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August 15, 2006 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Search Engine Marketing:
Behavioral Search Retargeting - Courting Prospects Who Did Not Buy
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is about targeting. The most basic, keyword-based PPC search campaign targets an audience by displaying ads to searchers who are already interested in something you have to offer. Further targeting options are available - IP Targeting to target your ads to a specific location, and the recent MSN AdCenter options that allow you to target certain demographics, such as age and gender. New targeting techniques are constantly being added and old techniques are refined. One of the newer developments takes the concepts of targeting and combines it with tracking elements in an effort to display new ads to searchers who have been targeted before. Called retargeting, this form of behavioral targeting (sometimes also called "behavioral search retargeting") allows advertisers to display a new offer to searchers who have already visited their site.
Any searcher who clicked on your ad in the past will most likely continue to see the same ad displayed at future visits. Retargeting allows you to display a new ad targeted for this audience - namely, a prospect who has already been exposed to your brand. This is done by tagging the user with a cookie after they have clicked on your ad and landed on your site or landing page. Regardless of their actions on your site, the cookie remains and identifies this user as one that has already visited your site. Later, when the same user visits a site within a retargeting ad network, you can display a different ad. Knowing you're targeting someone who has already visited your site, the new ad can display a unique offer. This is a great way to entice a prospect that may not have purchased when they visited your site earlier. You can offer a discount to this group, giving you a better chance to capture a sale the second time around.
Retargeting offers a lot of possibilities. Depending on the extent of your tracking, you can offer dozens of unique offers to different groups. By tracking deeper, you can more directly target the new ad to the user's interests based on which pages were viewed while on your site the first time. You can target a user who may have abandoned a shopping cart with a particular product in it. When they see your retargeted ad, it can be geared directly at the product that they had opted out of. Also, retargeting doesn't necessarily have to be directed at prospects. Customers can be targeted as well. By tracking the behavior of users who have already made a purchase, retargeting gives you the chance to offer up new ads for the purposes of cross marketing to and up-selling an existing customer.
Ad Budget Considerations
While preliminary studies of retargeting PPC campaigns show great conversion rates, it's important to remember not to put too much of your budget into retargeting just yet. The most important thing to remember is that retargeted ads can only be displayed to users who have clicked on an ad in the past. This means an existing campaign must already be in place. So, while the cost per click for retargeted ads is usually low, it will need to be paid on top of the cost of the original click. However, if you are already putting a lot into your PPC budget and not seeing acceptable conversion rates, the extra cost of retargeted ads may spark enough conversions to make it worth your while.
Retargeted ads will not work for everyone. For now it seems, these ads work best for products that a user may put more research and consideration into before making a purchase. A user may be putting more thought into the process, and the retargeted ads give you the chance to engage the user with multiple offers. It's as close to a dialogue that you could hope to get with a customer using only text ads.
Currently the search engines with PPC search programs in place are not offering retargeting. However, there are several ad networks with hundreds of publishers or affiliates offering retargeted ads with a fairly wide reach, and the field is expanding further everyday.
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