Author Archives: Christina

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Triggit Secures $6 Million in Additional Funding, Led by North Atlantic Capital

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Funds to accelerate new products and hiring as retargeter reaches 1.1 billion monthly unique user milestone

Triggit, the global leader in enterprise retargeting on Facebook, announced today it had secured $6 million in funding extend its lead in the Facebook retargeting landrush, led by North Atlantic Capital, joining existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group.

The new funding comes at a time of amazing, accelerated growth at Triggit. Recognized internationally for best-in-class dynamic retargeting on Facebook and other ad exchanges, Triggit is investing more in engineering and talent to deliver continued high-performance campaigns for advertisers through News Feed retargeting and future product innovations.

“Triggit is leading the way in some of the most innovative, relevant, and cost effective advertising online through the Facebook Exchange and Facebook News Feed retargeting,” says Mark Morrissette, Managing Director of North Atlantic Capital. “We are thrilled to join the team and help accelerate their growth.”

Triggit now powers the retargeting for advertisers with over 1.1 billion monthly unique site visitors in aggregate, which is over 4x the amount of traffic that Triggit was seeing when Facebook Exchange first came out of beta in September 2012. After quickly scaling to bid on the same number of people as there are users on Facebook, Triggit has reached several key milestones, including:

  • Rapid international expansion: 70% of Triggit’s business is now international, heavily driven by Latin America and Asia. Prior to the launch of Facebook Exchange,  only 16% of Triggit’s business was non-U.S.
  • Quadrupling client base: Triggit has grown its client base 425%, while growing its average customer size to over 5 million monthly unique visitors. 30% of its business comes from working with agencies both in the U.S. and overseas (shhh, please don’t tell Zach!).
  • Going bigger, faster: Triggit’s employee count has grown 30% from just one month ago, and is looking to increase the number of full-time engineering, operations and other employees another 30% in one month’s time – much of that outside the U.S. For career opportunities, check out triggit.com/careers.
  • Making true dynamic Facebook ads the norm: More than 75% of Triggit’s customers benefit from dynamic retargeting ads on Facebook, getting 2-5x higher CTRs and 2-3X higher conversion rates as a result.

“The landrush to target 1.1 billion Facebook users with relevant ads using real-time first party data is just starting.  We’re focused on this opportunity, on strong global execution, and keeping and extending our lead in dynamic creative solutions,” said Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit. “For the next phase of Triggit’s growth, we’ll be deploying bigger and better dynamic creatives on Facebook’s News Feed, ensuring our clients benefit in time for the holidays.”

About Triggit

Having quickly emerged as the industry leader in retargeting on Facebook, Triggit is able to turn advertisers’ site cookie data and product catalogues into dynamic retargeting experiences on Facebook. Triggit’s algorithms optimize impression-based pricing and bidding, executing real time buying decisions in less than 50 milliseconds. Triggit’s development of built-in campaign attribution technology gives advertisers the first truly accurate measure of overall display media ROI, earning Triggit the title of the most transparent and effective DSP to work with.

Product Descriptions:

  • Dynamic Product Retargeting – Customize dynamic creatives by product, image, description, location, etc.
  • Advanced Retargeting – Offers sophisticated targeting and advertising solutions such as category, keyword, and rules-based retargeting
  • Frequency capping – Avoid retargeting customers who have already purchased your product or suffer ‘ads fatigue’
  • International geotargeting – One of the only DSPs able to retarget your international customers on Facebook in under 50 milliseconds

 

 

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Facebook Retargeting On News Feed Is Now Live

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The front page of our generation’s newspaper looks very different from the one our parents read. In fact, it is no longer a newspaper – it’s Facebook, on desktop, smart phones and tablets, run by computers generating content tailored to your interests because it comes from your personal network. Facebook is 20% of the Internet, and the majority of that is the News Feed, where people scroll, scroll and then scroll some more to find personalized, relevant social content.  Now, that never-ending content stream is ready to include *your*  hyper-relevant, dynamic retargeting ads.

That’s right!  Starting today, Triggit’s advertisers can retarget customers with data-driven, personalized, dynamic ads on the #1 most engaging place on the web – the Facebook News Feed. Facebook is now allowing us to retarget your site visitors with Page Post Ad formats which are 50% bigger and have social elements – commenting, sharing and liking – enabled. Oh, and they’re in the News Feed; you know, that place right smack dab in the middle of the page.  To see what they’ll look like in the News Feed, take a look at our video below:

This is revolutionary for marketers for two reasons:

1. Retargeting can now operate at Facebook scale

Like the video says, savvy advertisers comb through massive first party data sets to retarget people who’ve shown strong intent but not purchased.  Although it yields stellar results, retargeting’s ability to fill the sales funnel is limited by

  • how quickly & for how long you can find users after they’ve expressed intent on your site;
  • the extent to which you can deliver relevant ads that mirror consumer intent;
  • the cost to do so; and
  • the ad’s setting and ability to catch the user’s eye

Over one billion people hang out on Facebook daily, 1.1 billion pairs of eyes focused on the News Feed according to eyetracking studies like this one.  Now, the purchase intent you’ve worked so hard to generate can drive timely dynamic ads where your customers’ attention is trained morning, noon and night.  Simply, your retargeting can finally scale!

2. Hyper engaging, hyper relevant retargeting

For right-hand side FBX ads, Triggit’s seen a dramatic increase in clickthrough rates – up to 5x higher – when the retargeting ad is dynamic rather than static. Users appreciate it when you show them things that matter to them on the social network, whether its news, comments, or products.  Looking at conversion data, it’s clear personalized retargeting works better on Facebook than anywhere else, including Google.  To get the most out of retargeting in the News Feed, you’ll need to work with a DSP that can translate millions of real-time intent signals into retargeting ads as rich and relevant as the news that surrounds them.  Few have been able to do this on FBX ads on the right-hand side, and even fewer will be able to handle Facebook News Feed scale.

The reward, though, for those advertisers that can extend their dynamic retargeting to the News Feed?  10-20X higher click volume, social amplification, and conversion rates that’ll make Facebook the Direct Response Channel Of The Year.

These are just two of the most obvious and short-term results we expect to see once our advertisers start retargeting potential customers on News Feed. As Facebook continues to innovate and more and more advertisers use the highly popular social network for both their top and bottom marketing funnel activities, the News Feed may very well evolve their sales funnel into an infinitely looping sales hourglass.

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Ten Frequently Asked Facebook Exchange Questions

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Today’s blog is cross-published with FBPPC.
By Prachi Mishra, Marketing Associate

Since the Facebook Exchange went live, we’ve been fielding questions from hundreds of the world’s largest e-commerce and travel advertisers. And while we’ve gotten nearly every question in the book when it comes to retargeting on Facebook, we’ve noticed that there were several that kept coming up. So we decided to revamp our new FAQ section and, in the process, honed in on the top 10 questions the world’s largest direct marketers ask about the Facebook Exchange.

1. How does Facebook Retargeting work?

Let’s look at the example below. Jane is looking for pink high heels on Shoes.com. After browsing several pink shoes, Jane finds a pair she likes but doesn’t buy.The next time Jane’s Facebook page reloads, your third-party demand side platform (DSP) makes sure that Shoes.com wins the bid for an ad on Jane’s page. Jane sees and clicks through on the ad for that specific pair of shoes and purchases. That’s retargeting at work.

