Exclusive: AdRoll launches LiquidAds, display ads you might actually want to click

Ad retargeting company AdRoll on Thursday launched a new technology called LiquidAds that will help make digital display advertising more personalized.

Retargeting ads work in such a way to record that you visited an advertiser’s site and then show that same site later in ads. LiquidAds takes this a step further by keeping track of products you view on a site and later showing you those same products in ad form on other sites.

“LiquidAds is definitely going to shake things up in the display ad space, and our beta customers love it,” AdRoll President Adam Berke told VentureBeat. “A lot of display ads out there are ugly and don’t entice a customer to click. Our retargeting ads are actually attractive.”

AdRoll currently serves more than 2,000 clients a month, and the company claims the average AdRoll retargeting client earns $10 for every $1 spent on retargeting. LiquidAds so far has attracted about 10 of those clients in the beta process, and the company expects many more to sign up in the near future.

“We have yet to have a client who signs up for LiquidAds that doesn’t like it,” Berke said. “When they see it in action, they like what they see.”

A few of the more notable clients now signed up for LiquidAds include BustedTees, Indochino and NastyGal. When you go to specific product sections of these sites, you’ll likely see some of those products again on other sites.

“We want ads that users like,” Berke said. “We’re aligned with users in that we want to present them with useful and relevant ads. It’s what the advertisers are interested in and users will like the ads better because they’re products they’re actually interested in.”

The basics behind the LiquidAds technology are that when you search around a site, say BustedTees, a cookie in your browser keeps track of viewed products. Then when you see a BustedTees display ad on another site, you will see various T-shirts you viewed cycling inside the ad.

“BustedTees has avoided dynamic ads because the aesthetic of our creative is extremely important,” Jonny Cottone, marketing manager at BustedTees, said in a statement. “LiquidAds gives us the ability to simultaneously promote our 400 plus products without any guesswork.”

Using the company’s proprietary RollCrawl technology, AdRoll automates the process of retargeting content into dynamic ads. Advertisers simply install RollCrawl into their site and it automatically pulls images, names, prices and other product info that can be used in ads.

“Before, these type of dynamic ads would take months to implement,” Berke said. “The feed is there to make the process easier. It erases months of development resources on the advertiser side.”

If I can help it, I most often don’t click on display ads. Usually I feel like an advertiser doesn’t have a clue what I like or appreciate, so the LiquidAds technology sounds promising in terms of conversion. For example, if I were to see a great pair of shoes I was looking at a few days ago on a different site, I might actually click that ad.

What do you think of LiquidAds? Do you think they can help improve conversion and click-though rates on display ads?