Rontar Ad Exchange: Free Ads

UPDATE: I see the app has changed its business model and is no longer doing retargeting. It's now an ad exchange, with an option to pay to show ads instead of installing ads on your own site. So I uploaded an an and set a budget of $5/day, but the ad has not spent anything. No idea what's happening or if this app is functional.

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It works. Assuming your store actually has visitors to retarget, this works and is simple to use. However, I have not gotten a response to any of my messages to Rontar at all -- not emails, not message sent through the app itself. Zero support. Hence the 4 stars.

Been use this free retargeting service only for a few days, and I'm already impressed with traffic to store stats...looking forward to do paid version soon to see that effects as well

La instalé ayer. He tenido 10 impresiones y 0 carritos recuperados. Si funciona en los próximos días volveré y escribiré una mejor reseña.

Mydentalwig.com
This app was installed at: https://mydentalwig.com/ but don't know what Retargeting ads does. It shows "impressions" "clicks" "$revenue". Don't know what that means. For that reason. Will update if I get clarification

Dear Shopify business website owner/developer,

They've got a bunch of great reviews that convinced us to sign up and give them our trust and money. Hopefully your experience will be better than ours was if you go ahead and install this app. Because our experience was pretty poor. And if we'd have been paying more than $5 per day I have to believe we'd have caught that poor performance and shut off the app and service many months before today.

Your mileage may vary if you go ahead with this app. All we can say is take a look at our website and decide for yourself if we look like newbies who don't know a thing about marketing and are griping about something that's our fault.

According to the retargeting solution's own stats, here are our results after 8 months of paying "Rontar" / "Dynamic Reargeting Ads" / WFP.ADVERTISING :

* 124,000 impressions
* 137 clicks (0.11%)
* 1495.14 ad spend or paid Rontar ($10.92 CPC)
* 675.75 Rontar-influenced revenue attributed

Not exactly a home run, considering retargeting is billed as the lowest-hanging fruit and best return on investment for digital ads-- and this company claims to be an expert in doing so.

After all, we can buy cold interested visitors for 15% of that CPC spend, with 20x the CTR and actually convert them to sales at a positive return.

Here are the promises we were made before signing up:

1) Our retargeting ads would be seen on Youtube, Gmail, WashingtonPost, NYTimes, ESPN, Fox News, Weather.com

Result: Fail. Not a single employee has seen ads on those sites. Nor to our knowledge have we received any referral visitors from those sites.

2) Average ROI of our 1000+ Shopify customers is average is 450%

Result: Fail. Our ROI has been severely negative.

Even if were we selling products that had no cost of goods cost, we'd still have lost money paying Rontar and whomever they allegedly paid to place ads on our behalf.

3) We told Rontar how many visitors we got to our website and our revenue, and said we wanted to spend 4% of our daily sales as a retargeting budget (estimated $16). Rontar said no problem.

Result: Fail. We instead spent $5 per day every day, and most days had zero clicks. We asked why we weren't spending the requested budget, and were told we didn't have enough traffic to our website.

4) We confirmed cost per thousand impressions was expected to be affordable/competitive before signing up.

Result: Fail. $10.90 per click and $12 per thousand impressions isn't efficient ad spend for a warm audience.

5) There are some basic ad customizations you can do yourself / our algorithms give our customers much more control over the customization of their creatives

Result: Fail. Until long after signup, we did not have any way we could find to preview what the creatives looked like-- much less edit anything.

Until we discovered a new "look and feel" tab in the app's settings that may not have been there when we originally signed up (or at the least didn't render an ad preview on our web browser as it did when checked today), we have had no idea what the ads look like they're supposedly running on our behalf.

Repeated questions about this steered us back to the Shopify app-- in which until long after signing up and paying many months we were unable to find any preview.

6) We usually manage to increase an online store's sales by up to 10%

Result: Fail. According to Rontar's own stats, they take credit for fewer than 1% of our sales

7) You should try out Drip Retargeting. It is a completely new approach to retargeting that helps move your visitors closer to the purchase by engaging them with different ads through their sales cycle. This approach was only available before in email marketing, now is possible in our advertising platform.

Result: Uncertain. We can't even verify actual ads were shown, much less of some innovative type.

8) With your search traffic percentage it looks like you will have a significant CTR percentage from Rontar ads.

Result: Uncertain. Is 132 clicks from 124,000 impressions over 8 months considered "significant"? If so, I'm pretty sure we are in the wrong business because any digital ads we've run ourselves have 10-30x better click-thru rates.

9) You should increase your frequency capping to 7 from 5 (many months after signup)

Result: Uncertain. We thought we had already had a frequency capping of 15 impressions per person per month from the time when we signed up. Apparently it was arbitrarily set at 5, ignoring our signup instructions.

10) You can exclude products you don't want to show.