2. What is the Facebook Exchange (FBX)?

Facebook’s ad exchange officially launched September 2012. Through a DSP like Triggit, advertisers bid in real time for Facebook ad impressions, some of the web’s most valuable inventory. The Facebook Exchange is a great direct-response channel as advertisers use their own first-party data to find and retarget their site visitors on Facebook.

3. How does Facebook Exchange compare to traditional exchanges?

After running tests comparing Facebook Exchange ads against above-the-fold ads on top-quality pages on traditional RTB exchanges, we found that not only did the Facebook Exchange outperform in terms of conversions, but it delivered much better ROAS. We also found that the Facebook Exchange was better in terms of:

  • Inventory: The Facebook Exchange will be over a 1/4 of all internet ad impressions once in full production.That’s 2-3x more than all other exchanges combined, including Google’s.
  • Above the Fold: There’s no fold! Facebook ads follow users up and down the page, so your ads will always be in view.
  • Efficiency: On average CPAs on the Facebook Exchange are 1/3 cost of the best inventory available on traditional exchanges.
  • Recency: A majority of people who visit your site see your ad on Facebook within the first hour – sometimes in the first five minutes.
  • Time on site: Most of your customers – over a billion people worldwide – are parked on Facebook and are browsing on the site all day long.

4. What is a dynamic creative ad?

Dynamic creative ad units are relevant, personalized ad experiences you can offer to your potential customer when advertising online. These ads can be used to showcase products and services your site visitors expressed interest in when last browsing on your site. The ad unit contains a customizable headline, image, and body copy.

5. Should I use a dynamic creative or a static ad when retargeting my site visitors?

We can’t emphasize enough how much better dynamic creatives perform vs. static ads. Not only have we seen 43% higher CTR at 1/3 of the CPA with these highly-relevant ads but we have seen conversions happening 30% faster.

6. Are there different types of dynamic creative campaigns to retarget customers?

Yes, Triggit offers two highly advanced ways of dynamically retargeting your potential customers:

  • Product feed-based dynamic – The ad unit is created automatically by pulling information from a website’s product feed. This type of offering is best utilized by large e-commerce & retail businesses.
  • Macro-insertion dynamic creatives – The site passes information via a pixel to Triggit, whereby we create highly relevant ads on the spot (e.g. A user completes a flight search on the site and the site passes back the query information to Triggit).

7. Is there a best position to bid for on the Facebook Exchange?

Facebook Exchange ads perform well in any position; unlike AdWords, winning the top spot isn’t necessary to see great performance. While AdWords’ CTRs plummet after the 1st and 2nd positions, performance of Facebook Exchange ads remains high because Facebook’s gotten rid of the fold – the ad units scroll up and down with the user. (For more information, visit our Data Insights page.)

8. What are the specifications and format for a Facebook Exchange ad?

The same a standard marketplace ad – 99 x 72 pixel banner ad with a 90 character body text and 25 character title.

9. How are Facebook Exchange ads different from Marketplace Ads?

While they use the same ad format, Facebook Exchange ads and Marketplace ads are two different products.

  • Marketplace ads are focused more closely on upper-funnel marketing activities, such as branding and awareness. These ads utilize Facebook’s demographic data, and are focused on increasing an advertiser’s visibility on Facebook.
  • Facebook Exchange ads use the same format but, unlike Marketplace, are used to retarget an advertiser’s own site visitors using the advertiser’s 1st-party data (not Interest Graph data). The service Facebook Exchange ads offer is mainly for bottom-funnel, direct-response advertisers who want to increase conversions through retargeting.

10. Can I retarget on mobile platforms with the Facebook Exchange?

Not at this time.

 

To learn more common terms, visit our new Glossary page. Still have a question you need answered about FBX?  We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to leave us a comment or suggestion below.

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How to Go 100% Dynamic With Your Travel Campaign

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By Sam Mitchell, Accounts Analyst

After personally overseeing millions of dynamic travel ads flowing through our servers and driving relevant retargeting on Facebook, it’s clear to me that global travel advertisers are extremely well-suited to Triggit’s dynamic creative offering. With hundreds of origins/destination pairs, thousands of packages, tens of thousands of hotels and millions of unique visitors, large travel sites have near-infinite travel permutations. Only constantly changing, personalized, interesting ad units will reignite and convert intent-laden cookie pools.

Unlike a dynamically generated e-commerce ad unit (pretty straightforward: show a user an ad for a product they clicked on or one known to convert against their profile), travel clients present a much more interesting challenge and require just a little bit more TLC because every case is so different. Are we marketing hotels, flights, vacation packages, cruises, rental cars, or all of the above? Does the client want to use a product feed, or avoid the technical strain of constantly updating hundreds of thousands of ads? Is the site live in multiple countries, languages, or currencies?

All of these factors can add up to a very complex integration process if there isn’t a clear roadmap to reference when launching your very first dynamic campaign. In the interests of helping travel advertisers better understand the road ahead and charge into this great new acquisition opportunity, below are three best practices that set up travel advertisers for success on the Facebook Exchange.

1) Decide on a Campaign Strategy First

The key to success with dynamic travel campaigns is for both parties to be upfront about goals, capabilities, and limitations before we even begin step 1 of integration. A costly and time-consuming trial and error phase can be avoided entirely with some good early-stage communication. Here are great examples of the early discussions we had from some of our top performing campaigns:

  • Define which part of the user funnel is most valuable: A client’s business intelligence unit noticed that the majority of their users completed a site search but didn’t end up clicking on a specific hotel. In that case, it made more sense to do a search-based ad creative (macro insertion) vs. a specific, product-based one (feed-based).

  • Global implementation: If your site is global, a best practice would be to have a roll-out plan for each region and language and communicate that with your Triggit accounts analyst.

2) Understand Which Dynamic Strategy Works Best

Hotels: Feed-based integration (strongly encouraged)

  • Why: This type of integration is best suited for our automated system since most hotel sites already have a product feed ready to go. It’s also the best format to go with since a hotel is a distinct product in a fixed location with a somewhat static price, and feeds are the most efficient way to get this type of information into a dynamic ad unit.

  • Requirement: Format feed correctly in XML, and contain all the information you want to include in the ad unit

Flights & Rental Cars: Macro-insertion

  • Why: The ad unit is dynamically created upon pulling information from each search result such as origin, destination, price, etc.

  • Requirement: The client must be able to pass all information through the Triggit pixel in the exact format desired in the ad copy. One important thing to remember is that static logos and branded images are the only available option when creating dynamic ads via macro-insertion.

3) Look through this Dynamic Creative Implementation Checklist

Before launching your site into implementation, it’s good practice to go over the following checklist with your webmaster to make sure your site meets certain criteria to go fully dynamic with either a feed-based or macro-insertion implementation.

Once you talk the above points over with your Triggit accounts analyst and decide that dynamic implementation is right for you, we can then work towards making your campaign a 100% dynamic experience. As the following slides show, dynamic creatives can lead to a much greater, more scalable campaign compared with static ads: http://clearslide.com/v/ha9cqg7hdqqzu39s8peh

Getting onto FBX is easy. But to make it work at max scale, proper dynamic creative implementation is a must for the world’s largest travel sites.

