• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 20, 2010

Advertise.com plans to make available a cost-per-action remarketing tool aimed at lower advertising costs, providing precise measurement and greater return on ad investments. The announcement was made Tuesday at ad:tech in San Francisco.

The remarketing tool serves incentives in ads to previous visitors of specific sites as they search the Web within contracted ad networks. Rather than change for each impression or click, the tool only counts when ads convert the consumer from looker to buyer.

Remarketing, also known as retargeting, continues to increase in popularity -- adopted by brands looking to reach prospective customers who visit their Web site but don't complete a transaction or action, such as a purchase.

With Advertise.com's CPA Remarketing platform, advertisers only pay when a sale or desired action occurs, rather than for each display ad impression. Advertise.com takes on the risk by buying the media, backing it out to the CPA rather than CPM.

The technology drops a cookie in the Web site visitor's browser when they leave. That cookie creates a custom target audience segment, enabling the technology to identify the Web browser on other sites, then deliver discounts and specials on items previously browsed.

Advertise.com founder and CEO Daniel Yomtobian says based on the company's data, its technology can find the cookie in the browser about 60% of the time within the first three days after a consumer visits a client's Web site. He calls Advertise.com's technology "network neutral" because "we'll go on to the Google Ad Exchange, Right Media and adECN to buy inventory on their networks."

Most companies buy ad space on a specific publisher network. Aside from the CPA model and ability to place ads on a variety of ad networks, Yomtobian says the difference in Advertise.com's remarketing technology resides in a U.S. patent that weeds out low-quality traffic sources before the ad is served up. It also can detect and screen out click fraud. The company delivers more than 10 billion ad impressions monthly.

About 46% of online marketers participating in a joint survey from Advertise.com and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization in 2009 believe that remarketing remains the most underutilized online marketing technology. Of those participants who had used the tool, 53.1% reveal they got better results, and 52.4% admittedly used it to drive sales leads.

Yomtobian says Advertise.com has been working on a dynamic retargeting that the company will launch within the next 60 days. The platform will drop a unique cookie in the browser based on the exact product being viewed by the consumer. Rather than provide a generic ad for the company, the advertisement will show a specific ad for the product when the technology recognizes the cookie in the browser.

Aside from the CPA remarketing platform, Advertise.com launched a Twitter campaign to win an Apple iPad that will run this week during ad:Tech. The "I want an iPad from @advertisedotcom!" campaign requires those entering the contest to stop by the company's booth, take a picture holding the iPad and upload the snapshot to Twitter.

The tweet must include the photo or photo link, and the phrase: I want an iPad from @advertisedotcom #AdtechSF. The Advertise.com team will choose a winner from published tweets and tweet the winner's handle from @advertisedotcom.