ChoiceStream’s AdOps Optimization Engineer was recently interviewed by CNBC SquawkBox anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin about ChoiceStream and how our audience targeting solution makes a difference in ad effectiveness. During the interview, Sorkin mentioned how he kept seeing ads for humidifiers during his recent bought with the flu after searching for the same item online. Sorkin was speaking of “retargeting” – an online ad technique marketers and advertisers know well.
Retargeting relies on delivering advertisements to a self-identified group of people who have already visited a website before, there is no doubt of the value of retargeting those consumers.
Retargeting works, as illustrated by Sorkin’s example. Yet, most retargeting campaigns are simplistic: touching only the surface of the data available to execute the campaign. For example most retargeting campaigns are simplistic: rely on showing the most recent product viewed or products abandoned in a shopping cart.
One significant weakness of the more simplistic approach to retargeting is a disregard of a key fact: most people who abandon items in a shopping cart or search on a site and leave without making a purchase do so deliberately. Therefore, retargeting to those people means many wouldn’t have been customers in the first place.
ChoiceStream’s approach to retargeting is different: smart and more effective. We rely on a number of additional data points or signals – not just abandoned items and most recents – to select the right products to show your retargeted audience. We’ll look at lookalikes: people who searched for similar products or placed those products in shopping carts to see what they purchased. We can also use weather-adaptive creative – ads that use local-weather to present relevant offers to consumers whom they want to retarget. ChoiceStream can even use information like a person’s favorite sports team to retarget them with products and promotions that resonate.
The real benefit ChoiceStream CRUNCH can deliver to a retargeting campaign aside from the use of additional data and creative techniques to augment retargeting response is to further parse the segments most likely to respond. Applying this intelligence will deliver more efficiency in a retargeting campaign. We target only those segments and sub-segments most likely to take action and respond – something we call smart retargeting.
So instead of just showing Andrew Sorkin humidifiers over and over again, a smart retargeting campaign would show him additional items that could help his suffering and prevent him from catching the flu again. Hand sanitizer, extra warm overcoats and scarves, vitamin C drinks, even travel offers to sunny destinations and more. Items he’s likely to buy to avoid catching that nasty bug again.
Interested in catching better performance from your retargeting campaign? It might be time to see what smart retargeting can do for you.
