If you’re anything like me, when you got up this morning you sat down at your computer to check the weather before taking the dog out for his or her morning walk. As the weather site came up, you were likely served with an ad for a product or a service. And very likely that product or service was something you looked at last night before shutting down for the evening. If it was, congratulations--you were just retargeted!
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a simple concept that helps marketers serve people goods and/or services they have already shown an interest in. Used in conjunction with a full online ad campaign, it can offer an advertiser a second chance when a user does not initially purchase their product or service.
To explain the concept, I like to use the example of shoes. I personally love shoes and all shoe marketers on the web have my "number." You can go ahead and insert your interest everywhere I say “shoes” and the concept is the same.
Last Saturday morning I logged onto my computer and was served up with an ad for a shoe website. I clicked on it, did a little browsing, clicked on a pair of magnificent boots, and gazed at them for awhile. They were beautiful, made of soft, supple leather, and they were super stylish. But the price was a little out of my range. I navigated away and over to another site that contained information for a project I was researching.
As I moved through that site, I was once more presented with a photo of the boots and a link to the previous website. I noticed it right away, and I decided to flip through a number of sites to see how long the boots would follow me. Quite honestly, they shadowed me for the next couple of hours as I continued my research.
You're probably wondering exactly how this all works. And if you own a small business, you might be wondering how it might work for you.
Basically, when you visit a website, the website owner begins to create a “profile” of you by collecting data that links to your web browser. It’s called a "cookie." The information being measured are things like the amount of time you view each web page, the links you click on, searches you’ve done and ads you’ve interacted with.
Website owners use this data to create what are known as "defined audience segments" based on other visitors with similar profiles. In my case, my interest in shoes puts me in a category with other shoe lovers.
A standard yardstick in advertising is the idea a company needs about seven contacts with a customer on average before they can make a sale. Retargeting allows the small business especially to add up their contacts with potential buyers without spending inordinately higher amounts of money on their advertising. And that's where the value is for small business. Retargeting improves your advertising ROI by increasing the effectiveness of your ads while offering lower cost.
However, all of this may change if Do Not Track legislation is approved. Federal regulators and online companies are currently slugging it out over the issue. It's too early to tell how it will come out, but since browsers such as Mozilla Firefox already have a ‘do not track’ option in the settings the legislation might turn out to be unnecessary to protect online privacy. Maybe that will be enough for lawmakers to decide to let small businesses continue to use this valuable marketing tool.
