faulker046

This post was originally posted in July 2009. I am updating it again as this is a topic that I get asked a lot lately and I have also recently launched a new course on the topic. In the course I cover Retargeting Fundamentals and how to do retargting on Facebook . (purchase course on Udemy  or on Global Analytics Academy ) and will be releasing the one on Google soon. According to Wikipedia Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral search retargeting, or simply, retargeting ) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion. How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done for the day. Next morning you go back to your computer and browse to a news site. As the page of t...

According to a latest report by Merkle Inc . advertisers spend 33% of their advertising budget on Retargeting efforts .  That is a huge chunk of the budget!   According to another study , the average Click Through Rate for Display ads is 0.07%, while those for Retargeting is ten times that number i.e. 0.7%, . However, that is still dismal.  Why?  Because of the way most organizations retarget , and obviously, their approach is wrong.  There are three major types of retargeting processes which companies perform; Retarget everybody who visited your site.   Retarget those who did not convert. Retarget only those who left items in shopping cart. However, all these approaches still result in very low CTRs and conversions. Of course, they are better than general display ads but still dismal - unless you consider 0.7% as great CTR! So, what is the problem? Let’s take the three retargeting scenarios above one by one. Retarget all your visitors – You are j...

Contextual advertising is not new, when I first started writing about targeting advertising the technology was new, the concept was new and few bold marketers were trying and learning from their mistake while helping others teach on how not to make this mistakes. A post by Kevin Hillstrom,  Highly Targeted Digital Ads That, Well, Just Read The Article ., tells me that we have yet to learn from the mistakes that have been made since the early years of online ad targeting. I remember when we are first dabbling with display ad targeting  and  retargeting  back in early 2000s, one of the things we were trying to solve for is to understand the full context of the content you were reading.  We saw many marketers making the mistake of not understanding the negative context of the content and wasting their ad dollars on wrong content. For example we saw an ad targeted (I believe it was served by Google) on a page talking about plane crash that showed an ad for carry-on ...

Today I came across an article by Isaac Weisberg, titled Unintended Consequences of Targeting: Less Information, Less Serendipity – Part I . In this article Isaac argues that online personalization limits the exposure of information to the individuals. I agree that current personalization practices are very limited though it is more of an issue with the marketers engaged in personalization than with the technology. ( Note: Retargeting , Behavioral Targeting , on-site recommendations, customized emails etc. are all different forms of personalization). So it is not Personalization that limits the flow of information but it is the people engaged in Personalization. The purpose of personalization is to provide information that is relevant to an individual and in order to do so you will eliminate a lot of information that the person is not likely to be interested in. However that does not mean that the person cannot be exposed to new information with the personalization. The issue is tha...

Shoppers, via their online and offline actions, provide a ton of information to the marketers. Smart marketers can and should leverage this information to understand shoppers motivations and needs to create a better relationship with the shoppers and ultimately make more money for their organizations. Every customer touch point is a goldmine of data. It starts from the keywords that shoppers use to arrive to your site, the links that they click on to get to your site (and the sites they visited before they came to your site), clicks on emails, clicks on banners, every click and every action on your site, purchases etc.. All these actions by the shopper provides you with the information that you can use to follow the shoppers. What does following the shopper mean? In simple terms, following the shopper (visitor) essentially means using the shoppers behavioral data to understand the shoppers’ needs and then serving them with personalized ads/messages/offers , wherever you see them onlin...

Retargeting or Remarketing is way to put your ad in front of the people who have been to your site before and are likely to respond to you ads and offers. Retargeting via Google Adwords Retargeting is not new, I have been writing about it since 2006 and working in this area since 2003 . Recently, Google Remarketing, via adwords, has brought retargeting to the masses . Though, in my opinion, Google has not done a good job in educating advertiser on how to effectively engage in retargeting. To start with, Google says, you should retarget every visitor who came to your site. That is a wrong approach and I highly discourage it. As you read through this post , you will know my reasoning behind it. You have to understand remarketing to effectively use it. I am listing 5 questions that you should ask before you put that JavaScript code to start remarketing. 5 questions to ask before starting a Retargeting Campaign What is the purpose of this retargeting campaign? This is first question you s...

This week Google Adwords announced that it is rolling out a feature called "Remarketing" . This feature is essentially "Retargeting" which I described in my blog post Retargeting 101 How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done with that site. Few minutes later you go back to your computer and browse to another site, say a news site. As the page of that site loads so does an Ad that is from the site that you visited yesterday (where you looked at some products but did not buy). For Google Remarketing to work, the news site will need to be a part of Google content network. So far Google used to show Adsense ads based on the content of the page but now it will start showing ads that match the interest of the person viewing the page (as identified by a cookie and retargeted by a market...