Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the context of that, answer my question on retargeting specifically. You did bring up retargeting as one of the areas that you have specialized expertise in. I’m curious about retargeting specifically.

James Green: Retargeting, initially, was just an end of the shopping cart. You chase them to say come back with a discount. That expanded to be much more sophisticated. There is a lot of data science that says, “You’ve exhibited this particular behavior on the website and so you don’t have to abandon the shopping cart or put anything in for us to figure out that these patterns mean that you are in market to buy something.”

You can be much more sophisticated in your decisions on how to communicate with someone. The most recent thing is adding external data to that retargeting. It’s just not the data that’s on your site. It’s taking external data into that. You can say why that’s valuable. For example, any brand or e-commerce person has a variety of different objectives for their marketing. One could be just to make yourself aware of the brand. Then next could be to make them come to the site.  The next is to have them convert.

The big developments over the last couple of years has been both the addition of external data and also the coordination of the retargeting with the higher level upper funnel activities of branding. For example, you wouldn’t want to advertise to someone who you’re already retargeting. The coordination of these different things so that you can have an advertising campaign that’s running only to people who you’re not retargeting is one of the bigger trends in the space.

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 300 online retailers who are using your solution. Could you talk about what sized online retailers are these in terms of revenues? Are they over $10 million? What bracket are we talking?

James Green: We’re talking about the small to midsize companies. It’s our sweet spot. I don’t have permission upfront to talk about a lot of them so I can talk about people we don’t have to give you an idea. We don’t have people like the Staples or the Walmart’s. We work with their agencies to do advertising work. Both of them have done work with us and are working with us. The retailers we work with directly tend to be smaller and don’t have the ability to develop in-house solutions that they can run themselves.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic
1 2 3 4