Information World shared the following amazing statistics:

• The percentage of users who return and complete the check-out process increased to 26 percent when retargeting was used.
• 68% of marketing agencies, along with 49% of brands, are moving dollars from traditional display advertising into retargeting.
• Retargeting can result in a 147% higher conversion rate.
• 46% of search engine marketers believe retargeting is the most underused marketing technology.
• Clickthrough rates decreased by almost 50% after five months of running the same ads.

When you use retargeting, though, there’s one name that comes to mind: AdRoll. After being founded in 2007, AdRoll has become an extremely fast growing company that works with about 3,500 advertisers. But, do you have to strictly rely on just one company when embarking on a retargeting campaign?

Of course not.

If you’re not satisfied with AdRoll, or looking for a compliment to AdRoll, then you may want to look into Texas-based Meteora. The self-service digital display platform recently unveiled its Advanced Targeting Suite. The additional features allow advertisers to search by keyword, category, or location. These features are just one example of how retargeting is getting more and more advanced.

To help marketers better understand how companies like Meteora are approaching online advertising, I reached out to Meteora’s founder Nicholas Waken-Paschal to explain how retargting is beneficial for advertisers.

Editor Note: No one at SEJ was paid or perked for this interview. Albert reached out for beneficial content for our readers.

1. What made you want to get involved with retargeting?

I came from the visual effects side of motion pictures like GI Joe, SevenPounds, and others. I use to design the algorithms that made explosions and particle simulations possible in games like Halo. When you’re watching a movie, some fire simulations have millions of particles and they are all telling each other where to move in order to look and feel the way fire does. I knew we could traverse the same algorithms that controlled the intelligence of particles to processing real-time ad requests and making intelligent decisions on what ads were worth every cent of an advertiser’s budget.

2. What benefits does retargeting offer marketers?

Retargeting is one of the most economically sound marketing decisions. As far as budget to performance is concerned, it’s really hard to beat programmatic advertising. It is the same reason computers are making all the trades on Wall Street these days, no human brain can make decisions as granular and as fast as programmatic retargeting. It’s an easy way to create repeat loyal customers, brand awareness, and be in-front of the right people, at the right time, for the right price.

3. Can you explain what Meteora does differently than your competition?

We really have focused on becoming a very different type of platform. Most platforms out there leverage hidden fees and arbitrary margins and don’t even get me started on the fraud. We like to do side-by-side performance tests between us and our competitors because it just becomes so clear with what is really going on. As far as features go, some of the key things we have that are differentiators such as:

• Friendly user interface
• No minimum spend
• Proximity based targeting that allows you to show ads to people visiting your competitor’s locations
• Weather targeting
• Free dynamic ads
• Ability to prospect for new business as opposed to just retargeting your current site visitors
• Full time account management that doesn’t go away after two months .like most of our competition

4. What’s your current reach?

98% of the internet including desktop, mobile, mobile in-app, and native ad placements.

5. Is Meteora’s retargeting efficient?

Sometimes it pays to be the second guy into the game. We feel like Meteora is a lot like the Apple of internet advertising companies. Our campaign setup process is a fresh breath of air compared to the PhD’s required to use some of our competitors systems. We wanted to make programmatic advertising simple and easy to understand. For example, if you use a popular e-commerce platform or something like WordPress as your website backend, we have one click pixel installers that require no coding ability, automatically setup your free dynamic ads, and conversion revenue tracking.

6. So how do you measure the success of a campaign?

Intuitive dashboards go a long way in this game but so does accurate reporting and creating fast ways for marketers to make decisions that are impactful with their campaigns. The Meteora platform has some very cool ways to reach advertising goals. Depending on the advertiser, goals change and so do the metrics that matter to you. Personally, I think the #1 thing businesses should focus on is their cost to convert a sale or lead. In our platform that is broken down very easily and we can even show the exact dollar figure associated with the revenue generated from your campaigns.

7. How has retargeting evolved over the years?

It just has gotten extremely smarter. The trajectory programmatic advertising has taken is unbelievable.

8. Where do you see retargeting going in the future?

We have some very cool things up our sleeve. In the next few years you’re going to see things surrounding cross device targeting/ attribution, especially retargeting via individualized TV commercials, obviously mobile is getting huge, native ads, anti-fraud tools, and hyper local beacon technologies.

Thanks for you time Nicholas.

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not you want to use retargeting, you should look into both the pros and cons in this informative post on SEJ by Amanda DiSilvestro.

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/evolution-retargeting-interview-meteoras-nicholas-waken-paschal/131422/