I do unfortunately notice that a lot of companies do this online as well, showing me expensive retargeted ads for products I already use and of course I’ve read the inevitable articles in places like the New York Times decrying ads that follow users surfing around the web (http://1ad.me/v). It’s a lot easier to control this online than offline – simply drop a piece of code on your page that removes the user from the retargeting segment. Users who are prospects but have not yet turned into customers should be targeted for retargeted ads, but those who have already become paying customers should NOT be retargeted, unless of course there is an upsell opportunity to a higher tier of service.

That’s problem 1 – showing ads to people that already buy your product. And part of the reason for this, I know from one company that has been doing this and who described to me how they set this up, is that companies are still getting great ROI and vendors are making a lot of money while still being lazy about how they set these things up. A client that sees a 3x performance boost versus a traditional campaign will be very happy – but when you show them that if they’d eliminated the wasteful impressions in the campaign they would be at an 8x ROI, they are a little less happy.

Consumers are being drowned in retargeted ads today — vendors are not properly controlling frequency on retargeted campaigns – part of the reason for that is that retargeting campaigns are typically small in size. Let’s say that you have a 200,000 user segment you want to hit every month, you bid a $6 dynamic CPM (ceiling) and end up at a $3.00 CPM rate across ad exchanges – you’re a whopping $600 a month account for one of these vendors…. and they cannot afford to service you for that price hence they pump up the ad volume to $1000-2000 a month. Maybe they charge you on a CPC, maybe something else – or maybe they convince you that their view-based conversion numbers are metrics you should pay attention to (and pay them for!).

Be careful. This is a treacherous path to walk down and is the reason if you browse around having visited your own site you may see a few of your ads but beware if you see too many! It’s impressive to see your ad on a large publisher website, but if you’re seeing it four or five times a day on various sites you might be getting a raw deal.

Given the opportunity to speak about remarketing/retargeting, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, was pleased with the crowds and session attendance and had this to say:

“People across online advertising disciplines are committed to learning all they can – to incorporate best practices and new technologies for improved campaign performance. Remarketing connects search and display advertising efforts like no other technology, and, when used correctly, can drastically improve conversion metrics for both mediums. It was good to see so many people engaged on the subject.”

Rob’s portion of the panel presentation focused on case studies that showed the best practices XA.net has used implementing retargeting/remarketing for clients’ display campaigns.

Check out Rob’s Introduction to Remarketing presentation slides.

Enter priority code “SPGSF20″ during the registration process to receive 20% off.

XA.net CEO and founder Rob Leathern will be featured as a panelist during the Introduction to Remarketing session taking place Tuesday, August 17th, 4:15pm – 5:15pm. Search Engine Strategies is part of the larger inaugural Connected Marketing Week, which also includes events produced by the IAB and Online Marketing Summit.

Contact us if you would like to meet up during the week!

Rob will be featured on Tuesday, August 17th as a panelist during “Introduction to Remarketing”. In this session industry experts will share their experiences with Remarketing (also known as retargeting) and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI. The panelists will also address the lack of awareness and the issues that have arisen surrounding Remarketing as a result.

We’ve allowed clients to input search keyword data with their campaigns for some time (remember our self-service platform component has now been live for over a year!), but will be adding some additional features soon that allow you to discover additional keyword data for your campaigns.

If you are interested, please contact us for more information on buying this data.