Retargeted Ad is one of those things on which my take as a consumer is diametrically opposed to that as a marketer.
As a consumer, I hate them.
As a marketer, I love them.
For the uninitiated – or, in this case, the unchased – retargeted ads are the banner ads that follow you around on different websites after you’ve visited the advertiser’s website and left without signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase or otherwise failing to “convert”.
These ads are creepy, at least when you first encounter them.
So much so that I once resolved to stop visiting websites that did retargeting.
That wasn’t hard to do in the early days when these ads were largely from B2C brands found on media websites, both of which I could easily avoid since there were dozens of alternatives in either category.
But, over a period of time, as virtually everyone – B2C brands on B2B websites and vice versa – started doing retargeted ad campaigns, it has become impossible to stick to my resolution.
Retargeting is so widespread I don't need bookmarks now. I know my surfing history by looking at the ads around me. http://t.co/unMS9vMRSQ
— GTM360 (@GTM360) November 28, 2013
Nowadays, I see Retargeted Ads even after I’ve made a purchase. This goes against the basic purpose of Retargeted Ads to bring back unconverted visitors. Therefore, they deserve the monicker “retarded ads”, as my friend and ex-colleague Ganesh Ramakrishnan calls them.
Now, that’s me talking as a consumer.
In my professional life as a marketer, I find retargeted ads awesome. They consistently deliver excellent bang for the ad buck on many of my company’s digital marketing campaigns (click here to find out more).
Quite often, retargeting gives us the highest ROAS of all digital channels we use (If you’re new to this term, it stands for Return on Advertising Spend, which is a very popular metric for measuring the effectiveness of advertising. An ROAS of 30 means $1 spent on an ads earns $30 in revenues).
We’re not alone: Mr. Belson Coutinho, Vice President – Marketing, eCommerce and Innovations at Jet Airways, once told us that retargeting gave them an ROAS of 2X of their second-best online channel.
Given the enviable track record of Retargeted Ads, I reckon that marketers will continue to use them even if many of their customers seem to hate them.
I became very confident of this prediction when I saw Amazon – that paragon of customer delight – running retargeted ads and, that too, an extra-creepy version in which the banner gets progressively updated in real time with the picture of every new item I saw on subsequent visits to its website (see exhibit above)!
That said, no brand wants to alienate its consumers for too long.
Maybe it’s high time digital marketers finessed their retargeting campaigns such that they don’t put off their customers but still do what works for them. I can think of at least two ways of striking the middleground:
- With immediate effect, stop retargeting visitors who have converted. This shouldn’t be hard since all popular retargeting platforms like Google Remarketing, Bizo (now part of LinkedIn) and Vizury support this feature out of the box.
- In the medium-term, find ways to garner feedback on why consumers click or don’t click retargeted ads and use this input to enhance the IQ of their future campaigns. We’re working on developing a smart retargeting solution to help marketers do this at scale. Should you wish to steer the development of our product towards your specific needs and goals, please feel free to contact us.
I’m sure marketers have other ways to “have their customer’s loyalty cake and eat their retargeting too” but, whatever they do, they need to ensure that consumers don’t confuse Retargeted Ads for Retarded Ads!
