Link: Founders’ Cameo in the New York Times
Today’s Sunday NYT article, “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds“ features a great photo of TellApart co-founders Josh and Mark in our game room.
If you’re also feeling the itch to get out of a BigCo and get into a thriving startup, you know what to do.
Link: TellApart named AWS Start-up Challenge Finalist!
We are extremely excited to announce that TellApart has been named a regional semi-finalist finalist(!) in this year’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) Start-up Challenge.
The AWS Start-up Challenge is an annual competition designed for promising startups that use the AWS cloud computing platform to compete for a chance to win $100,000 in cash and AWS credits.
We were selected as one of 16 regional semi-finalists one of 7 global finalists and will compete on Dec. 8th in Palo Alto for a shot at the title.
Congrats to the other finalists and Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Mashable held a “Fast Pitch” competition on November 12th for top startups to present their vision, business model, and market traction to an audience of entrepreneurs.
To see a two minute overview of TellApart’s vision, Data Platform, and Transactional Retargeting Application, skip to minute 27:50 to see the short presentation.
Earlier this week, industry guru John Battelle wrote a compelling piece on how remarketing needs to be a component of the conversation that occurs between a merchant and their prospective customer during the timeframe in which a purchase is being considered. He suggested a simple feature to facilitate the two-way nature of the conversation: an [X] icon in the corner of every ad that would allow a user to pause the messaging from that merchant.
Our team took that good idea and ran with it, implementing the feature for one of our largest customers – Diapers.com – in less than 24 hours. Now each of their TellApart ads incorporates this functionality:
As discussed in our previous post, we believe that display ads can be highly effective while also maintaining utmost respect for the consumer. Allowing the user to effectively “mute” the ads for products they no longer want is key to supporting this respect. We intend to build even richer functionality into this flow and discuss more of our thoughts with John here: That Was Fast: TellApart Implements A Searchblog Suggestion.
The New York Times article published this morning, “Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites“, does a good job of laying out a number of issues that our industry must address. At TellApart, we believe that we can make ads that are actually useful and that this sort of displeasure can be mitigated by commitment to one idea: respect for the consumer.
If you read Ms. Matlin’s first quote in the article or the sentiments of the many commenters, a common theme emerges: they are highly annoyed by the number of Zappos ads they’ve seen and the fact that they continue to see them well after their purchase decisions have been made.
Indeed, it doesn’t matter how well crafted the message is… hounding a consumer will only lead to frustration and contempt. We firmly believe this would have been a non-issue if Zappos’ vendor would have shown restraint in the number of ads they chose to show per user.
Aside from the obvious & staid options mentioned by the Times’ commenters (opt-out, clear cookies, use Adblock), how do advertisers show respect for their consumers in this new world of display advertising? TellApart recommends and commits to the following:
1) Don’t hound.
Use frequency management judiciously. At TellApart, our clients’ users see an average of just two ads per day during the handful of days they are in market for a given product or service. This is far fewer than the dozens of Zappos ads per day (for weeks on end) with which these users are so annoyed.2) Focus on truly engaged shoppers.
There are many data points that must be combined to know if a consumer is truly interested in a given product or is just browsing: number of pageviews, time spent on site, average conversion rate per product considered, whether the user is a new or repeat visitor, etc. Together, a strong, computer-modeled analysis of this data will help get ads in front of users who care and prevent the irritation of those who don’t.3) Drive clicks that convert.
Instead of trying to push maximum impressions or even maximum clicks from these ads, advertisers should demand the highest number of conversions for the lowest number of impressions possible. Only post-click conversions should be counted, and the experience should be optimized to drive one converting click per user. This keeps a majority of users engaged and happy while minimizing the “noise” that truly disinterested users must endure.4) Reward the user.
Some of our largest clients have decided to use coupons in their TellApart ads even when they have refrained from offering them elsewhere. Why? Because the curated users that we bring back to our merchant sites are of such high quality that the retailer wants to give the user a reason to click. In doing so, a huge lift in incremental sales can be gained from consumers who would have otherwise not converted.5) Watch the numbers.
So much of the idea of respect for the consumer comes down to doing the right thing by watching the right metrics. For example, TellApart drives user click through rates of over 3% for our clients. Yes — you read that correctly: three out of every 100 users click and go on to convert at a far better than average rate for our clients. In total this amounts to hundreds of thousands of satisfied consumers every month… the silent majority who vote with their mouse clicks & pocketbooks.
TellApart is committed to driving a better advertising experience for users across the web. And we’ll continue to improve by keeping our focus on this one idea: respect for the consumer.
Josh McFarland
CEO, TellApart
We came across this year-old article from Young-Bean Song (an absolute luminary in the online ad industry who currently heads Microsoft’s Atlas Institute). Its title is, “The Dirty Little Secret of View-Through Conversions,” and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves:
“The fact is, it’s difficult to justify VBC [View-Based Conversions, aka View-Through Conversions] as a measure of direct response. VBCs are a measure of targeted reach, not direct response.”
“In an attempt to conduct cleaner experiments, some have conducted “test/control” (a.k.a. “True Lift”) experiments. In almost all cases, both the test and control groups exhibited the same natural tendencies to visit the advertiser’s website and convert. Or in other words, True Lift tests do not support the notion that VBCs are a measure of direct response. This is especially true for advertisers with strong brands.”
It’s time that marketers demand a return to the unit of worth on which the web was built — the click.
One of the most popular questions we field from online retailers is, “Is the revenue from retargeting incremental?”
On the popular industry blog, AdExchanger, TellApart CEO Josh McFarland lays out how TellApart proves the incremental nature of the revenue that we drive for our clients.
To read the full Q&A, click here.
To download the full case study, entitled “Can Retargeting Yield Incremental Revenue?”, click here.