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Getting the most out of dynamic ad copy on the Facebook Exchange

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Today’s blog post is cross-published with FBPPC.
By Steve Palombo, Sr. Account Executive

I often read and hear skepticism from industry pundits, conference attendees, and even potential clients regarding the viability of the format of Facebook Exchange, or the Marketplace ad. I am often asked, “What can Triggit possibly do within the confines of the Facebook ad unit? And how do you do it in 90 characters or less? Who reads that stuff anyway?”  At first glance, the image space looks tiny and the text limitations is like writing a haiku for anyone trying to write Facebook ad copy. In fact, if this paragraph was the body copy of an ad on FBX, we would have already tripled the character limit! However with a little outside-of-the-box thinking and adept manipulation of first party data, the traditional Facebook ad can become an incredibly versatile and potent ad unit.

With our initial clients in FBX, we immediately saw that users were drawn to dynamic images of products they’d just clicked away from, even if the image is confined to the seemingly microscopic 99×72 ad and description. From our initial data, we found that moving to dynamic from static creative with product name and price had massive increases in click performance of over 500%.  Although the performance was already excellent for dynamic ads, we decided that it was time to do the next logical thing: A/B test dynamic ad copy to the ground.  But with 90 characters, how creative can you actually get?

We had an international client that was a perfect match for this test. They had thousands of product items to dynamically retarget site visitors with from all over the world, and had lots of creative parameters to play with including product name, price, category and description. After quickly and easily uploading their entire product catalogue into our system, we started off with a baseline model and generated our traditional dynamic product image with a title advertising a big “20% off” deal in the title line with sparse body copy that included price and the product name.  We then pitted that ad unit against an identical one, with the exception that the body copy was replaced with about 80 characters of copy related to the product image, followed by an ellipsis and a call to “…learn more!”

The results defied our expectations. Conventional display advertising wisdom said that less is more – tight, price-sensitive copy and flashy images and calls to action were thought to draw more people’s attention. However, after letting the test run to five million impressions, the text-heavy, product-related ad copy without prices was converting much better. Click-through rates were about 25% better and click to conversion rates were 50% higher, despite the fact that we were paying identical effective CPM costs for both ad groups.

Although we had clearly found a successful winner in this A/B test and proved that users can be moved by more than just price in certain verticals, we also could take a bigger logical leap: people aren’t just using the social network to look at vacation pictures or gloat about football victories, they’re also using the social network when they’re in the mood to buy, even taking the time to read the longer, more informative ad copy. Tests like these are starting to provide more light into why we’re seeing higher than expected conversion rates on Facebook Exchange compared to traditional display channels.

This is a huge win for advertisers, especially for e-tailers working with FBX partners like Triggit who are able to test and optimize different dynamic creatives. Finding a way to get 50% more conversions without doing any extra technical work is a huge windfall we’re happy to take advantage of.

Body Template A: (text heavy ad)

Body template B: (product price and name, louder call to action)


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Who’s Winning On Facebook Exchange, Where, & Why?

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By Zach Coelius

Since Facebook Exchange (FBX) launched last year, Triggit has been inundated with large direct response advertisers worldwide wanting to try out this most promising new channel.  Our Engineering and Accounts teams have worked tirelessly to bring intent-laden retail, travel, finance, auto & other cookie data to Facebook so that good advertisers could connect with their customers in a massive, brand-safe setting.  While we and other FBX partners have sung FBX’s ROI story from the infographic rooftops, no one’s revealed exactly who’s winning this game, where they’re winning, and why some are winning more than others.  With hundreds of advertisers each averaging millions of monthly unique visitors, our FBX footprint is major league, which puts us in a good position to give you answers:

Who’s Winning

The advertisers who have the most success scaling their FBX campaigns are large e-commerce and travel advertisers. Why? This is due to a few factors including:

  • 2.5 million monthly unique visitors: This is the natural inflection point for advertisers to profitably spend more and increase campaign size with features like dynamic creatives
  • Dynamic creatives: Static ads aren’t the entry point for verticals with large product feeds – dynamic creatives are. Dynamic creative campaigns see an immediate increase in CTRs and conversion rates, which enables advertisers to increase their campaign sizes by 8x – 10x.
  • Who’s not winning: Automotive, real estate, and certain CPG categories (beauty, home care). These three verticals have large product feeds and easily see millions of unique visitors to their sites, but haven’t made an aggressive stake on FBX yet.

FBX: It’s Not Just About Size, But How They Use It

Although the United States has the largest Facebook user base, variations in engagement by country paint a different FBX opportunity map.  When considering a country’s Facebook user base and ‘findability score’ (the number of retargeting opportunities in a day for a pixeled user on Facebook), the Latin American opportunity is as big as, if not bigger, than the U.S.  Brazil’s opportunity is the largest by far, thanks to its hyper-engaged base of Facebookers – one pixeled user there is worth 5.3x the retargeting opportunity vs. the U.S.!

Not Your Average Ad Position

Direct response advertisers know that in SEM, ad position is king. In the early days of AdWords, little known companies like eBay, Edmunds and Priceline were able to achieve bid positions #1 and #2 with little competition. Nowadays, though, any two direct competitors in retail, travel, automotive, real estate or online dating have 57% overlap in keywords with an average ad position of 3.5-4.0.  Quite simply, competition is everywhere.  By comparison, FBX is a wide open frontier where advertiser can easily stake claims to wide swaths of productive land:

  • Minimal cookie pool overlap between any two FBX advertisers: Less than 10% of cookie pools overlap, and as a consequence Triggit clients win their FBX auctions 70% of the time, with ads in average ad position 1.3 – pole position for Facebook’s 20% of the Internet.
  • FBX performs well in any position: Unlike AdWords, winning the top spot isn’t necessary to see great performance. While AdWords’ CTRs plummet after the 1st and 2nd positions, FBX’s performance remains high because Facebook’s gotten rid of the fold – the ad units scroll up and down with the user.

FBX Country eCPCs Are At A Discount To Average Order Values

One thing we and every other FBX partner have found is that FBX inventory in the U.S. is worth much more than it currently costs, hence the landrush analogy.  But in this case, the landrush isn’t just from New York to California; around the world direct response advertisers are seeing an effective CPC discount relative to regional average order values that is rewarding early adopters such as those in the below chart:

To see the full infographic, visit our Data Insights page.

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Facebook Exchange Ads: It’s not about you. It’s all about me.

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Today’s blog post is cross-published with FBPPC, the leading source for Facebook advertising news and views.

By Christina Park

On Facebook, I find most people, including myself, to be incredibly self-absorbed. The content that we’re drawn to are the posts, pictures, and comments that are most relevant to us. My next logical leap would be to think that this type of mentality would naturally extend itself to the ads we see on Facebook.  So my first question we ask our clients is, “Who and then what?” Who do you want to show your ads to, and what do you think would be most relevant for them?

