Item: AdRoll
Rating: 8
Author: Nadalie Dias

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using adroll as our retargeting platform, it helps your non-profit clients meet their fundraising and advocacy goals. It allows us to convert users who have left our clients site before completing our desired call to action. Adroll allows us to address the fact that 98 % of online users do not convert within their first visit to a website. It also allows us to stay top of mind for those users who have already expressed an interest in our client's charitable organization.

Pros and Cons

Segmentation - They allow your segmentation to be extremely granular and the setup is pretty easy and streamlined.
Cookie Splitting- they allow you to split your cookie pool which is great if you are doing any sort of testing, but do not have a tag management solution.
tech solutions- when new products are released by Twitter and Facebook they are usually one of the first to receive access to this inventory.

Self -serve implementation of 3rd party ad tags
Self-serve adjustments of frequency capping
I wish they provided you a latency graph or showed you how soon after a user saw an ad they converted so that you adjust your cookie duration and bidding strategy more effectively.

Return on Investment

Increased are our return on ad spend
Decreased our cost per conversions
Decreased our threshold for interaction. We have decreased the number of times we must show an ad to user to get them to convert.

Alternatives Considered

I have also worked with another product Perfect Audience. In comparison Adroll out performs them in almost every area. I found that Perfect Audience's UI was hard to navigate and setting up segmentation was especially confusing. Also we use a 3rd party ad-server, which perfect audience will not grant you access to unless you are spending a minimum of $10k a month which is pretty steep for a self-managed platform.

I have also worked with Retargeter, which I would recommend it over perfect audience. Their UI is easy to navigate and they don't require minimums to get access to a designated account manager or to use their 3rd party ad serving. The one area they lack in is that they don't have as much social media advertising capabilities.

Likelihood to Renew

Here are the questions we asked when we were going to renew (note: adroll does not have annual contract and you can cancel at anytime)

what new products/ updates were released in the last 6 months?
did I find these new products/updates helpful
was I informed of these products in a timely fashion?
did my Account Manage and Ad opps rep make suggestions on how I could make my campaigns more efficient and effective?

Likelihood to Recommend

If your client has a large budget you may want to look at a Demand Side Platform that has retargeting capabilities. While AdRoll does purchase inventory based on traditional display criteria (i.e; demographic and psychographics information ) it does not allow you to do so in a self-service manner. DSPs tend to have greater breadth of insights and reporting capabilities as well and their UIs allow for a lot more self- service in setting up your display campaign.

Key Questions I would ask are;

What does your backend look like? Is it easy to get your coders to passback macros? Can you easily apply a tag across your entire site?
What is your company's/ campaign goal?
Do you sell products?
Do you have a restrictive budget?
Can you creative your own banner ads ?

Users and Roles

3 - We primarily use them as our retargeting platform.

Is this retargeting platform right for you?

Overall Satisfaction