Display Advertising's Close Cousin - Remarketing

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about display advertising in digital. As you may know, the majority of display advertising usually consists of the banner ads you often encounter when visiting some of your favorite sites or blogs, whether they’re about hunting, scrap-booking, rowing, or dancing. I often refer to this type of marketing as “using the interest graph,” ultimately connecting with those who take interest in website’s that have content that matches up with the products or services you’re selling. For instance, a hunting blog may have banner ads for products like shotguns, camouflage, or tree stands. We want to jump even further into this topic, focusing our attention on the close relative of display advertising: remarketing.

Remarketing campaigns can achieve double the click-through and conversion rates of ordinary display advertising, if used carefully. Many marketers feel that ordinary display advertising doesn’t really attract the needed traffic to such website. The ads often have extremely low click-through rates and are engineered for gaining impressions by the thousand. However, remarketing allows you to view the path that visitors take on your site. These ads are more relevant to the consumer because they’re displayed based on specific sites that they’ve already viewed.

Ok, so you may be a little confused. Here’s a scenario for you:

Let’s say you’re looking for a new pair of shoes, Quoddy’s to be specific. You’re on the website and looking through all of the wonderful hand-made styles from Maine, but then, you decide that you want to compare these shoes to Sperry’s. Personally, this is a huge mistake. Nevertheless, you enter the Sperry homepage and you see a Quoddy banner ad at the top of the page, often containing the exact shoes you just saw. Hmmm... How did that banner get there? Are they following you? The answer to your questions: remarketing. You see, remarketing is extremely relevant to the user, and it has several different advantages to the marketer. 

Here are a few more key reasons to use remarketing in your digital advertising efforts:

Abandoned Shopping Carts

Many customers shop and actively place things in their virtual shopping carts. This is usually a good thing, right? Wrong. E-commerce moves very fast compared to its traditional counterpart - retail.  People get distracted, frustrated, and impatient when shopping online. They usually have full shopping carts but then leave them sitting for weeks or even months without buying anything. Remarketing allows advertisers to target these customers directly and encourage them to come back and complete the buying process.

Loyal Customers 

Loyal customers are already familiar with what you offer and they’ve converted in the past. If you run an e-commerce site, you may expect you customers to come back and make a purchase each month. Remarketing allows you to place ads across the display network and remind loyal customers to come back to your site. 

Unattributed Metrics 

Display advertising works on a cost per thousand impression bidding system. In some cases, customers who don’t click on your ads might still search for your offer, or interact with your business in a different way. This is more similar to ordinary display advertising on Google’s network, and it should be tracked and attributed accordingly.