At first, advertisers are skeptical about what they can do within the confines of a 99×72 ad format. There’s actually quite a lot that can be done to personalize the ad unit and create a relationship with the person viewing it. Below are some best practices that we go over on actual calls with clients who find success with Facebook Exchange.

1) Use images from your site that the person actually last looked at.

The most important factor is drawing eyeballs to the ad. Make sure the product image is relevant to your product. It’s best if the image reflected the last picture the visitor actually saw before leaving your site.

 

2) The more useful information, the better.

Put in as much helpful information as possible, including a description of your product. In several tests we found that putting in a product description in place of a price yielded higher engagement.

 

3) Test creative and copy variations.

Work with a partner like Triggit to test multiple combination of images and text to determine which ads are the most successful and relevant.As we said in a previous blog post, dynamic ad creatives that reflect relevant product images and copy can yield 500% better performance on Facebook.

So remember this mantra when you’re trying to think about the mindset of a Facebooker who’s seeing your ads: “It’s all about me, not about you!”

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Triggit Hosts First Padrino Meetup in San Francisco

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This is cross-posted from the official Padrino blog and written by the original authors of Padrino.

By Nathan Esquenazi

One of our core Padrino members DAddYE has moved to San Francisco recently and has joined as a developer at Triggit. The Padrino core team has always been a very distributed team with each of us living in different places until recently.

Since Davide, Josh and I all live in the city now, we thought it would make sense to host our first meetup in San Francisco.

Triggit has graciously agreed to let us use their office for the meetup and some food for you.

Come join us on Thursday, January 24th at 6:30pm to learn more about our plans for Padrino in the coming year as we continue our long journey to 1.0.

We will talking about the coming Padrino 0.11 release and we want to share our plans for Padrino 1.0, which aims to be a big step forward for us since will be focused on multi-threading with a special focus on JRuby.

There are more cool things like full modularized templates, routes etc… stay tuned for more details.

We are excited about jump starting our development efforts again and would love everyone interested in Sinatra and Padrino to attend.

Please RSVP to the event so we can get a rough sense of the number of people attending. Look forward to seeing you guys there!

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Triggit’s going to Paris and London!

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*Updated January 24th with new event details.

Triggit to host two new roadshows in 2013 in Europe by popular demand, celebrates new London office opening

After closing out last year with explosive international growth and hosting our first international Facebook Exchange roadshow in Brazil, Triggit’s hitting the road again and announcing new roadshow dates for Europe! By popular demand, Triggit’s headed to London and Paris, two cities that boast the most number of Facebook users in Europe.

As always, we’ll have free drinks, food, and of course, great content about the Facebook Exchange. If you want to reserve your spot today, please sign up via the forms below.

Paris Roadshow
When: January 30th - 7:00PM-10:00PM
Where: Espace Marbuef - 37 rue Marbeuf, 75008 Paris

With panelists:

  • Mathieu Lepoutre, Directeur du pôle Socialyse

Before joining Havas Digital, Mathieu Lepoutre co-founded Make It Social, an agency which specializes in social marketing. He was in charge of consulting, strategy, fan community management, application development, and media planning on Facebook. Additionally, he developed an unique advertising API in France to drive Facebook campaign performance for large advertisers such as Garnier, Maybeline-Gemey, 3suisses, La Redoute, and Cofidis. Socialyse accompanies brands and advertisers in the creation and engagement of communities, monitoring e-reputation, content delivery, measurement and performance analysis operations.

Damien has years of experience within the digital advertising space. Having served as Client Digital at the Zenithoptimedia Group and various roles within the Vivaki Nerve Center, Damien is currently serving as Advert Stream’s Managing Director and is responsible for the Adthink-Media Group. With a strong background in using data for performance, Damien’s perspective and experience will enrich our conversation on how to best connect with the online customer today.

Eric co-founded OneSIXTY2 last year to focus on using data to create a relevant customer advertising experience. He has over a decade’s worth of experience of online advertising world under his belt having spent years at Mediamind, Adnovia, and Multimania respectively. Eric will provide insight the importance of data in advertising today.

  • Mohamed Laaouissi, Country Manager – France mexad

Mohamed leads mexad’s efforts in France, bidding and managing display campaigns across ad exchange platforms and optimizing campaigns towards client objectives. Before mexad, Mohamed led various sales positions at Efficient Frontier and Espotting/Miva.

  • Laurent Duverney-Guichard, VP Product Marketing Gamned

Laurent joined Gamned to bring his in-depth knowledge in  online advertising to their product marketing division. At Gamned, he is responsible for defining the product and marketing roadmap for the company’s real-time advertising solutions. He was previously in charge of Microsoft’s Ad Exchange offering in France.

RSVP here: http://facebook-exchange-paris.eventbrite.com

 

London Roadshow
When: January 31st - 6:30PM – 10:00PM
Where: The Building Centre - 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT
RSVP here: http://facebook-exchange-london.eventbrite.com/

For those of you who plan on attending, merci beaucoup and cheers mate – we’ll see you soon!

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Triggit’s FBX Retargeting Playbook for 2013

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Tips & Strategies from the First Facebook Exchange Noel

By Christina Park
Marketing@Triggit 

Advertisers who began retargeting on Facebook Exchange in 2012 saw results that they hadn’t seen since 2002. On average, advertisers were seeing 4-6x higher return on ad spend at ⅕ the cost of anywhere else, making the Facebook Exchange the best converting and most efficient online marketing channel to date. Numbers like these made large direct advertisers with an aggregate of half a billion monthly unique site visitors rush to retarget on Facebook with Triggit in time for the holidays.

So, how did the Facebook Exchange do in its first Christmas Noel? Triggit teamed up with online advertising data expert Dr. Hyungyoung Choi to unwrap key online holiday shopping insights and strategies from the Facebook Exchange. To learn the tips and tricks that top Fortune 1000 advertisers successfully used to retarget valuable customers on Facebook during the busiest e-commerce season in history, visit triggit.com/facebook-exchange-playbook to download the first definitive Facebook Exchange Playbook for free!

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Triggit 2013 Predictions

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Zach Coelius
CEO, Triggit 

Without a doubt, 2012 was the best year in Triggit’s history. In the past 12 months we have grown more 300% in both revenue and staff.  We launched our best product to date with FBX.  We signed incredibly important advertisers all over the world.  And we are having more fun than ever before.  Last year was nothing short of awesome.  Thank you to everyone who made it possible.

