Case Studies

Zendesk is a web-based customer support software company with a robust ticket management system and a strong customer community. Offering a variety of products from starting from a free trial to three paid tiers, Zendesk began using ReTargeter with the hopes of driving sign-ups as well as improving branding awareness.

"ReTargeter has been a great addition to our marketing mix." Jacob Meltzer | Online Marketing Manager of ZenDesk

Over a one month period in September 2010, Zendesk's ReTargeter campaign performed outstanding results with a total of 43 unique visitors who visiting their website, clicking on a ReTargeted banner ad, and converting immediately. Furthermore, 364 additional unique visitors were influenced by a ReTargeted banner ad and converted without directly clicking on the banner ad. Lastly, within that one month period, Zendesk received an enormous branding value as their ads performed a .23% clickthrough rate.

BustedTees has seen consistent success with site retargeting to bring back recent customers and convert casual browsers, but they also wanted to re-engage with customers who hadn't made a purchase, been to the website, or opened an email in a significant period of time. To reach those users, BustedTees turned to CRM Retargeting, an innovative form of retargeting that allows advertisers to serve display ads to people with nothing but an email or mailing address.

"This is a way that you can re-market to customers who have fallen off your marketing bandwagon. This is one of the best tools I know of that provides a channel to get those people back into your funnel." Adam Schwartz | General Manager

BustedTees' email list was converted into a fully anonymized, secure online audience segment, allowing us to serve 447,180 ad impressions over the course of one month. The campaign resulted in 195 total conversions, and with an average order value of $40, BustedTees was able to see an ROI of 390%.

Magoosh Online Test prep offers online courses for GMAT, GRE and SAT courses including video explanations, subject lessons, and practice tests.

Organic search is Magoosh's primary source of web traffic, but it is rare for a student to convert after just one visit, as most are still researching.

"Retargeting serves as a brand booster as students are researching test prep and helps us establish our reputation."Margarette Jung | Marketing Manager

A retargeting campaign for Magoosh's GRE course yielded 1,123 conversions over six months (61 click-through and 1,062 view-through). To determine the value of view-throughs, Magoosh ran a test and found that people who had been retargeted converted at a significantly higher rate than the control group. As a result of the test, Magoosh attributes view-throughs at 50% of the value of click-throughs.

With view-throughs valued at 50% and a conversion equal to $99, the campaign generated $58,608 in attributable revenue. At a total cost of $11,000 the campaign resulted in an ROI of 486%.

Crowdcast is an interesting tool that offers social insight within a corporation. With a form of virtual currency, employees are able to place bets on internal forecasting questions, effectively crowdcasting answers for many of the questions a corporation could have.

For Crowdcast, using ReTargeter to scale its brand offered:

1. Buzzworthy presence on popular sites
2. Return visits from bounced traffic
3. Cost-effectiveness

This mix of quantitative and qualitative results from ReTargeting easily solved Mat's brand scaling problems. With the help of ReTargeting, Crowdcast's product has been enjoyed by companies like Electronic Arts, Hallmark, and General Motors.

"Retargeting makes us look bigger, it makes us look like we spend more money than we actually are." Mat Fogarty | CEO of Crowdcast

Get Satisfaction is a leading online customer community platform that companies use or customer support, idea submission, marketing and sales questions, and capturing positive feedback. Using a freemium conversion funnel, Get Satisfaction focused much of their traffic driving strategies on search, social media, blogging, and buildling a content community. Display advertising played no part in their marketing strategy.

"I like using ReTargeter because they have made it simple and cost effective. Not only does retargeting work but I can measure the ROI in any given month as a function of how many conversions we generate." Jeff Nolan | VP Product Marketing at Get Satisfaction

After achieving an initial ROI during the first month, Get Satisfaction was able to leverage ReTargeter's optimization engine and support team to achieve a 104% ROI over the first month, a 160% ROI over the second month, and a 248% ROI over the third month.

The Clean Program is a detoxification diet that promotes a healthful diet and lifestyle through a 21 day program. They use ReTargeter to stay in front of their traffic and give them additional chances to purchase their product.

The Clean Program spent $1,000/month on ReTargeting their current traffic. With a price point of their product at $350, their ReTargeting campaign helped drive 40 conversions, totalling up to $14,000 of revenue from ReTargeting in June.

June 2010 Breakdown

• Spend = $1,000
• Return = $14,000
• ROI = 1,400%

"We have a niche audience for our products, so it makes sense to only target the people visiting our site because they've already shown they're interested in us. ReTargeter is amazing at bringing back bounced traffic and adding additional sales." Ben Tseitlin | The Clean Program

SmileyCookie.com is located in Pittsburgh, PA, and is one of the fastest growing online brands for specialty and novelty cookie treats. All of their cookies are freshly baked, hand-iced, trans-fat-free, nut-free, and kosher. Additionally, cookies are sold year round to reflect holidays, and can be customized for celebrations and sports teams. This gives them a very broad target audience that can be difficult to segment.

