Emotional Retargeting Best Practices
For marketers, retargeting is a great tactical tool, but it may trigger adverse consumer reaction and be harmful to the brand. As a consumer, you do not have control over what is displayed on your computer screen.
Imagine you are looking for the perfect gift for father’s day and you want to keep it a surprise. You have visited a retailer site and looked at drills and wallets. The next day, your husband opens the sports network site and can see various ads for drills and wallets that are based on your browsing history. He now knows that it will be one of 2 things he will get: a drill or a wallet. Unless you deliberately through him off and bought a gift card on the way home from work.
As a company that uses retargeting advertising, you need to use this powerful tactic tastefully and always allow the consumer an easy way out. Luckily, we have the best practices that are easy to follow.
Retargeting definition
Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral remarketing, or simply, retargeting) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous Internet actions. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target web page or email, which sets a cookie in the user’s browser Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show display ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange. (1)
Brands need to let consumers control their ads
Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. (Source: PageFair) (2)
Marketers must know the top options for the consumers to control their ads
- Google-This allows users to turn off behavioral targeting on websites where ads are controlled by Google. (3)
Retargeting Tactics Examples
Retargeting Based On Product
Step 1. User Visits a Particular Product page
Step 2. Personalized Ad Matches the Product
The ad shows the exact product I have visited.
Step 3. Ads After personalization turned off
The ad shows similar products I have visited.
Brand and Promotional Campaign Retargeting Advertising
The Under Armour ad is a great example of retargeting where no specific product is shown. These types of ads are not offensive and allow creating brand awareness as well as potential to sell a variety of products.
Bad Example of Retargeting Ad
The Sears retargeting ad is displaying a product I never showed interest in and it is also in the wrong language.
Best Practices on friendly relationship with your shoppers: If someone does not want to be tracked let them go with a smile
5 Simple Retargeting Tips
- Do not use retargeting ads for sensitive products such as personal hygiene, medical, personal.
- Always have information on the site on your cookies policies and opt-out.
- Train customer support on opt-out process.
- Using generic sale or brand ads is always an excellent choice as it allows marketers to increase conversion to purchase but without the “creeping” feeling of the exact product the shopper was browsing.
- Have a variety of various creative sizes and messaging and test which one works better. You might even want to try different landing pages to optimize conversion.
If you retarget with heart, your results will be amazing.
References
- Behavioral retargeting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting
- 2015 Ad Blocking Report, https://pagefair.com/blog/2015/ad-blocking-report/
- Control, protect, and secure your account, all in one place, https://www.google.com/settings
- Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Self-Regulatory Program, http://www.aboutads.info/
- The AdChoices consumer opt-out page for online interest-based advertising, http://youradchoices.ca/choices/