But as good as 2012 was, I am incredibly bullish for 2013.  Here are my predictions:

  1. First and foremost, 2013 is going to be great year for the US economy, which means nothing but good things for those of us in the marketing sector.  At this point all the indicators such as household formation, average age of the US auto fleet, corporate profits and pretty much everything else is pointing to a very solid year. Because advertising and marketing is often highly tied to these cyclical effects, we usually see an outsized gain when growth occurs. I am forecasting a solid vintage with lucky 13.
  2. Having dreadfully missed Facebook in last year’s predictions I certainly don’t intend to do it again. 2013 will be the year FB starts to unfold their wings.  We saw the beginnings of their power in the space in 2012 and by all indications they are just getting started down there at 1 Hacker Way.
  3. 2013 will be the year we finally make progress innovating on the dreadful ad units – otherwise known as banner ads – we have had to work with on the web.  Roughly five toothpicks wide and about as engaging as a discarded cigarette butt, banner ads should have been improved a decade ago and are embarrassingly out of date. Thankfully this process has already begun with the often-misunderstood “native” ad, which is simply publishers refusing to go along with the collective stupidity and instead individually innovating by creating their own ad units.   Over the coming year I see a plethora of new formats emerging and significant progress being made. My personal hope is that we get a full half page ad that simply covers 50% of the page.
  4. For last six or so years there has been tremendous pressure on the structure of our business as Marketers, Agencies, Media and Technology companies have all struggled with how to relate to each other. Quite simply the old model of Client, Agency, Media is being significantly disrupted as technology is automating formally manual processes and shuffling the center of gravity.  Until recently most participants in the industry largely assumed things would stay roughly the same with technology being a vendor to the agencies.  Lately we are seeing this assumption challenged as important advertisers such as Kellogg’s, Proctor and Gamble, Ford and many others are going technology direct.  My bet is that 2013 will be the year the market broadly wakes up to the reality that the model is restructuring and we could be in for some major changes.
  5. For years now the market has been looking at the infamous Lumascape with its smorgasbord of companies and has not so silently prayed that some magic consolidator would swoop in and simplify the market.  Every year someone (myself included) predicts that the acquisition spree will begin and the behemoths of our world will bring us all rationality.  Every year the books close with an acquisition here or there and a larger and more complex map.  As with any innovation cycle – and there is surely a lot of innovation going on – it is to be expected that we would see such a profusion of new approaches and technologies creating confusion.  Yet it is reasonable to ask when it will end as it always does in every market.  My prediction is 2013 will be the year that we come to recognize that the consolidation will be coming from within rather than from adjacent companies moving into our space.  For as we have waited and predicted the consolidation, many of the companies on the Lumascape have been growing exponentially and some are getting to be quite large (for instance Triggit has been growing at 300% a year in revenue since 2009).  Next year these growth companies will start to make strategic moves that shakeup the space.  We will look back and recognize that strategic acquirers and incumbents made a big mistake by letting Ad Tech startups grow so large unencumbered.
  6. No Triggit predictions are complete without opining about RTB.  Every year I predict RTB will be bigger and better the next year and every year it has been true.  2013 will be no exception.  With FB proving that RTB works for more than just IAB ad units we should see a myriad of companies rolling out their own exchanges to access the now sizable programmatic dollars.  Moreover, we will see the continued trends of ad networks leaving the business, direct sales forces losing their stranglehold and large platforms realizing it makes strategic sense to engage with RTB sooner rather than later.  We are in the early innings with RTB and we have a lot of growth in front of us.
  7. We will continue to make slow and steady progress with attribution next year.  I don’t expect that there will be any groundbreaking changes, but attribution continues to be a huge pain point for our industry and all the signs point to more progress.
  8. Yahoo has been getting back in the saddle since Marissa took over and I fully expect them to make a significant move into ad tech in the coming twelve months.  I have no idea what the actual move will be (and I am not sure they do either), but they are coming back.
  9. Retargeting will be taken out of the tactic box marketers have been myopically placing it into, and instead they will recognize that retargeting is simply the first step to a sophisticated data driven marketing strategy.  Lots more on this in the coming year.
  10. And last, but hardly least, I once again predict that we all will have a ton of fun in lucky 2013.  Happy holidays and New Year everyone!

 

 

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2012 Predictions Reviewed

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By Zach Coelius
CEO, Triggit

Wow, for being such an amazingly good year for Triggit, I sure whiffed on my predictions for 2012. Somehow, I missed across the

board and yet the last 12 months have been the best we have ever had. What can I say other than I hope I do just as well for 2013.

Here is what I would say a year later:

“1.  Google. 2012 is going to be the year of Google just like it was in 2010 and 2011.  The boy and girls over there have built an amazing stack, market leading exchange and powerful cross channel capabilities that are simply unrivaled.  The last few years have been about building and now they have it and it is awesome.  In 2012 we are going to see them start to flex their muscles and do things that causes the market to realize just how insanely powerful they have become.  Examples could include a big deal for access to advertise in TV inventory with someone like DISH or a cable company; A massive multi hundred million dollar plus direct deal with a major advertiser for multiple channels; a deal leveraging their Motorola purchase to do something to bring IPTV to set top boxes everywhere or something else equally crazy.  Google will be big and powerful in 2012 and it will scare people.”

One word: Facebook. 2012 was clearly the year of Facebook in pretty much every category and yet I didn’t mention them once in last year’s predictions. I really have no excuse for missing this one. The writing was on the wall and I simply ignored it. Massive fail.

“2.  Yahoo, AOL, MSFT. In 2011 the world gave these three the chance to become competitors to Google in the display world and they largely disappointed. It is not that they didn’t do anything, they did some things, but compared to the thousands of engineers and intense focus Google has on winning they were bystanders in comparison. 2012 will be the year that someone steps up to compete and my bet is that it won’t be the three amigos. By the end of the 2012 at least one of these companies will no longer be independent as it gets eaten up by whoever emerges as the Google competitor. And at least one of these companies will no longer be relevant as it either quits the market altogether or is simply no longer seen as a viable competitor. 2012 will not be kind to any other these companies unless something dramatically changes.”

I would say that I deserve half points on this one.  First, it is clear MSFT is capitulating in the ad space as it tries to sell off Atlas and exit the sector. It is not apparent what Yahoo will do yet, but there is a chance Marissa and Co. will be doing something big in Ad Tech.  AOL is clearly active in the space and they are rolling out a lot of interesting things, but so far they are hardly a Google competitor.  And I clearly nailed this: “2012 will be the year that someone steps up to compete and my bet is that it won’t be the three amigos.”  Not sure what I was thinking to say this and yet to completely ignore FB.

“3.  2012 will be the year of deep data. For the last three years we in the industry have all worked hard to make data work and we have made a ton progress.  Yet as far as we have come, the data we use is still pretty thin and it often represents a single view into what are very complex user behaviors. The next step will be the process of unlocking the deep multi-dimensional data that we have on these users. This means integrating CRM data, offline data, purchasing data and complex demographics to build a much more nuanced and accurate targeting model. 2012 is when all the hard work we have been putting into overcoming these hurdles finally comes to fruition.”

This is a hard prediction to properly grade.  We certainly made a large amount of progress in working with big and deep data in 2012, but it is not clear that it was one of the most important themes of the year.  I would call this largely a miss.

“4.  Multi-Channel. 2012 Looks like it will be shaping up to be a year kind of like we had in 2011 in display when it comes to video and mobile.  The groundwork and plumbing has been laid and both in-stream video advertising and mobile are about to explode through RTB.  Next year will be a big one for both.”

Nope. Once again the expectation of mobile and video as advertising mediums far exceeded the result.

“5.  The Ad Network will be left for dead by the end of the year.  The ad networks have been dying a slow death over the last three years and the smartest among them sold, diversified and got out of the business last year.  By the end of 2012 it will be over and those left clinging to hope will see it extinguished by the cruel finality of the market.”

