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Each day when I go to my Yahoo mail, I'm shown an ad or a banner from the stores I visited on my own, from my own address bar, within the last 24 hours. If I use the ad as a way back there, the click is charged; for a banner this drastically inflates the ad buyers perception of how well the banner is doing, since the clickers are ALREADY the customer of the banner purchaser. Google is almost as bad, I'm bombarded each day with ads from sites where I'm already a customer.
Everybody knows this goes on, but I'm not sure that you men, who don't shop often, know how bad it is. You could be getting MOST of your clicks from non-uniques.
I'm frankly not impressed by paying for clicks from customers I already have. I'm curious how badly you think this is skewing our perceptions of our ad success?
I'll start by offering a slightly different perspective.
Most businesses and marketers seem to have blinders on when it comes to retaining and deepening relationships with existing users, preferring instead to think about acquiring new users, which is typically FAR more expensive than generating repeat sales from existing users, cross selling existing users, etc.
The most sophisticated marketers know that of a brand's total user base, typically only a very small percent are completely loyal users who never go to other brands/outlets/etc. And the Web, by virtue of greater access to performance and pricing information, has pushed this phenomenon to the point where fewer consumers than ever are truly brand loyal. People shop online, buy offline. Shop offline, buy online. Price is critical, and the search for the highest quality at the lowest price forces squeezed manufacturers and resellers to pay more attention to marketing ROI than every before.
All of which is to say, do not discount the value of finding cheap ways to remind users to come back to your store, site, etc. Reinforcing your presense among current users is for the most part more important and more cost effective then winning over new users who have no knowledge of your brand or site. And the less well known a brand/site is, the more important existing users are. I almost always opt for keeping current users in the fold, and deepening relationships, versus going out and finding the next new user.
Additionally, if your existing users are seeing and clicking on your ads, it means they are not seeing and clicking on your competitors' ads. ;-)
Perhaps the cost per conversion is actually less if you can hook the existing customers back to the site. I would love to have a algo on this.
It's also interesting from the standpoint of affiliate marketing, where the advertiser has to pay a percentage of the sale if I go back in through an ad.
