Behavioral Marketing Recap: Retargeting

After years of researching and executing Search Marketing campaigns on different stages and many types, we came to the understanding that while search is strong, growing, important and fruitful, while Search Marketing was considered the ultimate “pull marketing” vehicle to incorporate delivering the message not only when I , the marketer wanted to – but when the target audience wanted to… We can now take the next step forward.

Behavioral Marketing is here for more or less ~3 years already, at different forms and levels, and is basically offering us to deliver a message to a prospective customer based on their web browing patterns.

Today I’d like to focus on one method of behavioral marketing: Retargeting.

What is Retargeting

Retargeting is a technique where an advertiser “tags” its visitors (Organic, PPC and others) and using a 3rd party network (usually the bigger the better) can later on deliver the message to the actual users who already visit the website before, again and again.

Is Retareting any Good?

One might argue that delivering the message to the user twice is a waste of money… But going back to square one, 2 of the most important and basic metrics are Reach and Frequency.

While the first impression of a message attacks the Reach metric (get as many unique eye balls to see your message) the Frequency metric will hwlp us to enforce the message and create a repetition effect.

Steps to a Successful Retargeting Campaign:

1. Have a minimal volume of unique visitors to your website to begin with (the base audience to retarget)
2. Work with a network which offers the largest spread i.e. most likely to succeed n reargeting your users
3. Define maximum impression caps to optimize the effectiveness
4. Make sure your privacy policy supports the use of cookies for this purpose
5. Have web analytics abilities to measure the actual effectiveness of the campaign.

Here are some vendors to start with:

• http://www.retargeting.com/
• http://www.leadback.com/ (by Advertising.com)
• http://www.revenuescience.com/
• http://www.echotarget.com
• http://www.bluelithium.com/ (Acquired by yahoo!)