Perfect Audience

Perfect Audience operates as a retargeting platform, enabling businesses to reconnect with lost website visitors through targeted advertising. The company was founded in 2010 by Brad Flora and Jordan Buller. Flora, who served as CEO, and his co-founder developed the platform as a do-it-yourself tool, likened to an AdWords for Facebook, allowing advertisers to quickly launch campaigns. The venture was part of the Y Combinator S11 batch and secured $1.1 million in a seed round in 2012 from various venture capital firms and angel investors.

The company's trajectory includes several significant ownership changes. In June 2014, Marin Software acquired Perfect Audience for approximately $22.8 million, aiming to integrate its retargeting capabilities with Marin's cross-channel advertising platform. Subsequently, in November 2019, Marin Software sold the Perfect Audience business unit to SharpSpring, Inc. for a net cash purchase price of about $4.6 million. This move allowed Marin to focus on its enterprise-level clients while SharpSpring integrated Perfect Audience's functionality into its marketing automation suite, rebranding it as SharpSpring Ads. The final major corporate shift occurred in September 2021, when Constant Contact completed its acquisition of SharpSpring for approximately $240 million. This integration aimed to expand Constant Contact's marketing automation and CRM capabilities for its small and medium-sized business (SMB) clientele. By March 2023, the SharpSpring platform was officially rebranded as 'Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM'.

The business model is centered on providing a self-service platform for advertisers of all sizes, with no contracts or minimum spending requirements. It allows marketers to launch display, PPC, Facebook, and web retargeting campaigns to win back customers who have visited their site but did not convert. The platform functions by placing a cookie on a visitor's browser, which then allows for the delivery of targeted ads as that person browses other websites. The service is designed to serve clients across various ad networks, including Google, Facebook, and over 200 other exchanges. Revenue is generated based on advertising volume, charging a fee on top of the ad spend with networks like Facebook and Google.

The core service is a comprehensive retargeting and digital advertising platform. It empowers users to design ads, define audiences, and manage campaigns from a single dashboard. Key features include the ability to retarget website visitors to capture more leads, use lookalike audiences to drive new quality leads, and upsell or cross-sell to existing customers. The platform provides analytics to measure the impact of ad views and clicks on conversions and revenue, and it integrates with various e-commerce and marketing tools. A significant benefit is its ability to increase conversion rates, with statistics suggesting that retargeted visitors are substantially more likely to convert. The integration with SharpSpring (now Constant Contact) combined these retargeting features with a broader suite of marketing automation tools, including CRM, email marketing, and social media management, to create a more holistic platform for managing the entire customer lifecycle. Keywords: retargeting platform, display advertising, PPC, Facebook ads, ad retargeting, SharpSpring Ads, Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM, marketing automation, customer acquisition, conversion optimization, Brad Flora, Marin Software, ad campaign management, self-service advertising, digital advertising, lead generation, website visitor tracking, lookalike audiences, cross-channel advertising, SMB marketing tools