Understanding Behavioral Retargeting through Personalization
Personalization is a trend that has long been a part of marketing, but made even easier with the introduction of online marketing tools; one of those tools being personalized retargeting. About 95% of consumers leave websites without buying anything. By segmenting consumers and tailoring online ads wherever they go, marketers’ hope is to convince this large portion of consumers to come back after they leave a site and actually make a purchase.
So what is personalized retargeting and what can be done with it?
Personalized retargeting is defined by Wikipedia as a display advertising technique used by online advertisers to recapture consumers who visit a retailer’s site and leave without making a purchase. It is a marketing method that can be used along with SEO and other online marketing efforts. What makes personalized retargeting effective is that is uses cookies that are placed on a consumer’s web browser which is then the means that allows businesses to place certain ads on other sites for that the consumer.
Just like any other marketing technique, personalized retargeting has grown throughout its lifetime. At its start, it was very basic; a consumer would visit a site and then once they left they would see ads for that site on other websites. It then evolved to a consumer visiting a site whose online behavior would be tracked. Once tracked, the consumer would be segmented into a category based on their actions and when they visited other sites they would get an ad based on the category they were segmented into. More recently, the process has gotten even more complex. Consumers visit a website and are put into a category of consumers just like them. Then the consumer is given personalized ads based on products or pages they viewed while on the website making it extremely personal for each consumer.
Personalized retargeting is now at a stage where businesses have an opportunity to further segment their consumers. According to James Moore, unstructured data is the best way to make sure that each consumer receives the best possible personalized ad. Unstructured data is a type of data tells marketers a lot more about consumers and their online behavior which allows for such personalized ads.
While businesses are enjoying the intelligence that personalized remarketing is giving them, consumers are not so happy. The New York Times ran an article that mentioned how people feel about retargeting:
“Retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with palpable feelings that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.”
Clearly, businesses and consumers have different views on the idea of personalized remarketing.
There is definitely a way to go about retargeting that makes it successful, but not completely creepy as consumers fear. For example, if someone were to be looking for a plumber in Harrisburg they might end up landing on Secco’s website who offers plumbing in the Harrisburg area. They will see a range of different options from plumbing to electrical services offered on the site. Say then, they go to the plumbing section and click around to a few different pages. It wouldn’t be very effective for Secco to then show that consumer ads on electrical services or air condition services, even though Secco offers these services. Successful personalized retargeting will make sure that the consumer sees only ads for plumbing based on their behavior on Secco’s site even after leaving the website.
Although personalized retargeting has been around for a while, it is still growing and evolving into a method that businesses can use to better market their website to consumers. By taking some time to look closely at data and create personalized ads to fit each consumer, hopefully businesses can try and attract back the 95% of people who leave without buying anything.
