Retargeting is often viewed as a dirty word in the digital advertising industry. From annoyance with receiving ads for already purchased products on the consumer side, to opinions that it devalues display advertising on the industry side, retargeting has popularity issues. As Martin Pavey (pictured below), UK country director, Flashtalking writes, there are more sophisticated ways to target consumers today. Here, Pavey tells ExchangeWire that retargeting needs to evolve, using data and creative intelligently to truly understand and engage with the consumer.

Retargeting is about acting on clear signals. If a consumer shows interest in a product, the goal of retargeting is to convert that interest into a sale, to turn window shoppers into buyers. It takes a consumer’s direct sign of intent and encourages them to take that next step. 

Today’s data-rich targeting methodologies offer more sophisticated ways to detect that sign of intent. In many ways, we are finding that the intent itself was more nuanced than retargeters once imagined. Most smart marketers today understand that behavioural signals are not to be taken entirely at face value. When a consumer shows interest in sports cars, it’s not necessarily a sign they have the intention, let alone the financial means, to buy one. Rather, that signal is one input in a sophisticated profile that may take into account age, household income, location, and so on. It probably makes more sense to show them ads for tyres, car repair shops, certain brands of sunglasses, or apparel. 

The problem is that most retargeting today will still turn right around and show that consumer pre-made ads for the same sports cars they were originally searching for. All the sophisticated tech we have to understand consumer’s intentions hasn’t yet translated into a new sophistication in how we act on those intentions, and in how we design and deliver the message. It’s finally time for retargeting to evolve in that direction – to look beyond a simple response to the last product viewed. 

Evolve beyond the last product

Let’s take another example. A consumer is browsing online for wall paint and carpeting. It looks, on the surface, that they are planning to do some work on their home. But what if the week prior, that same consumer was looking at family cars and cribs? These behaviours suggest the consumer is expecting a child, and, likely, in the market for larger purchases than paint. A remarketing ad featuring nothing but home improvement products misses that big picture and those bigger buys. Given the richness of today’s data sets, it’s outdated and simplistic.  

Combine additional data to enhance retargeting

Martin Pavey, UK Country Director, Flashtalking

The key to this evolution of retargeting is the layering-in of additional data and better quality creative, both of which are easy and actionable today. Ad servers can now tap multiple data sets simultaneously, combining first-party DMP data segments, in-page contextual data, geo information, weather, time, sequences, A/B testing, third-party data feeds, you name it. These can, and should, all be available in your ad server and, when used in combination with site-visit behaviour, will deliver on the big picture and identify the big opportunity. Executing on that opportunity requires that you go one step further and have the data inform the personalisation of the creative itself. 

And just adding more data isn’t enough – you have to demand more detail from your data as well. The only way to truly validate conversions from retargeting is with impression-level reporting. Anything short of a full fractional attribution model and the only thing your retargeting data will prove is the rate at which you harvest cookies.

Such a model will also yield the type of nuanced understanding that enables creatives to take an entirely new approach to crafting the message. Clarity on the consumer’s place in the purchase cycle allows for precise personalisation. In the previous example of the expecting parent, this creative personalisation is the difference between advertising, say, a life insurance policy instead of a can of baby-blue paint they already Googled. It opens the opportunity to stay one step ahead.

The real KPI: understanding the consumer

One of the reasons that last-product retargeting persists today is because our methods for measuring success are good at hiding these shortcomings. Catch-all cookie harvesting (AKA post-view conversion tracking) only serves to demonstrate that people who visit your website buy more stuff than people who don’t. People who window shop buy more than people who don’t shop at all – you don’t need data to figure that out.

But you risk letting the consumer’s real interests disappear behind a wall of safe KPIs. A bad retargeting job will show the consumer something they no longer want, already have, or never wanted in the first place. For long-term success, it’s time for retargeting to evolve beyond its comfort zone, take a bolder approach beyond last-product focus and focus on the relationship with consumers – by delivering engaging and high-quality creative experiences powered by intelligent data activation.

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