At TellApart, we’re reinventing the customer data platform for e-commerce companies because we believe that knowledge of one’s own customers has the potential to dramatically improve ROI across all online marketing applications. One of the key applications on this platform is Transactional Retargeting.
Informed by the past few months of client conversations, it’s clear that many top online retailers have had really poor experiences with their display ad retargeting efforts to date. But the underlying factors behind that lack of performance are also clear: old technology, inefficient vendor business models, sub-optimal creative formats, etc. We call this Retargeting 1.0.
Leveraging customer data on an entirely reinvented display ads infrastructure, we believe we’ve created a product and business model so radically different from the previous generation that it leads the way toward Retargeting 2.0.
Here’s a quick guide to tell apart the two:
1. Business model:
- 1.0 vendors charge CPMs or on CPAs that are massively overinflated by “view-throughs.” They have hidden fees, cumbersome I/Os, and generally attempt to constantly take credit for transactions that would have happened anyway.
- 2.0 vendors acknowledge the worth of an ad click, with the best charging only a rev-share on successful post-click conversions. Because the vendor only makes money when the client does, these campaigns are “always on” and grow each month as predictive models train on your data.
2. Customer-specific targeting:
- 1.0 retargeters, per their business model above, are incentivized to spread a thin layer of impressions on almost all users, resulting in undifferentiated & wasteful impressions that can over-saturate users… especially those who needed no ad to help them complete their transaction.
- 2.0 platforms use predictive modeling to seek out just those prospective customers who need a “nudge” toward a final transaction. Their modeling is specific to the user and the exact items in which they have shown the most interest. This yields maximum incremental revenue to your bottom line.
3. Real-Time Bidding
- 1.0 vendors place users into rough CPM buckets with hard frequency caps and buy impressions in chunks, creating in a sub-optimal user experience that typically results in either too few or too many ads being shown.
- 2.0 vendors utilize a new technique called real-time bidding (RTB) to bid per-impression, per-user. Combined with customer-specific modeling, this results in the right number of ads being shown to just those users whose conversion rates can be lifted with retargeted ads.
4. Dynamic creative assets:
- 1.0 vendors display static banner ads repeatedly, depressing click-thru rates (CTR) and thus, your potential revenue. Their platforms typically lack A/B testing frameworks to continuously optimize the ad creatives.
- 2.0 vendors use Flash-based, dynamic banners to insert the best information into the creative, automatically optimizing for CTR. Every element will be tested: product-images, copy, coupons, button color, animations, etc.
What’s the big picture?
Retargeting 2.0 is a no-brainer for online retailers, but there is a natural ceiling to its upside (based on the number of visitors to your site). You should ask, what’s the big vision beyond retargeting that will make this a worthwhile integration, beyond the immediate revenue lift?
While TellApart Transactional Retargeting uses customer data to generate 10x improved ROI over Retargeting 1.0, we believe this data will also unlock gains across every online marketing channel that you have. And the platform we have built will enable many applications powered by this customer data. That’s the big picture, and that’s where we’re headed with our clients today.
To find out more about what it’s like to work with a Retargeting 2.0 solution, contact us today.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time speaking with (and learning from!) our clients and other online retailers about retargeting, specifically how to ensure its value is incremental to the bottom line. We have a simple answer to that, of course: pay only for clicks that convert!
When we started our crusade on this topic, we were a lone voice. However, it is becoming clear that online marketers are quickly learning of the perils of paying for view-through conversions, and the sentiment is quickly growing into a crescendo. Below, we’ve curated a few of the best like-minded articles on the web:
Kevin Lee of DidIt posted a great article on ClickZ last Friday where he cleanly laid out the hazards of paying for conversions on a view-through basis. He writes “if view-through orders” are to be paid for on a CPA basis… then the retargeting provider has “an incentive to buy below-the-fold, less expensive inventory on the hope” that the conversions would have happened anyway. This is the definition of view-through conversion spam: charging for conversions that were not incremental to bottom-line revenue.
The Crosspixelmedia team elaborates on the definition and makes it easier for retailers to recognize if they’re being duped. They write:
“Ad networks spam our computers with useless ads to get credit for sales that they didn’t generate. If an ad network is delivering an inordinate number of view conversions vs. click conversions, it is likely they are engaging in view spam, and your advertising dollars are being wasted.”
Harry Gold’s article on ClickZ brings up two more concerns with paying for view-through conversions:
[VTC] grossly inflates the network’s reported conversions and ROI. I’ve taken over many accounts where a client had raved about a network’s conversion/ROI success. As soon as I showed them how to drill down on the conversions to take out the view-based conversions, the whole story changed. It wasn’t good news, but it was critical to show the real picture. Agencies, sites, or networks shouldn’t take credit for view-based conversions in the same way they take credit for click-based (where the banner was actually clicked on) conversions.
Second, when you count view-based conversion the same as click-based conversion, you can end up double-counting conversion when you bring all your data together into a consolidated dashboard.
Young Bean Song of Microsoft sums up view-through conversion accounting simply in “The Dirty Little Secret of View-Through Conversions.” He writes: “view-based conversions are a measure of targeted reach, not direct response.” He points out that view-through conversions are appropriate for brand advertisers who want to know where their target audience lives online, but that “it’s time to drop the ROI moniker where it isn’t sincere.”
At TellApart, we’ll go further and say “there is no valid way to enter into a pay-for-view-throughs agreement with a retargeting provider. If you want an agreement that works for retailers and retargeting vendors, pay only for clicks, and, specifically, only for clicks that convert.”
We recently moved into a spacious loft in downtown Burlingame, CA, and are looking to grow our team.
We’re looking for the best people out there in the following fields:
And just consider these additional perks that can be had by working at TellApart:
