Retargeting options abound for marketers today, and the Retargeting Roundtable session at SMX West sought to make sense of the landscape and give guidance on how to best take advantage of the opportunity.
The panel of experts featured Steve Palombo, Director of Revenue at Triggit, Jackie Lamping, Sr. Director of Marketing at AdRoll, and Dennis Goedegebuure, Vice President for Growth and SEO at Fanatics Inc. Marketing Land paid media reporter Ginny Marvin served as the moderator.
Biggest Opportunity In Retargeting
Question: What is the biggest opportunity for advertisers retargeting now?
Steve: Steve sees the combining if online data and offline data and business analytics having huge potential. It will allow businesses to identify the best customers and tailor messaging accordingly.
Jackie: Dovetailing on Steve’s comment, Jackie gave an example of how a wireless carrier could use business data to identify when a subscriber is up for renewal soon, then retarget that customer to renew.
New Retargeting Segments
Question: What’s your favorite new segment? What should people look for?
Dennis: Dennis formerly worked for AirBNB and shared how the company had up to 80 different segments. They went really deep with the retargeting and marketed to people through authoritative sources.
Jackie: Jackie gave the example of retargeting for annual events. If someone attended last year, get them to come back next year by retargeting them around the time of the event. She also gave an example of how one of her clients wanted to target people when they are likely watching a sporting event, so they timed the retargeting efforts for those time periods.
Steve: Steve’s company works with many online travel agencies, and often they are challenged to compete in the highly competitive area of paid search. One example they tried was to target business travelers because they know they will travel again soon. Steve emphasized that not every site visitor is equal. When businesses combine business analytics with the behavioral site data it’s much more powerful for retargeting.
Privacy & Personalization
Question: How do you respect users’ privacy? Are users’ attitudes shifting towards personalization?
Steve: Steve feels that retargeting is becoming accepted. User experience complaints seem to be the larger issue.
Dennis: Dennis feels that most people who see retargeted ads don’t realize what they are — they don’t realize that they are being retargeted to. Therefore, they likely don’t see retargeting as a privacy concern.
Jackie: Jackie shared how retargeting done incorrectly can backfire. She shared a story about a friend who recently got engaged. The friend was tipped off that her boyfriend would propose because the jeweler served retargeting ads on their laptop.
Impression Caps
Question: How do you use impression caps? At the device level? At the user level?
Jackie: Ideally impression caps should be at the user level, but it can be difficult when you use multiple platforms, like Google AdWords, Facebook, etc. because they are not connected.
Dennis: Frequency capping can be very beneficial in retargeting campaigns because of message fatigue.
Steve: Steve added that there’s also product fatigue to consider.
Banner Ads
Question: Is the banner dead?
Jackie: No. Consumers want utility, no matter what that is. Consumers want to see something they want to buy and ads that are fun or engaging. Sometimes that’s banners, sometimes that’s native, etc. Platforms and publishers have to figure out what will engage consumers. Advertisers have to nail the creative — it can’t be automated.
Steve: Can we really claim the banner dead? Death is a strong word. User experience is what this is about. Users don’t know a sponsored story versus other ads on Facebook. When presented with a non-fractured, fluid experience, they work.
Dennis: If you have a terrible product and slap a banner on it, the banner will likely perform terribly too. Create the banner based on the audience, not the other way around.
Why Use Retargeting?
Question: Where do you start with retargeting?
Jackie: If you’re not retargeting today and you’re an e-commerce site, stop everything. Retarget to those who added to cart but did not purchase. You can prevent lost sales. Do it now before you lose more sales. That’s instant ROI.
Steve: Get your ad in front of them. Identify high-value users until they convert or they are no longer likely to purchase.
Facebook Retargeting
Question: Facebook for e-commerce campaigns — do you see purchase intent on these platforms?
Steve: With retargeting on Facebook, yes. But is this demographics and custom audience data effective? He says they test it a lot but don’t necessarily see the ROI from it. It’s less intent-driven when compared to search, where marketers are able to exploit existing intent. He’s also concerned that Facebook is a very closed ecosystem. Not a lot of data is shared. He thinks that the real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchanges are a bit better since they are open.
Jackie: Facebook is trying to weed out partners who don’t have the processing power or engineering power to be successful on the Facebook platform. They have re-certified some partners and kicked out others. There are many partners who are not well integrated, so ask the hard questions. If you’re not using Facebook retargeting, you’re missing out on a channel that is used by nearly every consumer.
Dennis: Through content campaigns, Dennis said he can identify those that have a propensity towards a purchase. But purchase intent isn’t as clear as on other platforms like search. He’s seeing ROI that comes in like a mixture of SEO, content and ads.
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