Mobile marketer Kahuna launches app-driven retargeting on Facebook — without driving users crazy

Mobile marketer Kahuna is moving beyond mobile today by announcing a marketing tool that goes beyond Facebook’s.

The new product, Dynamic Audiences, enables marketers to automatically retarget ads on Facebook by using mobile app behavior. And, of interest to users, it allows marketers to set conditions for discontinuing the ads if users don’t respond or have already made a purchase.

Let’s say you’re using Hipmunk’s travel app on your smartphone. You search for flights to Bermuda but decide not to buy.

Days later, you’re on Facebook on your laptop or in the mobile app. You see a Hipmunk ad for a discount on a United flight to Bermuda.

You don’t respond, and soon the ad stops following you. Or you decide to take that discount, you book a flight to Bermuda through Hipmunk, and the ads soon stop.

This is the scenario for how marketers can use Dynamic Audiences. It tracks your behavior in the Hipmunk app, targets you for a behavior-related ad on Facebook properties, and can be programmatically set to automatically stop those ads if you don’t respond or have made the purchase.

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The app-tracking assumes the app has used Kahuna’s software development kit (SDK) or mParticle’s SDK. App developers using mParticle’s one-stop SDK can select Kahuna as one of their integrations, so the developer has to use only one SDK to get access to many mobile services.

(Kahuna is also announcing today a partnership with mParticle, joining a variety of other mobile services who have done so.)

Kahuna CEO and cofounder Adam Marchick has this thing about being ad-spammed. Last year, for instance, his company launched RevIQ for targeting shopping cart abandoners with ads, but doing so at tested intervals so as not to turn the potential customer off.

“I’m tired of getting ads that don’t resonate,” he told me.

Both of these Dynamic Audiences features — retargeting based on app behavior, and limiting ad displays if the user doesn’t respond or has already made a purchase — are functions that neither Facebook’s Custom Audiences or its Exchange offer, Marchick pointed out.

Custom Audiences is Facebook’s solution for marketers to target its users based on a manually uploaded list. This roll call of sorts — of usernames or email addresses, for instance — often comes from a customer relationship management (CRM) system or other repository. Dynamic Audiences manages or “curates” Custom Audiences.

Custom Audiences doesn’t track app behavior. Unless, of course, you have exported data from the Hipmunk app on which users searched for air flights to Bermuda, and then uploaded that list to Custom Audiences — not exactly the speediest process.

Facebook Exchange offers retargeting for website visitors, based on a cookie saved to your computer when you visit a website. It is also not built for tracking app behavior.

“No one else is doing this,” Marchick said, referring both to the app behavior tracking for Facebook retargeting and the ad display rules, based on whether the user responds one way or the other. “A lot of what our competitors are doing is manual uploads of lists, companies like [Salesforce’s] ExactTarget.”

Dynamic Audiences represents a broadening of his company’s “omnichannel vision,” Marchick said, offering Kahuna’s first product that targets messaging beyond mobile web or apps and toward computer websites.