AdRoll: improving display advertising for small businesses

If you're a small business trying to get your message to the right audience at the right time, what's the best place to put your advertising? AdRoll builds display advertising platforms that make sure your ads run efficiently—often by targeting potential customers that have already visited your company's web site.

That means that AdRoll creates ads that follow a potential customer around the web. If you checked out a pair of pants on one of their partner's web sites, then you might go to CNN.com and see an offer for 10 percent off a pair of pants from that retailer.

"Through our relationships with people like Google and Yahoo," explains Adam Berke, co-founder of AdRoll, "we're able to say, 'When you see this person's cookie, we have a specific ad or offer we want to show this person, from this advertiser.' And then based on how much intent the person showed, and how they interacted with the site, we can decide things like how much to bid, which makes it very efficient and ROI-positive. We do a lot of that stuff with algorithms in an automated fashion, so the small business doesn't have to figure all that out."

AdRoll's approach makes effective display advertising a possibility for small businesses, where before it had largely been the terrain of major brands.

"When you make things like display advertising available beyond just huge brands and credit app folks, you actually allow those small- and medium-sized businesses to really care about the brand more," says Peter Krivkovich, AdRoll co-founder. "The one thing about search is that there's no branding around it. It's a very effective tool, but when you can actually allow them to get their brand out where someone does see the ad, maybe they don't buy it online, but they see it on the aisle in the store. Or they recognize it as they're walking by. If you think about every small business having a brand that they really care about, there are huge opportunities beyond even what we do."

More info:
AdRoll web site: http://www.adroll.com/
AdRoll blog: http://blog.adroll.com/
AdRoll profile on CrunchBase:http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adroll-semantic-sugar-inc

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• advertising
• small business
• display
• adroll
• adam berke
• peter krivkovich