I would call this a win expect it is such an easy prediction that it is almost a gimme.  Ad networks are quitting the space or dying left and right as ad exchanges eat their lunch.  We will see this same trend continuing in 2013 as they slowly wither away.

“6.  Congress will finally do something in 2012 and it scares the hell out of me to think about what it could be.  Legislating the internet seems to be something congress is finally ready to do as we have seen with SOPA this fall.  In 2012 they are going to pass something and given their ignorance it will do a ton of damage.  My figures are crossed that it is not too bad.”

Nada. I am very happy to have completely whiffed here. Once again Congress blessedly didn’t pass any legislation regarding the internet. I will continue holding my breath.

“7.  The big offline media, cable, and telecommunications companies will get into the internet battle in a big way. By the end of the year it will be clear that they are in this game to play hardball.”

Ha. Who was I kidding? Besides a few scattered moves, 2012 was like every year before it with the offline companies sucking their thumbs as they become increasingly strategically vulnerable.

“8.  The Ad Agencies will continue to leave their heads firmly in the sand as their service businesses are automated. Somehow agency folk have a remarkable capacity to rationalize, which is an absolute wonder. In 2012 they will continue to do nothing as their world continues to be upset by technology.”

In retrospect I made a mistake to lump all the agencies together. They are clearly a diverse pack and some are doing a lot more than others. Generally, though, I would still say this statement is true.

“9.  Adobe, IBM, Epsilon, Experian, Axciom, Amazon, Ebay, SAP, Oracle and others will continue their inexorable march to automate marketing.  2012 will be a big year for these companies as they make big moves and establish the new structure for marketing.  At this point I can’t see anything in the way of these players becoming a huge and dominating force in marketing.”

Step by step the above companies are continually making progress to own the future of marketing.  With acquisitions, new initiatives and focus, these guys are getting it done.

“10.  The online advertising business will continue to grow like a weed and we will all enjoy the ride.”

A gimme, but 2012 was a great year for our business.

“11.  And finally 2012 will be a year of big winners and big losers in the ad tech space.  Some folks are going to have huge wins as our good friends at Admeld did last year and some folks are going to get knocked out of game.  By the end of the year the Lumascape will be a memory of an innovation cycle that was a wondrous thing to behold but that is now much more consolidated and rationalized.”

I wouldn’t say that I crushed with it with this prediction. 2012 was a solid year for consolidation, but the innovation cycle is clearly still in full effect and we are hardly at the end.

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Óla, São Paulo!

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The Facebook Retargeting Landrush Roadshow series finally came to its last 2012 stop last week in São Paulo, Brazil

The weather wasn’t the only thing muito quenteon a December night in São Paulo. Despite being 6,400 miles away, our last roadshow in Brazil was a packed house with over 100 people in attendance – nearly the max capacity for our venue, the lovely Bar Santa Julia. Perhaps we should have guessed that Brazil was hungry for more information about Facebook Exchange, as it’s a country that boasts the 2nd highest number of Facebook users in the world. They’re not slowing down anytime soon either with a year over year growth rate of 144% and 63 million Facebook users – that’s one third of the Brazilian population!

The night proved to be an educational one as Alessandro Lima from Facebook’s Media Solutions team gave a comprehensive overview of how the Facebook Exchange fits into Facebook’s advertising ecosystem. Triggit’s Co-Founder and CEO, Zach Coelius, then shared insights around initial performance results from this deck in the panel that followed Alessandro’s talk. According to some of the attendees, there were many ‘lightbulb moments’ including the point in slide 11 – not only is  FBX the most efficient retargeting channel to date, it’s also the best converting one too.



Some Brazilian friends of ours had such a great time at the event, they put together a video capturing the sights and sounds of the roadshow. If you couldn’t make it south of the equator, don’t despair – you can re-live it here!

To everyone in São Paulo, we are glad we finally had the opportunity to meet you in person. We have a feeling this won’t be our last trip to São Paulo! To stay up to date with Triggit’s latest and greatest, check out our events page. For more information, contact sales@triggit.com.

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Triggit completes $7.4 million Series B, led jointly by Spark Capital and Foundry Group

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Triggit prepares to expand aggressively for Facebook Exchange in Asia, South America and Europe; reports 300% topline revenue growth since FBX launched in June

November 29, 2012 – San Francisco, CA- Triggit, the global leader in retargeting on Facebook, announced today it had secured $7.4 million in Series B funding led by Spark Capital and Foundry Group, with participation from earlier angel investors.

The Series B funding announcement comes at a time of incredible growth at Triggit. As a leader in retargeting on Facebook, Triggit partners with several top 1000 online direct response advertisers, like Kmart and Lowes. With hundreds of Facebook Exchange (FBX) campaigns live in time for the holidays, Triggit powers retargeting for advertisers that in aggregate see over half a billion (520MM) unique visitors per month on their site. This figure is double the amount of traffic that Triggit was seeing in September, when FBX first came out of beta.

Santo Politi, founder and general partner of Spark Capital, says that Triggit is quickly on track to become very profitable, due to their ability to adapt quickly and aggressively when taking on new opportunities like FBX. “Spark has always looked for companies that reach can reach great scale at whatever they’re doing, and Triggit has always shown signs that it had great potential to do this.”

Seth Levine, managing director of Foundry Group, says that thanks to the Facebook Exchange, programmatic buying and selling has increased at a pace higher than most people expected. “Programmatic buying will be the future of media buying on the internet for the next several years, so by design I expect Triggit to continue growing at breakneck speed.”

In Q4’12 alone, the company grew 50%, with 1/3 of the hires joining the engineering department. Triggit recently also opened three new sales offices in Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles to keep up with the high demand of new business all around the US. Triggit’s clients include companies in every major vertical including retail, travel, finance, and entertainment, and dozens of advertisers have been impressed with the performance of their FBX campaigns during the holidays. In particular, retail and travel advertisers have been seeing CTRs are high as .7% for their dynamic FBX ads, which rivals the performance of their paid search campaigns.

Since October, Triggit has been educating and evangelizing the opportunity on FBX through a series of sold-out roadshows called The Retargeting Landrush on Facebook. The event sparked wide interest from people across the online advertising industry, with 40% of the attendees composed of large advertisers and agency members. By popular demand, Triggit will be concluding the series with one last roadshow in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they’ve seen high levels of interest from advertisers in a country that boasts the 2nd highest number of Facebook users in the world.

About Triggit

Having quickly emerged as the industry leader in retargeting on Facebook, Triggit is able to turn advertisers’ entire product catalogues into dynamic retargeting experiences on Facebook. Triggit partners with hundreds of the largest retail, travel, finance, and entertainment companies across the globe. With over seven years’ of experience in providing real-time bidding solutions, Triggit also offers the following capabilities on all major exchanges including Facebook: Control tests and view-through attribution, optimization, dynamic creatives, frequency capping, and flexible pricing. Contact info@triggit.com for more information.

About Spark Capital

Founded in 2005 by Todd Dagres, Santo Politi and Paul Conway, Spark Capital is a tight-knit group of partners managing approximately $1 billion across three funds. Headquartered in Boston, Spark invests in companies across the globe. Spark invests across a number of key market segments including: advertising & monetization, commerce & services, cloud & infrastructure, social, mobile and content. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, AdMeld, OMGPOP, ThePlatform and 5Min. The Spark team has previously backed notable companies such as Akamai Technologies, Qtera, Aether Systems and Novatel Wireless.

