Does remarketing really work?

[300m]

we have been remarketing for a few weeks now and I am curious if anyone has had success with converting sales or even been able to increase lead gen with it?

My initial thought is that its kind of creepy, but effective at catching my eye.

Does anyone know some tips to make this thing convert better?

[arieng]

I've had some success with it, but not on the AdWords platform. The way we were able to increase our performance was by segmenting our ad creative and our offers. Generic brand-related offers didn't do very well, but conversions improved when showed an ad and an offer that were relevant to the types of products the user was browsing on your site.

I do agree though, as a consumer I find them creepy.

[buckworks]

In my experience remarketing ads are most effective when we aim to achieve an occasional courteous reminder, not "stalk the user".

If you're using remarketing ads, I urge you to tweak the settings for that campaign to set conservative limits for how often a user would see your ads.

In AdWords the frequency cap defaults to unlimited, which is practically a recipe for creepiness. It's also a recipe for overexposing your ads, which would reduce your clickthrough rates and increase your CPC costs.

Like so many things in life, remarketing works best if you aren't heavy-handed about it.

[RhinoFish]

concur, use freq cap.

i've found wide variance in results, mainly determined by the strategy used.
what type of strategy are you using?

examples of strategies:
adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=168407

[shorebreak]

[Disclosure: I work at Yahoo, running sales for Smart Ads, Y!'s dynamic display business. Part of what we do for clients is help them with retargeting.]

Best practices:
1. Retarget the user with an ad the is relevant to them. In a retail scenario, for example, show them the product they looked at but didn't buy. If they did buy that product, show them another product(s) that you know convert well with people who've purchased that product.
2. Start with no freq cap, then dial back, sort of the display equivalent of starting with broad match & then dial back to phrase or exact.
3. If geo, age, gender or behavioral cues help you know what products/offers to show, use that data. We find that those data points are immensely valuable both in terms of helping know which offers to show, as well as being a data background against which to test different creative.
4. Don't just buy impressions on Google. Most people who've been doing retargeting for a while will tell you that large publishers' inventory converts better than exchange inventory.
5. Make sure your ad is dynamic and not static. Dynamic, personalized retargeting works several times better than static ads. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE AD.

[300m]

All great comments.
1)Retarget the user with an ad the is relevant to them. In a retail scenario, for example, show them the product they looked at but didn't buy. If they did buy that product, show them another product(s) that you know convert well with people who've purchased that product.
That’s a good idea, I will plan that one out and see what happens.

2)Start with no freq cap, then dial back, sort of the display equivalent of starting with broad match & then dial back to phrase or exact.

I was thinking that way originally, but given the types of products I deal with, it needs to have a cap or it will likely creep out the person exposed to the AD.

3)If geo, age, gender or behavioral cues help you know what products/offers to show, use that data. We find that those data points are immensely valuable both in terms of helping know which offers to show, as well as being a data background against which to test different creative.

This is not a concern for me.

4)Don't just buy impressions on Google. Most people who've been doing retargeting for a while will tell you that large publishers' inventory converts better than exchange inventory.

Agreed.

5)Make sure your ad is dynamic and not static. Dynamic, personalized retargeting works several times better than static ads. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE AD.

Agreed, but how to make a graphical ad dynamic? That’s the bulk of clicks I receive. One idea that we came up with was to get people who were interested in one of our products and came to the site, then left and we would serve them up ads offering a discount and after they purchase, they are removed from that remarketing list. Does anyone have some background or success stories they could share on that topic?

[Brian0275]

We use a simple graphic ad displaying a few of our more popular products. We also offer a discount code for "returning visitors". We have seen a lot of success with this strategy.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Like so many things in life, remarketing works best if you aren't heavy-handed about it.

Amen, users of ad blocking technology are becoming heavy handed and that is likely proportional to the amount of spam they are forced to endure.

[300m]

Quaetion for Brian: Do you send them to a custom landing page for that discount, or do you send them direct to the shopping cart? We are plannning to send them to the cart because they should already know enough about the products to know they are ready to purchase. Does that sound like something that you would do? Its going to increase abandon rates on the cart, but thankfully we have a way to capture email addresed, purchase types, etc..so we would still see some benfit from an increase in abandon.

