Pantheon Is on a Retargeting Roll with AdRoll

Founded in 2010 as a platform for hosting and managing Web sites, Pantheon has launched more than 100,000 sites in the past five years. The platform handles the bulk of the traditional IT and DevOps functions for Web sites, providing hosting infrastructure and configuration, monitoring, scaling, performance optimization, security, and uptime capabilities.

And the platform’s tool set is expanding all the time, with several launches in the past six months. The company released Priority Enterprise Support, which provides around-the-clock emergency support, on-boarding and training features, and new cloud integration tools to enable developers to integrate workflows with apps and services and unify login across services; it also launched Pantheon for EDU, a platform for educational institutions to manage and host Drupal and WordPress sites. Additionally, it unveiled Pantheon Enterprise, its flagship product, designed for managing large teams and multiple sites, with features for helping teams collaborate more efficiently and manage access securely.

But to build on its success, Pantheon wanted to improve its retargeting, a vital means of acquiring new prospects. More specifically, Pantheon was looking to engage B2B prospects with highly personalized ads while simultaneously excluding current customers from its retargeting campaigns. The company has achieved solid results using retargeting and performance marketing platform AdRoll, which it first implemented in August 2015.

Since then, Pantheon has seen a 22 percent decrease in retargeting cost per action, and a 0.32 percent retargeting click-through rate. “Along with most advertisers, those of us at Pantheon want to ensure that our ads are as useful and relevant as possible to the audiences we put them in front of. While we had been retargeting with Google, I had previously worked with AdRoll and knew that the platform was much more user-friendly when it came to making the kinds of specifications we wanted to make,” Emi Winslow, online marketing manager at Pantheon, told CRM magazine via email. “Adding that to the larger Web network, and the knowledge that AdRoll was making lots of advancements when it came to integrations such as the Marketo bridge, it made a lot of sense to migrate to AdRoll.”

Indeed, Winslow cites AdRoll’s Marketo integration as a crucial factor. “We’ve been doing a lot to ensure that the message we are putting out is relevant to the audience, at every stage of the life cycle. We are trying to make our retargeting match our buyer journeys and user flow. To do that means that we are taking full advantage of the Marketo integration to make sure that whenever possible, our existing customers don’t receive top-of-funnel ads, and vice-versa.”

In addition to the retargeting click-through rate and lower retargeting cost per action, Pantheon has established a $45 cost per action and a $95 cost per net new user. According to Winslow, Pantheon is laser focused on net new name acquisition. “Retargeting wouldn’t generally be a high performer since there would be a lot of reconversions. That being said, AdRoll is still one of our top-performing platforms. By keeping our [cost per net new user] under $100, we are able to both engage new opportunities but also enhance the ad experience for users as well as work users through the funnel of creating a site,” she says. 

The Payoff

Since implementing the AdRoll retargeting and performance marketing platform, Pantheon has seen the following results:

• a 22 percent decrease in retargeting cost per action;
• a 0.32 percent retargeting click-through rate;
• a $45 cost per action; and
• a $95 cost per net new user.

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