• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 15, 2012

Most search marketers are familiar with using intent data from search queries to target paid-search ads on engines or display ads on publisher sites, but a startup called Perfect Audience built a similar do-it-yourself platform for Facebook to retarget ads through the Facebook Exchange.

Perfect Audience, a five-person startup based in Mountain View, Calif. and Chicago, recently received $1.1 million in seed round funding from a variety of venture capital firms and angel investors; not only in the U.S., but from others around the world.

Brad Flora, Perfect Audience president and co-founder, refers to the platform as an AdWords-like tool for Facebook, because the do-it-yourself platform allows anyone to sign up and use the platform within 6 minutes or less.

A summer project to help marketers place banner ads across the Web from a DYI platform turned into the Facebook retargeting platform after Flora gained access to Facebook Exchange. Tests revealed that the cost per click on Facebook was sometimes about 40 times better than the CPC across the Web.

Flora points to a brand getting a $1.65 cost per client from Google remarketing vs. 75 cent cost per click from Perfect Audience. "Now they do Facebook retargeting through us at about a 29-cent CPC," he said.

Perfect Audience charges on a CPM basis per impression. When a brand launches a campaign, Perfect Audience buys the ad impressions on a CPM basis, tacks on a small margin for its cut, and then charges the company for the rest. Prices range between $0.5-1.5 for Facebook Retargeting and $1-2.25 for Web retargeting on average, according to the company's Web site.

Aside from the U.S., Brad Flora said there has been sign up by companies in Eastern Europe, Africa, and New Zealand.

Perfect Audience also offers retargeting across the remainder of the Web through partnerships with Google, OpenX, Pubmatic, and others. The retargeting crosses about 100,000 sites, but it does not directly connect with the company's Facebook retargeting platform. Not yet, anyway. For now, brands set up two campaigns. One targets users on Facebook and the other across the Web. The two use the same intent data, but don't link together.

Prior to the Facebook Exchange, brands could use demographic information to create complex targeting profiles, but being able to integrate intent data generated from clicks on a Web site increases targeting accuracy, Flora said.