Retargeting: Get That Bread for Qualified Website Traffic That Just Didn’t Convert
90% of your website traffic doesn’t convert, and there’s nothing worse than a missed opportunity. For b2b companies, retargeting is a no-brainer. It's an easy way to make sure you’re always targeting an audience that has shown some intent to buy. However, the problem with retargeting anonymous website traffic broadly is that you don’t know who you are targeting and how qualified they are. With just a high volume, many SaaS companies bid low on retargeting across their entire website traffic. They push their brand in front of their website traffic wherever they go. This spray and pray tactic means SaaS companies are only getting in front of traffic that other advertisers aren’t willing to pay more. Do you think your competitors may have a more focused strategy, outbidding you on your best leads and leaving the rest to you? The Click-through rate is low because the quality filter is low. Conversion rate is low because most of your website traffic shouldn’t convert (candidates, low-quality leads, investors, analysts, perusers). That is, of course, unless you only target leads that should convert in the first place. We already know MadKudu can handle qualifying anonymous traffic, so why not retarget it as well?
Re-Get That Bread: Identity, Qualify, Retarget
Our goal here is to focus our retargeting budget on the subsection of our website traffic that is worth the most to us. If we do that, we will be able to reallocate the budget we’re not spending on low-quality traffic to bidding more for our high-quality traffic. We’ll need a few tools to Re-Get That Bread:
- IP lookup: we’ll be using Clearbit Reveal for this.
- Qualification: we’ll be using MadKudu for this.
- Retargeting: we’ll be using Adroll for this.
As usual, we’ll be connecting this all through Segment.
Qualifying traffic has become pretty easy with the advent of IP Lookup APIs - the most popular being Clearbit Reveal. Feed Clearbit an IP address and it returns (among other things) the domain of the company or the individual visiting your website. This is enough to score an account. We’ll be scoring with MadKudu, but you can also do it with your homegrown Lamb or Duck lead scoring model. We’ll send MadKudu the domain name provided by Clearbit, which will return a few important data points for this play:
- Customer Fit segment: very good, good, medium, low
- Predicted Spend: custom based on your specific pricing plans, predicting which
- Topical Segmentation: custom based on your target segments (e.g for Algolia: eCommerce, media, SaaS).
With this data, we’re able to feed AdRoll a custom audience of qualified traffic to target. This can be a bit tricky since AdRoll requires a static audience, but a quick script to update a static audience daily will get us around that hiccough. Based on predicted spend, we can even build separate audiences for our various plans, each with different budgets. If we add in Topical Segmentation, we can run targeted messaging to our various ICPs based on their needs at various price points. If we know the predicted value of the qualified traffic, we can calculate our maximum budget as a function of our acceptable CAC.
The Impact: +300% click-through rate
When Chris Rodriguez at Gliffy first began building this play, he was looking to get a click-through rate for his retargeting ads under control. When he saw it jump from the .7% industry average to 2-3% for qualified traffic, it became pretty clear that qualified traffic was worth the focus. Bidding higher on a qualified audience is a no-brainer: we see it on ad networks that boast a qualified audience or a qualified system of manual segmentation. It only makes sense that we would apply the same logic to how we retarget our audience: we want to spend more on the audience that matters, the ones that got away.