I’ve been running a few campaigns on Perfect Audience for the past couple of weeks. The value proposition they offer is definitely very tempting (see my previous post for a more detailed explanation), however I’m a little concerned with their metrics.

Every day they send me a report with the performance of all my campaigns during the previous day. This is all good and very useful, you can check how many impressions your ads got, how many clicks, therefore calculate clickthrough rates, etc.

Perfect Audience also offers the option to set up goals just as you’ll do in Google Analytics, that way you can track how many sales (or whatever it is that you want your users to do) you get from their ads and calculate ROI.

Studying these reports I came across a term I’ve never heard about before, and that’s the view-through-conversion (VTC) which according to Perfect Audience I was getting a lot of, so I decided to learn a little more about what a VTC actually is. A VTC happens to be a conversion that came from a user that saw your ad but didn’t click on it. Ok, this is starting to sound familiar, we’ve all heard about the importance of brand awareness and how people who see and add might be more likely to buy your product just the same way people who see your billboard on the highway are, even if they don’t click on it (obviously).

This is all good and fine, but when you apply this concept to retargeting ads things doesn’t seem so clear to me, because what Perfect Audience is really saying is hey, there is this person who visited your site (on their own), didn’t buy on that first visit, but then saw our add, which he didn’t click on, went back to your site (on their own again) and made a purchase, so we are going to take some credit for that sale.

What?

Let’s take a look at another example. We have some very loyal users who will purchase every new service we offer. These people will obviously have the Perfect Audience cookie because they visit our site regularly. They will most likely never click on one of our ads because they already know who we are and where to find us, but even then Perfect Audience has decided that next time this users makes a purchase they are going to take some credit for it. Sure, why not…

I just came across Perfect Audience, a company that offers retargeted ads on Facebook. So basically what they do is after you insert a few lines of code into your website they start  placing cookies on the computers of anyone who visits your site, then when this people log in to their Facebook they will be served your add.

The value proposition is definitely tempting. Why on earth would someone who has already visited your website (therefore have your cookie and are now being served your add) click on one of your ads if they hated your product right? Someone who click on these kind of ads should be that more likely to convert, at least in theory.

I’ll give it a try and let you guys know how it works out.