[shazam]

I sincerely hope your ad campaign is successful but I personally avoid companies that use re-targeting.

I was very close to buying a vps from a popular vendor for one of my joomla sites. I then noticed that I couldn't even check out my own adsense sites without being bombarded by the same ads. Completely irrelevant ads I might point out.

Needless to say, I won't be getting a VPS with this company. I've done my research and spent a lot of time on their site. Spamming me to death will never yield positive results and in my case turned me off completely.

I may be a minority, and I hope for your campaign that I am and you have great success.

[buckworks]

@shazam

Would you have had the same negative reaction if they had set their frequency cap set to a very conservative number?

FWIW, I'm having good results with a remarketing campaign that has the frequency cap set at three per day.

[wwconnect]

I initially didn't want to creep out users so I tested out frequency cap at 5 per ad per day but response was terrible. I've since gradually cranked it up and found that in our case what I would consider "bombardment" results in a far better response. Our target users have a very short sales cycle, think hours, so that's also a factor.

[buckworks]

very short sales cycle

Ah, that's definitely something to keep in mind.

FWIW, the campaign I mentioned that's using 3/day is in a sector where the target consumers sometimes take weeks to make up their minds.

[PCInk]

Remarketing is stupid if you can't delete the user from the list.

I am sick of AdWords showing me adverts on YouTube and other sites when they know I have an account because I logged in.

It needs a 'delete this person from the remarketing list' piece of code that can be put on any logged in page or purchase completion page (or wherever the webmaster decides).

[misterjinx]

Hello after the introduction of remarketing personally I set up at least a remarketing campaign in each account I manage because it's extremely useful and gives good ROI looking not only to direct conversions but also to view-through ones.

I developed two different strategies of remarketing I'd like to share because they're tested for months and works really well.

If in your account you have other GDN campaigns I suggest to follow Google rules to setup a remarketing campaign which means
1) audiences and combinations of audiences
2) no keywords in your ad groups
3) display network set up to show your ads only in managed placements, audience and topics.

BUT, for my experience, if you haven't other GDN campaigns in the same account I suggest what I called a "defensive remarketing campaign" which means:
1) audiences and combinations of audiences
2) keywords in your ad groups
3) display network set up to show your ads in all the network.

Note: if you try this second way and you have other GDN campaigns in the same account they collide and you have performance loss.

[Olney]

Like Brian0275
We've had good results with retargeting especially with clients who offer special discounts to returning consumers.

One issue that does come up is proper conversion attribution for some of the clients that we handle multiple media strategies. Realistically the user has to engage twice with your page to add them to your data pool.

[alexdino1]

Through analysis, we repeatedly show that the optimal retargeting latency is +1 month after the visit. This was really surprising to me at first, but that's the beauty of statistics - they don't lie.

[shazam]

@shazam

Would you have had the same negative reaction if they had set their frequency cap set to a very conservative number?

FWIW, I'm having good results with a remarketing campaign that has the frequency cap set at three per day.

Quite possibly if it was set extremely low, almost so I didn't notice it. I'm not most people though, so I'm likely not a great person to gauge response from. For many online companies the target market is, shall we say, a bit less internet savvy than most of us.

For me, it would work a lot better if it was only shown on relevant or semi relevant pages. When I'm focused on researching green polka dot widgets, spamming me to death with red widgets isn't likely to produce the desired result. It also makes it obvious that I'm being re-targeted.

Marketing agencies will often bombard people with radio, tv, and print ads again and again so It clearly works or they wouldn't keep doing it.

The whole thing is quite ironic. Google thinks they are the internet police protecting us from spam, yet they are one of the leading retargeting spammers on the web! To me its the most insidious type of spam as it follows you from site to site.

[jimbanks]

any form of retargeting is only as good as the person and the campaign that is implemented as part of the follow up.

They visited you and didn't buy, but showed an interest. I would definitely start hard at trying to re-engage, and get them to buy at full price. I see too many people launch into a discount right off the bat, when the reason they didn't buy may not have been anything to do with price. If after you know they have seen further ads and not bought then offer a sequentially bigger discount to get them to buy, so it might be the same ad with the same message but with 10% off, then 20% and if they don't buy after a pre-determined period then stop retargeting them, they have moved on and so should you.