About Foundry Group

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on making investments in early-stage information technology, Internet and software startups. They are centrally located in Boulder, CO, but invest in companies across North America. Their current venture fund of $225m was launched in late 2007 and is managed by four managing directors. Collectively, they have almost five decades of experience in venture capital investing. During that time they have invested in over 70 companies as institutional investors and over 50 companies as angel investors.

 

 

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Triggit says ‘ciao’ to last roadshow event of the year

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Last event of 2012 about the Facebook Exchange to be held in São Paulo, Brazil

As winter approaches Triggit’s escaping to 90 degree temperatures in the beautiful city of São Paulo, Brazil, to end a series of panels educating the o

nline advertising industry about the Facebook Exchange opportunity. Brazil was an obvious location to host our first ever international event about FBX as it’s a country that boasts the second highest number of Facebook users. The interest from advertisers was so great that we already had 80 out of 100 spots filled the first week of November – one month before our event date of December 4th!

Although the location is 6500 miles away from San Francisco, the format is still the same as it’s always been – we’ll have insightful content, free drinks and great food the entire event. If you’re planning on traveling to Brazil the week of December 4th, check out the details below and join us by registering here!

When:
December 4, 2012

Where:
Santa Julia Bar & Restaurant (right near the bustling business district of Itaim Bibi)
Alameda Raja Gabaglia, 125
Vila Olímpia – São Paulo

Public parking can be found right next door:
Gomes de Carvalho 1581
São Paulo, 04551-090, Brazil

Who:
Panelists will include: 

  • Zach Coelius, CEO @ Triggit
  • Alessandro Lima, Media Solutions @ Facebook
  • Pedro Reiss, Head of Platforms & Technology at F.biz
  • Vitor Hugo Batista, Retargeting Specialist @ Dafiti
  • Guilherme Becker, Kanui

What:
6:30 – 7:30 PM — Drinks, food and networking
7:30 – 8:30 PM — Presentation by Facebook followed by a panel
8:30 – 9:30 PM — More networking, food and drinks

How:
Register at the Eventbrite link now – spaces are limited!

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FBX + Dynamic Creatives: Crushing It

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Today’s blog post is cross-published with FBPPC, the leading source for Facebook advertising news and views.
By Christina Park 

Since the Facebook Exchange launched two months ago, the data analytics team here at Triggit has been finding more and more evidence that proves the Facebook Exchange is the biggest opportunity for direct response marketers to jump on since paid search. In case you’ve missed it, let’s recap the reasons why Facebook is breeding a retargeting landrush:

#1) Scale: Over one billion people – including most of your customers – are literally parked on Facebook and browsing on the site all day long.

#2) Recency: A majority of the people who visit your site see your ad on Facebook in the first hour – sometimes in the first five minutes.

#3) Efficiency: Right now, the CPAs on FBX are 20 – 80% lower compared to other major exchanges.

#4) Viewability: FBX outperforms above-the-fold only ads on other exchanges at ⅓ the cost. At that price, advertising on guaranteed brand-safe pages where you’re sure your ads will be seen makes this opportunity the biggest bargain on the internet.

Our next series of experiments focused on ad relevance to specific users. If the above signs are innate to Facebook as a retargeting platform, what happens when marketers optimize on it to create relevant, dynamic ads with their 1st party data on FBX?

We compared campaign data for six different retailers with similar conversion goals over a two month span. Half of the retailers were advertising only static ad formats on Facebook, and the other half were only running dynamic creatives – that is, retargeting people with ads of the products they expressed interest in. If, for example, a user went to a retail site and checked out a pair of shoes, we’d then show them ad ad with not only an image of that exact pair of shoes, but also the name and price of that pair of shoes in the body copy of the ad.

Compared to static ads, dynamic creatives on Facebook saw:

  • 5.12 higher CTRs
  • 9x more efficient CPAs, 5.5x more efficient CPCs
  • 1.56x greater conversion rate

In plain English, the clicks on dynamic ads jumped over 500% compared to static ads, and the costs for those valuable clicks dropped off a cliff. Not only did these relevant ads generate clicks more cost-effectively, but the users who clicked those relevant ads were also converting at a rate that was 1.5 times greater than the more generally targeted ads! This dramatic return on investment makes ‘relevancy’ point #5 on our ever growing list of reasons for why direct response marketers should take advantage of the valuable surplus inventory on Facebook Exchange now.

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Announcing our SES Chicago Roadshow Panelists

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Third leg of the Facebook Retargeting Landrush to include Facebook, partners, and industry experts
By Prachi Mishra, Marketing

As the temperatures start to drop and the holiday season approaches, Triggit is more energized than ever to hit the road and spread the word about the Facebook Exchange. We’ve finalized the lineup for our third roadshow, which will be held during SES in Chicago next Wednesday, Nov 14th, at the HardRock Hotel. We’ll have free drinks, food, and of course, great content, starting at 6:30 PM CST. The hotel is just across the street from SES for those of you who want to take a break from the busyness of the conference hall.

Our panel will be moderated by Geoff Price, industry veteran and Triggit’s VP of Sales. Prior to leading Triggit’s worldwide client acquisition efforts, Geoff ran sales at several early-stage start-ups, Adobe, and Efficient Frontier. He also held a stint at Yahoo! for seven years through a company acquisition (broadcast.com).

Our esteemed panelists will include:

Brad Keown, Midwest Director of Sales of Facebook
Brad has over 11 years of interactive media experience and currently serves as Facebook’s Midwest Director of Sales in Chicago. In this role, Brad focuses on helping both brand and direct marketers develop social media strategies to connect with Facebook’s 400MM active users via a combination of targeted ad placement, branded application integration, and custom program development. Brad’s expertise and knowledge will be invaluable in our discussion of how FBX is changing the direct marketing. Prior to joining Facebook, Brad spent 9 years at Microsoft and worked at Clear Channel in national radio sales in both Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

Maggie Neuwald, VP of Product Marketing and Partnerships at TagMan
Maggie has several years of digital advertising and technology marketing industry experience. She oversees TagMan’s partnerships with digital marketing and technology providers, and identifies new market opportunities and TagMan technology integration. We are excited to have Maggie as an objective authority on the changing landscape of online advertising.

Angela Overhoff, VP of Client Services at SearchForce
Angela brings more than a decade of experience in Search and Social Media to the table, and will be giving lots of insight into how advertisers might drive better performance and solve key challenges. Before joining SearchForce, Angela was Senior Director at Efficient Frontier. While there, she led a team which helped dozens of enterprise accounts – including Nordstrom, Wells Fargo and Zappos – grow and optimize their Search, Facebook and Display Re-Marketing programs. Angela began her career at MSN Search and later helped open the EMEA headquarters for aQuantive, which was later acquired by Microsoft.

Mike Winters, VP of Accounts at Triggit
Mike brings a wealth of knowledge in data-driven advertising. He oversees Triggit’s client services group, working closely with our sales and product development teams to help clients implement and utilize the newest technologies. We are excited to have Mike share his first-hand knowledge on how marketers are utilizing FBX to reach their audiences directly.

