SharpSpring Ads and the art of the second chance

Somewhere between looking at a product and paying for it, a visitor closes the tab. The business has bought the click, polished the landing page, and perhaps even persuaded someone to put an item in a cart. Then nothing. The customer has other things to do. Advertising, which can be terribly persistent about its own importance, would like another appointment.

SharpSpring Ads was built for that appointment. Formerly Perfect Audience, it lets businesses show display and social ads to people who have already expressed interest. Its pitch was practical: collect an audience, prepare a campaign, and manage it through a self-service dashboard. The more interesting part came later, when those ads began sharing a home with the machinery that tracks and nurtures sales leads.

The first idea was too small

Before the reminder came the design tool. Brad Flora’s company had an earlier life as NowSpots, an advertising product spun out of his local-news venture, Windy Citizen. NowSpots entered Y Combinator in 2011. But, as Flora later explained in Slate, ad design offered a smaller market than ad buying. Learning how advertisers spent their money pointed the founders toward retargeting.

That distinction explains the business more neatly than a list of features. A design tool helps make the message. An ad-buying tool helps put the message in front of someone. Perfect Audience chose the latter, with a particular interest in people who had already visited the advertiser’s site. The 2012 product made that follow-up available through software rather than a lengthy enterprise buying process.

The early team also had an unusual relationship with ownership. Flora wrote that employees held actual shares, making them shareholders whose consent mattered in a sale. Colleagues worked in San Francisco, Chicago, and Raleigh. When the founders announced the Marin acquisition, they brought everyone into one room for the first time. A distributed company acquired, briefly, a very physical gathering.

Three deals, three different purchases

In June 2014, Marin Software bought Perfect Audience. The acquisition consideration was $22.8 million in cash and stock; another $2.7 million in equity retention grants went toward keeping employees. Together, those figures produced the $25.5 million package that made the headlines. Marin wanted retargeting capabilities for its cross-channel advertising platform.

The closing itself sounded less cinematic. Flora’s short description was “Poof! Gone.” The useful technology continued, now inside another company.

Five years later, Marin sold the Perfect Audience business to SharpSpring for approximately $4.6 million in net cash consideration. Marin said it wanted to concentrate on enterprise brands across search, social, and ecommerce advertising. SharpSpring wanted an advertising engine that complemented its agency-focused marketing software. The same product occupied a different place in each buyer’s plan.

Then, in September 2021, Constant Contact completed its acquisition of SharpSpring. The announced transaction value was approximately $240 million, including outstanding debt. That bought the parent business. Attaching the whole amount to SharpSpring Ads would give a retargeting product credit for a much larger shopping basket.

An ad learns where the lead went

The decisive product change arrived in the first quarter of 2021: SharpSpring Ads was integrated into SharpSpring’s platform. The acquisition’s original logic became something a marketer could use. Advertising could participate in the lead workflow, rather than remain a campaign managed somewhere else.

In its launch-era explanation, SharpSpring described automatic targeting of individual leads within automation workflows, list and lookalike targeting, campaign attribution, and reporting through to return on investment. These were the company’s stated capabilities, not a guarantee that every campaign would produce a sale.

“The sale strengthens Marin’s balance sheet”Chris Lien, Marin Software CEO, on the 2019 divestiture

Consider a software buyer who visits a pricing page and leaves. In a sensible implementation, that behavior can inform which audience receives which message. A reminder might offer a demonstration; a later communication might answer a purchasing objection. This is an illustration of the workflow logic, not a reported customer result. The useful idea is to let the ad know something about the conversation already underway.

Perfect Audience had already built expertise in coordinating advertising across networks. Its historical platform supported display and social retargeting, while dynamic product ads drew on retailer product feeds. The 2014 implementation connected Google Merchant Center to Facebook Exchange. That particular channel arrangement belongs to its period; the enduring product idea is an advertisement that reflects what a visitor actually considered.

Landingi’s guide, updated in June 2024, starts with installing the JavaScript tracking tag. The mundane instruction is revealing. Audience-based advertising needs a way to register interest before it can act on it. No amount of elegant creative repairs a campaign that never collected the audience it was meant to reach.

Fewer dashboards, more agency work

The historical customer list includes Eventbrite, Atlassian, and New Relic, named in Flora’s Y Combinator biography. The broader proposition also suited online retailers and smaller advertisers that wanted retargeting without building their own buying system. For agencies, the attraction extended beyond the next conversion.

SharpSpring’s agency model emphasized managing clients through one login, rebranding parts of the experience, and reporting results from lead to revenue. The agency could decide what to charge its customers. Adding advertising to that environment gave it another service to manage within an existing relationship. The economics included the agency’s work as well as the software beneath it.

This is where SharpSpring Ads sat in the market: between the advertiser’s own customer knowledge and the networks selling access to attention. AdRoll and Criteo offered alternative retargeting routes. Google and Facebook supplied their own advertising tools. SharpSpring’s argument centered on bringing the campaign closer to its own lead records and automation. A marketer already using that system had a particular reason to care.

No minimum is not no cost

SharpSpring Ads’ company listing advertised no contracts or minimum spends. Its predecessor’s dynamic-product service had promoted free setup. Both statements concern entry barriers. Neither means that the impressions themselves arrive as a charitable donation.

The 2020 annual report described Perfect Audience customers paying deposits in advance and then being charged as they used the platform, generally under month-to-month agreements. For an advertiser, the cost question therefore includes media spending, the work of making and maintaining the campaign, and any agency service. A parent-platform subscription belongs in its own column.

Small commitments make experimentation easier. They do not settle the economics. A cheap click from the wrong person is still an expense. A remembered brand is not necessarily a purchased product. The sensible buyer asks which outcome the campaign is meant to change, and what that outcome is worth.

The reminder needs a reason

There were limits on the business itself. SharpSpring’s 2020 filing recorded a roughly $710,000 goodwill impairment in the Perfect Audience reporting unit. That is an accounting reduction in an acquisition asset’s carrying value, not a campaign performance metric. The filing also identified exposure to changing privacy rules and third-party advertising platforms. Owning the dashboard did not mean owning the networks beneath it.

For a marketer, the copyable lesson is narrower and more useful than “follow everyone.” Start with a behavior that matters. Match the next message to that behavior. Keep the campaign connected to the actual sales process. These are editorial recommendations drawn from the product’s logic; the software still needs an addressable audience, relevant material, and an offer people have reason to accept.

Someone who glanced at a page out of curiosity may be a poor prospect. Someone who already bought may need a different message. An audience too small to reach reliably, or margins too thin to pay for the reminders, can make the exercise unrewarding. Retargeting provides another opportunity to persuade. It cannot supply the persuasion on its own.

The wider SharpSpring platform subsequently became Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM. Constant Contact’s current product page still places retargeting beside email, social marketing, lead scoring, and analytics. The family resemblance is clear: bring the follow-up into the same system as the relationship. The visitor may have left the website. A useful next conversation, if there is one, has to earn the return.