Small and Mighty: How a 4-person Agency Team Switched from Google to AdRoll and Increased ROI For Their Clients

So we pared back to have about a dozen key clients who are served by a core team of four: myself, a graphic designer, a programmer, and an SEO and PPC expert. We have other long-term freelancers, but our small and mighty team is all we need for daily operations. We’re proof that a small company can be profitable, provide excellent service, and enjoy our work!

Since making this change we’ve developed deeper relationships with our clients, who we talk to weekly. They pay us a monthly fee for marketing services, which sometimes bleeds into design and IT. We also help them by consulting on their business decisions. Our clients span various industries, and we learn what works in specific fields that we can apply to others.

Our clients rely on my team and me to help grow their business, which is why I now insist that all clients have an account with AdRoll.

Leaving Google Remarketing for Something More Granular

We previously used Google Remarketing for our clients, but it wasn’t always effective for small audiences. With Google Remarketing, you need to have at least 1,000 people in your audience. Some of our clients are not that big, or they might want to market a specific niche.

Google support can also be confusing. I’ve found it to be hit and miss in terms of getting help because they’re almost too big. This difficulty with support has been magnified since the start of the pandemic, now that many more people rely on Google services. When we ran into an issue, we didn’t even always reach out to support because it was such a hassle—and sometimes, Google didn’t know how to help us.

One of our clients is First Primary Care, a group of primary-care doctors with four offices in Houston, Texas. When they initially became a client of ours, they didn’t care about SEO. I convinced them that SEO matters, and we started to develop a retargeting campaign through Google. Then, we ran into a problem. First Primary Care met all of Google’s policy restrictions, but for some reason, Google decided they didn’t and wouldn’t run their retargeting campaign. We couldn’t get them to budge. I thought, “There has to be another way.” That’s when I started searching for another platform.

The first thing I thought when I found AdRoll was, “this is awesome.” The capability that stuck out to me was that AdRoll would let us target smaller audiences. I can get more granular on who and how we’re targeting. Many companies have more than one product or service, so they have to develop more niche target audiences.

I’ll give you one example. Another one of our clients is a large manufacturer of LED lights. Recently, they branched out into charging stations for electric vehicles, which they manufacture and install. We created an extensive marketing campaign for them, but first, we had to recognize that the audience for these charging stations was new and perhaps very different from their existing audience. We had to build a campaign that specifically targeted that audience, which AdRoll allowed us to do.

AdRoll’s Simplicity Saves Me Time

Onboarding new clients to AdRoll is super easy. Once you create a profile for them, AdRoll walks you through the steps necessary to create different campaigns. It’s self-explanatory to the point of being fail-proof. You can create campaigns yourself, but they also have recipes that you can use right out of the box or adjust as you see fit.

AdRoll is great for the world of ecommerce, but we’ve found that a combination of display ads, retargeting, and cart abandonment works for all our clients. If our client has a list of customers they want to target, we hit those customers with display ads around the web. AdRoll finds those customers wherever they might be, based on their online behavior profile. That helps with brand recognition and awareness.

The ease and effectiveness of AdRoll’s retargeting efforts are other reasons why we chose to work with AdRoll. You can use their three-step retargeting recipe right out of the box. Just fill in the blanks, and you’re ready to go.

Cart Abandonment Amidst a Busy World

Cart abandonment is a big piece of the puzzle for our ecommerce clients, which we were missing before we joined AdRoll. Our clients understand the concept, although some worry about “bothering” people. But a cart recovery strategy helps them stay top of mind in a world where customers are constantly distracted as they shop around online. So I push back and ask, “What’s the harm in reminding them about the items in their cart?” If you don’t remind those customers what they’re missing, you’re missing out on business.

Cart abandonment isn’t necessarily the most important piece of the funnel, but you need it to be successful, especially for ecommerce. It’s cost effective and it works. Our cart abandonment stats from August 2021 speak for themselves: 6.9x ROAS, 33 conversions, and $2,591 in recovered revenue.

The Benefits of AdRoll’s Shopify Integration

A few of our clients are also using AdRoll’s Shopify integration. You don’t need to be a developer to set this up: You can connect a store to AdRoll in just a few clicks.

The Shopify integration is great because it automatically imports the product feed to generate dynamic ads. That saves a lot of time because otherwise, you have to download and upload that data manually. The Shopify integration pulls the information right into AdRoll, meaning you don’t even have to leave the platform to work with those product feeds.

A Knowledgeable Account Manager Saves Our Clients Money

With AdRoll, not only did I find a much more user-friendly platform, I also have an account manager who is always willing to help address challenges or make suggestions to optimize ad spend. As a business owner, I wear many hats. Even though I love touching every aspect of my business, I don’t have time to sit down and dive deep into the platform on my own. So when my AdRoll account manager has suggestions, I take those as an opportunity to learn.

In one instance, she pointed out that we were running 90-day retargeting campaigns for one of our clients, even though all our activities associated with retargeting happened in the first 30 days. She suggested that instead of spending money on these people for an additional 60 days, we should cut down the overall campaign to 30 days. We took her advice, and that suggestion resulted in a 10–15% boost in conversions.

AdRoll’s reporting capabilities provide much more data than we had before, and we can isolate certain variables and gain valuable insights to improve performance drastically. The next step is to interpret the data. This interpretation is another area where having a knowledgeable and active account manager makes the difference. They can help you analyze the data and turn that into an actionable strategy.

AdRoll Works for Everyone

Other platforms offer some of these services, but no one matches AdRoll’s simplicity and ease of use. That has a lot of value for me because it makes me more efficient. I’m not sitting there cursing at the screen for an hour. And efficiency is key for a small business owner who carries multiple responsibilities.

The numbers add up: When I look at ROAS, money saved, and revenue from recovered carts, AdRoll is worth the money and time put into it. All our accounts have seen a marked improvement since they started using AdRoll, and it’s so cost-effective, it’s become a core part of our strategy.

We use AdRoll for all our clients now. AdRoll can work for companies big or small, ecommerce or otherwise. You can become more niche in your marketing and get more value from your ad spend. As long as you have a trackable goal, AdRoll can help you get there.