RTB - super profit channel or regular dust in the eyes? How to properly analyze the channel retargeting

To write this article I was motivated by the desire to share experiences and get good advice from more experienced fellow analysts.

Briefly about myself: I have been working on the creation, administration and analytics of e-commerce websites with my partner for a short 3 years. In August 2015, we received a fairly large project in the form of a website for the sale of women's clothing, let's call it Project “C”. On average, it has 100k per month, but it is subject to strong seasonal fluctuations due to the nature of the product.

For more interest, I will provide screenshots of well-known analytics tools.

The structure of the channels of the Project "C" for November 2015

The main task for me and my colleague, I will call him Mr. “V”, was, however trite, an increase in sales.

To begin with, we set about increasing the influx of new users by posting all kinds of advertising, the basis of which was our "favorite" direct. But the profitability of this kind of channel was at best 8-12%, which did not get tired of us, since we believed that we could invest money more efficiently.

After analyzing the sales funnel, we came to the conclusion that we fairly well bring in new customers, their share was ~ 65–70%, but withholding our difficulties. At that time, only Yandex and Google retargeting worked. Hand on heart, they were tuned in well ___, and in general their effectiveness and flexibility caused me great doubts.

At the next brainstorming, it was decided to work with the retention flask, for which RTB was chosen. We began to look for partners for work, Mr. "V" preferred organic search, and I, meanwhile, began to look at the URLs of competitors in search of useful UTM tags.

After a brief search, we did find a large company operating around the world - ___teo (who knows, he will understand). Having settled all the problems with tracker settings and documents, they assigned a click price and waited for the data to be collected for analysis. Neither I nor “V” placed great hopes on this tool, however, the result was pleasantly surprising.

Data that turned out for the first month:

I will not disclose commercial information, but the profitability of investments according to the results of the analysis of shipments was 30%, which could not but please us.

After 2 months, we already had this result:

And profitability is about 150%.

I, as a suspicious person, still the numbers could not help but think: there is something wrong here. Whether we are so great, or do not know how to count.

This is where the main idea of ​​my article emerges: How to analyze RTB?

If we look at the standard Paid Search reports in GA, then a small financier rejoices within each of us.

But the whole “raspberry” spoils one concept: “hold time”, and in our case it is 30 days. For those who are not quite "in the subject", I will explain: no matter at what point the customer made a purchase on the site, if within 30 days before he went via the RTB banner, the purchase will go to this channel, in other words, if the client is on the way to conversion moved on the banner, this lead will go into the channel of retargeting.

In order to get more objective, in my opinion, data, I made a sample in the section “Basic Conversion Paths”, filtering only those transactions that took place immediately after interacting with the RTB banner. Result: 60 orders out of 250 were in this sample, which, as before, gave us a margin of profit of 15-20%, but could not be compared with the figure of 150%.

All these calculations make you ask a philosophical question: “Would the client make a transaction if this channel were absent in its path to conversion or not?”

In another way, it can be formulated as follows: “How justified are investments in auxiliary interaction?”

Question to the audience: How do you analyze RTB? And what are your results using this tool? In your opinion, is this channel super profitable or is this another global divorce?

Waiting for your comments and thanks for your attention!