The global adverati gathered in New York last week to hear the latest changes in the options for advertisers with a special focus on mobile. So what better occasion for audience measurement and real-time-bidding provider Quantcast to announce its latest acquisition: of London-based retargeting specialist Struq. But why make the acquisition at all?
As Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman told Ronan Shields of ExchangeWire: “Feldman said the desire to bring both its own prospecting capabilities, and the retargeting function under one roof was at the behest of its advertising clients”.
Why would advertisers want an adtech solution to offer prospecting and retargeting under the same roof? Aren’t they fundamentally different? Prospecting is all about finding new customers relatively high up in the funnel wherever they might be on the web. Retargeting is about more focused activity to either nudge people down the final part of the funnel after a visit or cross-sell and upsell.
But the reality is that, especially in the world of Facebook that StitcherAds focuses on, advertisers get better results overall when they combine the two activities in the same advertising programs. Advertisers achieve better results this way rather than – as many providers before this Quantcast/Struq deal would prefer – competing against each other, driving up ad costs and thus fees for adtech vendors that charge on a percentage of adspend basis.
Putting prospecting and retargeting together makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Having the two compete for attribution suits older adtech providers by gaming the system to make their part of the funnel appear the most effective and the most efficient. Obviously Quantcast finally came across enough advertisers who weren’t being fooled any more by these false economies, and just wanted a solution that handles both retargeting and prospecting to achieve a great result.
Other retargeting-only players like AdRoll or Criteo must have shuddered a bit at Quantcast’s CEO letting that cat out of the bag.
Here at StitcherAds, though, we’ve known that prospecting and retargeting go together for quite some time. Combining the two is why we created our platform to help online retailers acquire new customers and grow revenue. In fact, just about all of the savvy online retail advertisers we work with get the fact that it’s just lunacy to have these ads compete with one another. And we saw even from our earliest experiments that when you combine retargeting and prospecting campaigns in the same activity you simply get 30% greater effectiveness on the overall activity—dropping CPAs and increasing ROI from nearly day one. We’ve seen online retail customers using our platform achieve CPAs using Facebook Newsfeed that match their benchmark from Google’s Adwords (We had to check a few times before we believed it).
Of course, there may be another reason why we’re now seeing consolidation in the old, cookie-based world of prospecting and retargeting. Which is that the cookie world is coming to an end, driven by the prevalence of mobile where cookies simply don’t work – never have, never will. Only identity-based targeting solutions for prospecting and retargeting can work effectively cross-device, and with the relaunch this week of Facebook’s Atlas, the prospect of advertising on the open web becoming more and more reliant on identity-based targeting will more than likely launch a scramble for more cookie-based players to make the transition.
Fortunately StitcherAds’ online retail marketing customers don’t need to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
