Retargeting…stalker much?

Marketers Turn to Search Retargeting for Branding, Direct Response Goals

Research has certainly indicated that when done right, retargeting can be a very valuable marketing tool. Retargeting has proven to increase both brand awareness and organizations’ bottom lines as reflected in this recent emarketer article.

My personal experience:  Last week, my best friend and I were online browsing multiple wedding vendors from decorators to wedding dress designers. Several hours later, I decided to get some school work done only to realize that I was virtually being “stalked” by various wedding vendors. Frankly, I thought it was creepy. From a privacy perspective, I felt violated. However, it proved to be useful once I dug deep to understand the concept of “Retargeting”.

What is retargeting? Some refer to it as remarketing. I would define it as stalking those who are potentially interested in your service. However, that doesn’t mean I disagree with this tool from a business perspective. It clearly has proven to increase brand awareness, retains a “shadow” portfolio of clients (i.e. those who have shown interest but have not yet converted), and overall increases ROI.  Retargeting has proven to increase online sales by ensuring that company brands are at the forefront of “window shopper” minds in the pre-purchase stage, often increasing conversion rates. I think one of the key benefits of retargeting as a marketing tool is that it aims at only targeting those that have shown some interest in your brand/product/services. This makes it more cost effective than ad campaigns targeting a larger audience who may never be interested in your product/service as it would be of no value to them.

How it works…

On the other hand, I think that people can find retargeting to be overbearing, and those who do not fully understand the technology behind it could find it an invasion of privacy.  My understanding is that personal information is never shared and it is merely a cookie being dropped on to the site visitor’s computer.

Some retargeting best practices would be as follows:

1)      Segment carefully and then target the selected segment. You do not want to retarget anyone and everyone that has visited your site.

2)      The feedback loop is important. Follow forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter to see what people are saying about retargeting, things they like and things they dislike. Further, this will allow you to control the frequency of your ads by catering to customer needs.

3)      Timing is important. Different products and services require different retargeting time frames. For example, someone who is looking for last minute travel deals should be targeted sooner than later when compared to someone who is looking for a luxury big ticket item.

 

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