Retargeting Company Triggit Is Making A 'Big Bet' On Native Advertising
Triggit works with retail brands and other direct-response advertisers to market products to customers on Facebook based on a prior history of searing for those products online.
By dropping a cookie on Nordstrom's website, for instance, Triggit and other retargeting companies can help the store place an ad in your Facebook newsfeed for a pair of shoes you'd been browsing earlier in the day.
Triggit CEO Zach Coelius says his company has spent the past six months testing similar in-stream ads on sites across the web. Since web users have learned to ignore banner ads, Coelius says that native ads, which appear organically within the flow of a user's web experience, will be increasingly popular moving forward.
"We're making a big bet that retargeting and native will be a big deal," Coelius said in an interview.
So far, Coelius says Triggit's testing has been hugely successful. Triggit said it determined the program's success by keeping three things in mind.
First, it needed to ensure that people actually clicked on the ads. Then, it wanted to see that users actually bought something once they clicked. And finally, for the sake of the advertisers and publishers, Triggit needed to monitor what an effective cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, would be for a publisher running these ads.
Triggit found that CPM for publishers ran at a good range, about $5-10 CPM, with retargeted native ads. According to the company's website, this system has also driven click-through rates, or CTRs, that are 15 times higher than those of banner ads.
The process to create such a successful program has been so lengthy because as Coelius explains, there are about 100 different types of ads that can run, unlike running a banner ad or an ad on Facebook, depending on the publisher.
"A native ad on Yahoo looks very different than, say, a sponsored tweet, which looks different than a Pinterest ad," Coelius said. "So to support that as a retargeting company, you need to be able to run and create ads on all these different formats, which is very challenging and it took a long time for us to build the technology."
Now that the company has launched its beta program, it plans to extend its services beyond the Facebook news feed and help companies across the web boost their ROIs.