The other day a friend of mine mentioned that he was searching for a new car online. He had been browsing many different auto manufacture’s websites, but had yet to come up with a choice on the car he wanted to buy. He knows that I work in the internet marketing industry so he mentioned how much Ford spends on their advertising. He said “I see their ads everywhere I go!”
The truth is that my friend had been experiencing an innovation from Google called Remarketing. Because he had been browsing the Ford site a cookie was placed on his browser indicating his interest in specific products. A few days later as he was browsing other websites that have nothing to do with cars, the cookie was triggering ads from Ford to show up on other sites.
From the view point of my friend, he was seeing the same cars from Ford over and over again. While Ford was not paying a single penny to show those ads to him, they were effectively remarking their products to him during a critical time of the buying cycle.
Google AdWords is a great way to bring in new customers to your website, but when you add the power of remarking through the Google Display Network many advertisers see higher conversions for their campaigns overall. Advertisers can “tag” pages of their site that correspond to certain categories they want to promote. Then when someone visits one of those tagged pages, they will begin to see those display ads over the next several days as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.
My friend has not yet decided on what car he will buy, but the last time I talked to him he was leaning towards purchasing a Ford. I never told him about Ford’s little remarketing secret.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, I didn’t know that feature existed. I think I’ve been a sucker of that kind of marketing for a while now and I never knew it.
Twitter: ReTargeter
January 11, 2012 at 12:54 pm
This is a great intro to remarketing (often called retargeting by non-Googlers).
Retargeting is phenomenal for branding campaigns in both the B2C and B2B spaces, and for more targeted campaigns highlighting a specific product or service that the user has viewed. The latter use case best describes your friend’s experience. Retargeting core technology can also be used in a variety of other ways (for example, you can show ads to users who open your marketing emails).
I also wanted to point out that this service is NOT exclusive to Google. There are other platforms that offer retargeting. Full disclosure: I work for one, ReTargeter, an online ad platform that actually specializes in retargeting solutions.