"ReTargeter has been an awesome addition to our marketing mix. For a product like ours, retargeting has proven to be instrumental in following up with our customers and generating additional sales." Adam Golomb | Director of E-Commerce at Smiley cookie

During November 2010, Smiley Cookie was able to complement their initial traffic driving efforts using ReTargeter. By retargeting their search, email marketing, PPC, social, and comparison shopping engine traffic, Smiley Cookie was able to reach their benchmark ROI of 5x with ReTargeter in November with 42 retargeted conversions. Additionally, Smiley Cookie was able to nearly double their conversion goal in December, and have more than tripled it in January due to continually building their segment pool and through creative and landing page A/B testing.

Ad:tech is frequently touted as "the event for digital marketing." The international series of conferences and exhibits for interactive advertising and technology scales across seven countries and 9 cities throughout the year, and attracts some of the most accomplished keynote speakers, such as Ariana Huffington, Guy Kawasaki, and Antonio Lucio.

"We saw many conversions on our end with the revenue associating to this campaign. It's one of the most successful [campaigns] for us this year." Sejal Badani | Marketing Manager at ad:tech

After using our retargeting solution for a few of their 2010 events, ad:tech decided to switch over to ReTargeter's Incredible Network for promoting their 2011 San Francisco and New York events.

Brahmin is a family-owned high end handbag company based in Massachusetts. They looked to ReTargeter to curb shopping cart abandonment and to convert window shoppers into customers. Within a month of launching a retargeting campaign, Brahmin was able to see a positive return on their investment. Since the introduction of retargeting, Brahmin has been able to reengage 20% of customers who initially abandon and bring them back to the site.

In addition to driving increased conversions by bringing shoppers back to the website to complete purchases, ReTargeter has also helped Brahmin gain a strong understanding of where their customers are going online, what sites they head to, and what blogs they read, allowing Brahmin to develop a more targeted marketing strategy.

"ReTargeter is easy for us to navigate. To be able to launch campaigns quickly has been extraordinarily valuable for us. We're able to adjust and change what's not working and ramp up what is working. We love that we're able to test and get comprehensive results almost immediately." Amy Sullivan | Director Ecommerce and Catalog

Graduation Source, a company that sells caps, gowns and other graduation attire uses ReTargeter to keep their brand top of mind during a longer than average retail purchase cycle.

After launching a campaign with ReTargeter, Graduation Source immediately saw a positive ROI. Retargeting has made a significant impact both from a branding and a direct response perspective. Their online revenue has been steadily increasing, and Graduation Source has seen a 460% return on their retargeting spend over the course of their campaigns.

"Retargeting made us realize that the traffic that comes to our homepage is extremely relevant. In our market, customers don't make decisions spontaneously. That's why I think retargeting has made such a big impact. I think it is a mix of the industry we're in, the ReTargeter team, and the service provided that's allowed us to see such consistently high returns." Sri Pv | Digital Marketing Specialist

Icebreaker is a retailer of merino wool based activewear. They focus on producing natural, high-performing materials with an eye toward sustainability. They sell their products from an online store, in wholesale stores around the world, as well as in their own stores in New Zealand, Canada, New York, Portland and San Francisco.

For Icebreaker, retargeting has been easy to execute and simple to maintain thanks to ReTargeter's account management team. One of the primary highlights of working with ReTargeter has been the commitment to the campaign demonstrated by their dedicated account manager, Marvin.

"I love working with Marvin; he's a very helpful, can-do account manager. Getting a campaign up and running with ReTargeter has been easy, efficient and seamless. His involvement has made the process enjoyable and he's always eager to jump on the phone if I have questions or need more data." Justine Seidel | eMarketing Manager

Skimlinks uses ReTargeter to improve brand recall and stay in front of prospective clients during their sales cycle.

In the first month, ReTargeter was able to drive 448 conversions. At Skimlinks, churn rates are quite low; as Aaron puts it, "happy clients are lifelong clients," so having new clients join their program is of paramount importance. Customer lifetime values can be extraordinarily high, and with ReTargeter, the cost per conversion averages a few dollars, leading to an incredibly high returns, which has been the most striking benefit that Skimlinks has seen from retargeting. In addition to the high return on investment, Skimlinks has also benefitted from ReTargeter's account management team.

The account management at ReTargeter is incredibly helpful. I have so many other things going on, so it's nice to know that ReTargeter is able to provide advice, guidance, and actively give us feedback on how to optimize our campaign. This was never a self-service model; ReTargeter really goes above and beyond to help make sure our campaign is running smoothly. Aaron Weissman | Director of Marketing

The University of Florida's Hough School of Business has used ReTargeter to keep their messages in front of prospective students. In two months, they were able to serve 3.3 million impressions, receiving a .31% click-through rate.

Nathan Lowery of Lipof, the ad agency that handles the University of FloridaÕs marketing, has found retargeting to be an effective way to recapture interest and ultimately drive conversions. Prior to launching their retargeting campaign, Lipof had focused the lion's share of the University's budget on driving new traffic to the website, largely via direct ad buys on premium sites. However, while they were able to successfully drive new traffic to the UF site, getting that traffic to convert proved a challenge. ReTargeter has solved the problem by bringing qualified prospects back to their site, resulting in 59 closed leads over two months.

"ReTargeter has worked as a great tool to communicate with prospects that we may not have captured the first time they visited our client's website. We spend a lot of effort initially pulling prospects to the UF site, and in the past we had no way to get our message in front of them again unless they specifically requested more information." Nathan Lowery | Lipof