Has anyone had a successful experience with retargeting for a B2B app?

Has anyone had a successful experience with retargeting for a B2B app?

Here is our experience:

Last year we kept hearing from different people how awesome retargeting is, so we decided to give it a try. We launched retargeting campaign for Helpdesk via http://perfectaudience.com/ (it was recommended to us). It is a B2B app, so we had some doubts about running ads on Facebook and Twitter, but we did it anyway.

Unsurprisingly, results sucked. Facebook was a little better than Twitter, but the conversions were too low on both services. CTR was okay – around 1-2%. We tried it with dedicated landing pages too – no improvement. It turned out to be around $500 for every paid customer we got. And we got just two or three. We shut down the campaign.

A couple of months ago a sales guy from http://www.adroll.com contacted me and offered to run a campaign. They have a huge ad network. We decided to give it a try again in hopes that web retargeting will perform better than FB/Twitter did. So far we’ve been running a campaign for about three weeks and results are better indeed, but still not good enough.

Retargeting works for my b2b saas. We only dabble in it for now, but it has definitely worked better than basic PPC.

But it’s all about how you use it. There are lots of ways to retarget. I find it works best when pointing users to opt in for free content (or free consultation), then use it again to move them along the sales funnel.

I am currently trying retargeting with PerfectAudience. I am getting (rather expensive) additional clicks and some of these people buy. The question is - would they have purchased anyway? I’m currently running a test to try and find out. It might be a while before I have enough data to say.

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Also keep in mind that PerfectAudience has a thing called a “view-through conversion”. What this means is a visitor was shown an add, didn’t click it, but later on the same day they went directly to your web site to convert. AdRoll has it too. Here is a quote from an email I got from them:

… if we serve them an ad August 5th and they convert that same day, there is definitely a correlation between the ad served and the customer’s action.

There is a correlation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their action was caused by seeing an ad.

Anyway, don’t forget to share the results of your test.