Result: Uncertain. We provided a list of those products. And they may have been excluded from showing in ads. We don't know. As stated before, we never saw any live ads. But the PREVIEW of ads we saw today in the app was definitely showing items we had requested to be excluded.

Summary:

I don't want this to be flagged as defamatory. So I've tried to stick to just the facts. All 10 of these promises the app/company Rontar/WFP.Advertising/Dynamic Retargeting Ads did not deliver on are in emails to our company from their representatives or else on sales pages / app description of the company itself.

Personally, I've never seen ONE ad supposedly shown by Rontar. Nowhere on the web-- nor on ANY of the websites they claimed to have been doing retargeting ads on. Nor has anyone on our employment team. That's despite the fact that our team spends a large part of our week on our own website and also browsing other sites afterwards like any consumer...and our company was paying Rontar for many months to serve ads on websites and online applications where some of our team members are regularly hanging out.

Yet the app itself claims to have served ads. If they're promising to run ads and not doing so, I feel this company probably would have been outed from the Shopify app store a long time ago. So I must accept that isn't the case. I must accept it to be true that they are serving ads. Therefore, I won't say that the stats they provide in the app are bogus. I must accept that ads were served 124,000 impressions and clicked on 132 times over 8 months-- even though I cannot independently verify these claims from other sources (Shopify, Elevar, Google Analytics).

Perhaps the data is there for us to independently confirm ads were actually served and clicked on...and I don't know how to find it. If so, I'll revise this review to say so.

Even so, I must conclude they've done what we hired them to do very poorly in our case. Here are 3 things I can say for sure that Rontar does:
1) Whack our card every 7 days for more money
2) Send us an email receipt
3) Respond super-quickly to most customer emails

I'm just sorry that the "respond super quickly to emails" fooled us for more than 4 months that this was a business we could trust to help its customers grow their business. After all, it makes you wonder when multi-month customers are reduced to asking simple questions like:

"Presumably we have some sort of log-in to your website as a dashboard with analytics--- but no one here can find it. And though we were promised someone would look over our account and keep us informed about what we should do to increase things...unfortunately I don't really show any email communication from your company in the last 4 months (other than payment notifications). We'd like to have some idea of what we're getting for our money. And if it's worth anything, how we can be spending more with a good return."

(The answer eventually turned out to be that the app name had changed from Rontar to "Dynamic Retargeting Ads" though a bit confusingly, we were still getting billed by another party (WFP.Advertising) and emailed by the original party we hired (Rontar).

In the last couple months, we can find in our inboxes a couple times we asked a question and received no response at all.

Questions like:

"Hey it's been awhile since we could figure out how to log in to Rontar and see what's what. Shopify doesn't even have a Rontar app. What's going on?"

Or "What are you doing for the money we are paying? How is the retargeting going? Can you help me take a look at it?"

Still, nothing will upset a customer on a recurring charge more than 2-3 charges of "new services" while questions go unasked from 2-3 payments ago. And we've suffered that now enough times that we're saying enough is enough.

We're uninstalling this app and providing three stars.

And I took an hour and a half today to give my honest feedback here about this app and this company-- in hopes to save other Shopify owners a possible headache.

To be fair, our company has seen similar non-results with these other automated ad-generating solutions, too.

* Abaco
* Poln
* CommerceCentral
* Shoelace

Though we got great results from YahooCommerce/ Lexity before I guess they were closed down years back.

After what seems to have been our 6th waste of money with an automated remarketing solution (Rontar), I'm beginning to think we were wrong to think dynamic retargeting could work for our business.

But I don't really want to believe that. The model can and should work. After all, these are warm prospects and we ought to be able to compete in the ad netwrorks for their attention and make good on the "retargeting is among the best ROIs in all digital avertising" promise. Our remarketing efforts via email (Klaviyo) work fine.

So hopefully the 7th time is the charm! If any digital ads service provider reads this and wants to collaborate to run our remarketing for CubicZirconia.com and our other jewelry brands, we'll probably sign up and give it a try. And we'll be just as effusive in our praise if your solution is worth it as we have been in speaking honestly-- but less than glowingly-- about the companies and apps who made big promises and didn't back them up.

The app seems to work but in a total unclear way.
We don't know what the app is really doing in terms of connection to Google Ads. I upgraded the app and did not get result in addition to unclear way of operation as a marketing app.

I have used this app for 7 days now. I have gotten less than 100 views from it. I thought I would get more. I hope that the next week will show more results. As I had thought there would be better results. We will see how the next 7 days goes.

I have had it set up for a while now. Had 59 retargets with Zero clicks, zero sales, so far. To early to tell how well it works. I was easy to set up, except for adding my logo! They were helpful and helped me get it on correct. I am hoping to see success soon.

Trying out for the next week. Will update review again after a week to see if this app work as intended

I installed a few weeks ago and I am able to see that I do get traffic and clicks from this app. So far, no directly creditable sales but traffic is where it starts and I'm definitely getting that. I am glad I installed this.