Along with the insightful conversation, there will be plenty of food and drinks at 6:30pm CST. Space is extremely limited; make sure to RSVP today! See you at the HardRock!

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Why the Facebook Exchange ends the viewability debate

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This latest data insight was unveiled at last Thursday’s SF Roadshow. To be the first to hear fresh new insights, sign up now for the next roadshow at 11/14 in Chicago at SES!

By Christina Park

Advertisers have been spending a lot of time and money trying to adopt the “viewable impression” standard, i.e. only paying for ads that are actually seen, not just served. It’s becoming more and more important for advertisers to capture a person’s attention as effectively as possible as users bounce from site to site at high velocity in an increasingly fragmented web. The performance for above-the-fold-only ads make this argument even more compelling: CTRs rose 3x higher than the industry average according to NBC Universal, and research showed that action rates decreased rapidly as ads plunged lower on a page.

When the Facebook Exchange launched in mid-September, it was a rare outpost of the internet that exhibited the perfect combination of performance, viewable impressions, and engagement for online advertisers. FBX was delivering on average 4x higher post click ROAS and 2x higher click conversion rates compared to traditional display retargeting methods. And they were delivering them on brand-safe and innocuous pages that were always above the fold, because, well, there is no fold on Facebook. The ads follow you as you scroll up and down the page.

Seeing stellar data points like these really hit home the idea that the FBX opportunity was the next big landrush in online advertising. However, we needed one more piece of the puzzle – how efficiently does FBX perform against above-the-fold only ads on traditional exchanges? We took campaigns from two different advertisers that were simultaneously running on both FBX and traditional, and eventually found mathematical proof highlighting how irrational it is not to be running a campaign on the Facebook Exchange right now: an FBX ad not only out-performs above-the-fold only ads, but they outperform them at 1/3 the cost.

Boiling down the math a bit further, this means:

  • At 1/3 the cost, you’re advertising on all brand-safe pages on Facebook
  • At 1/3 the cost all your ads on FBX are viewable
  • At 1/3 the cost all your ads are being retargeted by a majority of the people who visit your site
  • At 1/3 the cost you’re advertising on the one site where people are parked on all day long

And as our Account Manager Steve Palombo pointed out in an earlier blog post, a majority of the people that leave your site are seeing the ad retargeted to them on Facebook under an hour, sometimes within five minutes after tabbing back to the site that they have open all day long.

Clearly Facebook Exchange works incredibly well if you’re about getting your ads seen, and this could be exactly what direct response marketers have dreamed of all along. But as this trend continues, only one problem remains: how quickly can advertisers get their ads running on on a highly profitable online direct response channel with available inventory at bargain prices before their competitors do?

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Sold out SF Roadshow recap and pictures

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Thursday’s sold out “The Facebook Retargeting Landrush” event included attendees from Facebook, agencies, large advertisers, and other FBX partners. We’ve picked some photos from the event below, but feel free to view the rest of them here!

People begin streaming in 15 minutes early and by 6:45 PM it’s already a packed house

One of our guests busies himself viewing the infographic we released at our NYC roadshow about FBX

Seats fill up quickly as everyone quiets themselves for the presentation led by Triggit’s head of sales and marketing, Chris Zaharias

Our all-star panel (from left to right): Brian Anderson of LUMA Partners, Eric Stein of Epsilon, Zach Coelius of Triggit, Adam Berke of AdRoll, Natalia Dias of Dafiti.com, Chris Zaharias of Triggit

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Announcing our All-Star Lineup of Roadshow Panelists

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The Facebook Retargeting Landrush event to include advertisers, partners, and industry experts
By Christina Park

We’re excited to announce that we’ve finalized the all-star lineup of panelists for our event about the Facebook Exchange tomorrow. If you haven’t signed up yet, I urge you to do so NOW – we only have 20 remaining spots left!

Without further ado, our panel features:

Natalia Dias, Display Remarketing Manager and Affiliate Marketing for Dafiti
Natalia has probably traveled the farthest out of all the panelists to come speak at this event. She hails from Brazil, where she overlooks online advertising and account management for the largest and fastest growing e-commerce site in her country, Dafiti. She brings a wealth of knowledge to media buying and affiliate marketing, with over 5+ years of experience, and is one of the first marketers to test FBX’s performance in South America. We can’t wait to hear Dafiti’s perspective and results on FBX.

Eric Stein, EVP of Online Solutions at Epsilon
Eric serves as the online expert for one of the top 10 largest agencies in the world, Epsilon. Eric is responsible for identifying and testing new, proven solutions in the online marketing space to better serve Epsilon’s global client roster, such as the Facebook Exchange. Eric joined Epsilon from Google, where he led two key integration projects on the DoubleClick business as well as the Local Markets team. Eric was also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Bessemer Ventures, where he led strategic efforts to use fundamental data from a variety of sources to build their hedge fund. Eric is a graduate of University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School.

Brian Anderson, Partner at LUMA Partners
Everyone in the display advertising space has probably seen this chart. Brian hails from LUMA Partners, the firm that created the now iconic map of the industry. He is a seasoned strategy, corporate development and mergers and acquisitions executive and anchors LUMA’s west coast presence from its Palo Alto office. Prior to LUMA, Brian was Vice President, Corporate Development for Omniture, the leading web analytics and web optimization company, responsible for all mergers and acquisition activities (acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion). Prior to Omniture, Brian was VP, Corporate Development at Interwoven, and was a member of the executive staff at Phoenix Technologies. Brian was also formerly with Robertson Stephens, a technology-focused investment bank, in its mergers and acquisitions group.

Adam Berke, President of AdRoll
Adam is the President of AdRoll, one of the first 12 partners to be included into the Facebook Exchange. Founded in 2007, AdRoll switched to retargeting in 2008, and the company was recently named the fastest growing private advertising company by Inc. Magazine. Adam says that he has a passion for interactive marketing, which is very apparent as he is one of the few start-up presidents that works directly with many advertisers and is extremely active in commenting, writing, and posting on various forums and blogs. Before joining AdRoll, Adam helped launch the CPL network at Aptimus, a publicly traded ad network acquired by the Apollo Group. In his four years there, he took a leadership role in almost every department: Business Development, Advertiser Operations, and Product Management.

Zach Coelius, Co-founder & CEO of Triggit
And of course, we have our very own Zach Coelius. A self described serial-entrepreneur with seven years of RTB under his belt, he lent the Facebook product team everything he knew about RTB and retargeting from the moment they expressed interest in creating a Facebook Exchange. Zach played a crucial part in designing Triggit’s own Facebook specific algorithm, making sure that Triggit was the first to bid on the Facebook Exchange with features like dynamic creative, advanced retargeting, A/B lift tests and more. Zach is widely known as an industry thought leader in real-time bidding and demand side platforms — if you Google an article about the industry, you’ll probably see Zach’s name pop up more than once as he is a frequent industry columnist and speaker.

Along with great content we’ll have plenty of food and drinks starting at 6:30 PM PST. As I mentioned before, space is extremely limited so place sign up here: http://triggit-roadshow-sf.eventbrite.com/

We hope to see you there!