Rontar Ad Exchange: Free Ads

Hi,

Thanks for using our retargeting app. Here are a few comments regarding how we operate:

1. When deciding whether or not we should show your ad to a past visitor of yours, we take multiple parameters into account: when the visitor visited your website the last time, how much time they spent on your website, the ad placement on the website they are currently visiting, whether the visitor clicks ads in general, what the traffic source was that brought the visitor to your site in the first place, and so on. A few dozen parameters in total. Thanks to machine learning, we’re able to make click/conversion predictions much more precisely than you would by adjusting any of these settings yourself. This way we can decrease your CPC and increase your ROI at the same time. Setting the age/gender setting by yourself would only decrease the effectiveness of your campaign. That’s why we don’t have these and many other targeting settings in the public view. The optimization is done by the machine learning algorithm in the background.

2. Thanks to our partners, we have access to literally hundreds of thousands of websites. As a result, for bigger retargeting campaigns, it’s not unusual to see ads being shown on hundreds, sometimes thousands, of websites daily. Showing these websites in your account would only clutter your statistics report and wouldn’t give you any insights into how your ads are performing. Moreover, as mentioned above, our machine learning algorithms decide where your ads should be shown based on data. Giving our customers the ability to manually choose/blacklist sites would only decrease your campaign effectiveness.

3. All our links to your site are marked with UTM parameters. You should be able to see the clicks from us under utm_source=rontar in your Google Analytics or any other tracking software you might be using. Some obscure and less popular browsers do truncate our links sometimes, but they are in the minority and should not exceed more than 5-10% of all traffic generally.

Hope this helps.

If you have other questions or concerns, please reach out to your account manager via the chat. They will be happy to help.

Hi, thanks for your review and for using our app.

The information about how we bill customers can be found on the Billing page and it is prominently displayed so that anybody can see it. Since Rontar is an advertising company, we charge $25.00 initially and then automatically every time the advertising balance gets low. This is in accordance with your daily budget settings and to cover the amount required in the upcoming week. This is how many advertising companies work.

In your particular case, you were charged $25 initially. On the first day of your ad campaign, because you had no maximum daily budget set, you exhausted your balance. As a result, the system charged you again, and once again a day later to cover the expenses for the upcoming period.

Please note, there are options for you to limit your campaign, including setting the maximum daily budget and cost per click.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

Thanks for the review and your question. The Free Forever plan is currently discontinued. Although it was completely free, stores would get only 3,000 ad impressions under the plan, which didn’t turn out to be nearly enough to drive any meaningful results for those stores.

So we’ve decided to introduce the Starter plan, which is 10X more effective than the Free Forever plan used to be. Also, the Starter plan costs just $60, which makes it affordable for virtually everyone.

I hope this helps.

P.S.: The last time we reached out to anyone with the Free Forever offer was September 23.

Hi there,

I’m very sorry you haven't seen results from using our app. But I would like to give a detailed answer to your review:

1. We bill per click/impression, not per sale. This is clearly stated here: https://help.rontar.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002831574-How-does-Rontar-charge-my-account-

2. We did bill you $100 initially, but you spent only $55.81 of it. The rest was refunded to you upon your request.

3. You spent just $55.81 on retargeting, which may not always be enough to see sales. Sometimes you may spend $50 and see no sales, then you see 2 or 3 sales with the next $50 spent on ads. This is how it usually works.

If you ever decide to give our app a try again, we have a free plan now that you can use.

Hi,

I’m sorry you didn’t get the results you expected from using our app. I took a look at your campaign and see that you did receive about 2,000 ad impressions but no clicks. While it’s unusual to see such a low CTR, it’s too early to tell whether the campaign is effective or not due to the very low overall number of impressions.

Sometimes you get 2,000 impressions and no clicks/sales, then you see 5-10 clicks and a few sales with the next 2,000 ad impressions. This is how it usually works. We have a customer that had a similar situation to yours. They had almost 4,000 ad impressions and just 2 clicks (which is low), but the situation changed completely with bigger numbers: https://blog.rontar.com/upgrading-from-the-free-forever-to-starter-plan

Another reason could be the quality of inbound traffic. If the quality is low then retargeting will drive poor results as well. We don’t have access to this data so I can’t comment with 100% certainty on this.

Hope this helps.

Hi, thanks for your review and for using our app. I took a closer look at your campaign and would like to make a few comments:

1. You’re correct, in the last 11 days you’ve spent around $100 and received 5 clicks and no conversions. However, in the 11 days before that, you had spent $77 and received 11 clicks and $654 in sales. This is exactly how it works when you have few impressions/clicks and little daily spend. We have a customer that was in a similar situation to yours. They had almost 4,000 ad impressions and just 1 sale (which is low), but the situation changed completely with bigger numbers: https://blog.rontar.com/upgrading-from-the-free-forever-to-starter-plan

2. You can easily control how much you pay per click. This can be done on the Settings page in the app. You can also control how much you spend daily on the same page. Please note, when you limit the maximum cost per click, the number of impressions and clicks you’re getting is decreased as well.

If you have questions regarding the best settings for your account, please reach out to your account manager via the chat. They will be happy to help.

Hi, thanks for your review and for using our app. Let me clarify a few things on using our app:

1. When you sign up for the Pay-as-you-go plan, we bill you $25 initially and then every time the advertising balance gets low, in accordance with your daily budget settings and to cover the amount due in the upcoming 3-4 days. This is clearly stated on our Billing page in the app.

2. Stopping automatic payments is as easy as removing your payment method in the app. It takes just a few clicks.

3. You can return the funds not yet spent on advertising by reaching out to our support team. From what I can see, you haven’t contacted us yet. But as a response to your review, we decided to go ahead and return the remaining balance to you. You can expect it to arrive within a day or two.

Hope this helps.

Hi, thanks for your review and for using our app. I took a closer look at your account and would like to make a few comments:

1. With retargeting, you show ads only to your recent visitors who didn't make a purchase. For smaller sites with few daily visitors, we bill for impressions. We also bid a little bit higher than we would for a larger website. This way, we make sure you get at least some impressions/clicks for your campaign. Otherwise, you wouldn’t receive any impressions/clicks at all.

2. In the chat with our customer rep, you mentioned that you also run retargeting with other retargeting companies. If so, running multiple retargeting campaigns simultaneously might have contributed to the high cost per impression as well.

3. Your current Bid strategy is set to Auto. You could consider choosing Target CPC instead to limit the cost per click manually. That way, our system will make sure you don't pay more than your maximum cost per click. However, bear in mind that if your Target CPC is too low, you may receive a lower number of clicks/impressions.

I can see that you have already initiated the refund process. If you decide to give us a try again in the future, feel free to reach out to us to help you with your campaign settings.

Hope this helps.