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Search Retargeting Brings Intent To Facebook News Feed

Chango, which built a programmatic platform for real-time data driven marketing, rolled out a retargeting tool Wednesday that brings search engine signals into the Facebook News Feed.

The company collects what Dax Hamman, chief strategy officer at Chango, calls "incoming referrer data" from sites carrying the company's code on Web pages. The anatomized cookie IDs help to retarget the ads in the news feed. Profiles from intent search data gathered across Google, Bing and Yahoo means that direct-response advertisers have access to more ad inventory in a social platform.

Using the new tool, clients in retail, travel and personal finance see twice the performance, according to Hamman, which measures most campaigns on a cost per acquisition or return on investment. Some of the phrases working well these days focus on behavior, product and intent, such as "new outfit for Friday," as well as brand-name or product-specific phrases.

Pricing differs per phrase. Hamman said the media bought determines the prices for clients. Within FBX and more established media exchanges, the media is bought on dynamic CPM. Clients don't pay more for targeting brand vs. generic keywords and phrases. On Google, a finance company may pay $50 per click for the word "mortgage" when running a paid-search ad, because many marketers compete for the word and when a search occurs there's only one opportunity to serve ads.

Chango captures the fact that someone searched on the term "mortgage" across Bing, Google or Yahoo, but there's more than one opportunity to serve the ad in Facebook's news feed based on the word, so the brand doesn't need to bid as much. They might typically pay less than $5 CPM on average for any term -- even expensive terms like "mortgage."

Aside from looking for retargeting data, Chango also analyzes data to understand when the brand should not retarget in Facebook. Programmatic technology, a combination of automation and human intervention, enables marketers to build those algorithms to present new opportunities based on behavior.

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