Drawbridge, which specialises in cross-device ad audience targeting and retargeting, has launched a mobile-to-mobile retargeting solution, after successful trials with several mCommerce clients.
Drawbridge says the results have been extraordinarily strong: marketers who have targeted lapsed users have achieved over 100 per cent Return on Ad Spend (“ROAS”) in under three weeks.
Marketers who have targeted active user groups have gotten 100% ROAS intraday (the incremental profitability from targeted users pays back the cost of the ad campaign within the same day). No other marketing technique drives these instant results, Drawbridge says.
The new tool enables marketers to easily define a target criteria among mobile users that have already converted at some point in the past: for example, they can target ads towards lapsed users, or towards users who have not yet activated, or target their most loyal and active users.
“Marketing efforts in mobile have been concentrated in new user acquisition, as marketers scrambled in the land grab that mobile offered as a platform,” said Drawbridge founder and CEO, Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan. “However, many marketers have already acquired millions or even tens of millions of users; they now need to turn their attention to tools and techniques that allow better engagement marketing towards this user base. Techniques for reengagement have been commonly employed in the desktop web, and have even been employed in-app; we are finding, though, that new techniques are highly effective in mobile marketing.”
Drawbridge notes that mobile reengagement differs from traditional desktop reengagement techniques in several important respects. A primary channel of engagement with users in mobile apps has been the use of system alerts (to alert a user that there is a new Groupon deal available, for instance). Users who elect to turn off these alerts are effectively lost to the marketer. However, this doesn’t mean that the user has suddenly stopped liking Groupon (in which case they would have uninstalled the application); more likely is that they didn’t want so many alerts. Mobile reengagement helps address users who feel that they get too many alerts, but who fundamentally enjoy an application’s core service. 
Mobile reengagement is also different in its ability to target both in-app and in mobile web. Because of the lack of cookies, an ad server would see the mobile browser as a different user from the user who is viewing an ad inside an app. Even within app, some publishers may pass back IDFA, while others use MAC-SHA1 or another anonymized identifier. This makes the targeting of a current customer far more difficult than if the advertising platform simply had a unified cookie to target.
Drawbridge says its system helps to solve both of these problems. Drawbridge can serve ads – both in-app and in mobile web – towards users that fulfil any combination of criteria set by the marketer (eg., “has turned off alerts”; “has not made first purchase”; “loves sales on household decor”), and target ads effectively.
Drawbridge’s TrustE certified matching technology also offers user mapping across apps and browsers, and across identification formats. Users who click on the ad can be “deep linked” into the app (ie., the application is opened directly into the product purchase page), and can therefore have a seamless experience that takes advantage of the initial application download.
This system also works with extension of initial user acquisition, where marketers can predefine segments that should be retargeted at set intervals or upon certain criteria. If a marketer decides that 28 days after initial install, all users who have not yet made their first purchase should be shown ad copy featuring a special offer within the app, Drawbridge can effectively make that happen.
