Retargeting has become the hot favorite technique in the online advertisement space to lure in more and more customers and increase the market sales for a particular brand because in general only 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store and the next 98% have to be brought back by retargeting. Hence Retargeting, also known as remarketing by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), is a form of online advertising that can help keep a brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave its website. Therefore, if an endorser is not using retargeting as a part of digital marketing strategy then probably it is being retargeted by some other brand that is using this methodology.
The Retargeting Trends and Challenges
Despite of this retargeting trend becoming an integral part of the digital marketing world, still many marketers are unfamiliar of its effectiveness. Hence, to understand the state of retargeting amidst the marketers, Marine Software conducted a survey of 233 enterprise marketers and inquired about their retargeting practices and challenges. The report highlighted that in the present moment 88% of marketers are currently employing this tactic to re-engage users who didn’t purchased on their initial visits to their consortium. The rest 12% who haven’t implemented this practice of retargeting attributed the main reasons as poor past performance, poor fit with marketing goals, lack of budget, and privacy/regulatory constraints for keeping it out of their marketing mix. However, over 50% of this group said that they had plans to start retargeting within the following 12 months.
The most preferred channel for retargeting deduced in the survey was display followed by search. The popularity of these two mediums can be accounted due to their alignment with Google AdWords retargeting offering through GDN (Global Development Network) and RLSA (Remarketing List for Search Ads).
89% of marketers who were retargeting, reported of using a combination of Google’s retargeting tools, search retargeting through RLSA, and display retargeting through GDN. However, with Google, Bing, and other major search engines moving to secure search, the opportunities to retarget search queries have abated.
Marketers are even focusing on retargeting across multiple channels, but the drawback attached with this phenomenon is that over 50% of such promoters reported having disparate goals for each channel they were retargeting on and according to a recent Econsultancy/Oracle report, only 10% of marketers said that their messaging, execution, and delivery were aligned when performing cross-channel marketing.
Marin Software Chief Marketing Officer Matt Ackley talked about the effectiveness of combining Facebook and display retargeting; “It starts with the premise that the path to conversion is a multi-channel path. It’s not like somebody just uses search. It’s not like someone just goes to Facebook and gives all their information. I think the fact that it is a multi-channel path means that you have to be present when you’re implementing different types of targeting strategies. You have to be present across channels in order to stay top-of-mind.”
Attribution, sufficient list volume, and lack of transparency are ongoing challenges
The most tedious task for the marketers in terms of redirecting is to attribute their performance across various channels. Hence, to get a better idea of how to attribute their performance they can employ lift tests to determine how much lift is attributable to the retargeting campaigns, and what, if any, cannibalization from other marketing efforts.
Also, generating sufficient volume when retargeting through Google RLA’s is another ongoing challenge for the marketers both in quantitative and qualitative aspects which hold true for large brands and advertisers as well. However, list volume in the survey seemed less of an issue on the social and display channels.
Lack of Transparency occupied the third spot in this list of challenges to be faced with redirecting by the advertisers. Transparency can be molded into different senses by different companies, but the common themes basically involve an amalgam of media transparency, performance transparency, and pricing transparency. Most of the above listed spheres are addressable but a number of these issues can be attributed to the misaligned incentives that can possibly come into picture when a particular brand works with a retargeting company who charges on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPA (Cost Per Action) basis, while purchasing inventory on a CPM (Cost Per Mille) basis.
Retargeting budgets: Limited but liberal
The retargeting tactic being adopted by almost 90% of marketers now as a digital marketing strategy seems already a prevailing ploy, but in contrast the allocation of budgets for this gambit still makes it seem an experimental stratagem which needs to prove its performance. Almost half of the marketers claimed that they did not have a fixed budget for retargeting. Furthermore, 51% of marketers told that they spent 10% or less of their budget on retargeting.
On the whole, the substantial competence of retargeting to drive positive ROI has successfully increased its presence in marketing budgets as more than 50% of marketers plan to escalate their retargeting spends across search, social, and display over the next 12 months. In addition to this, the emerging retargeting modes like mobile and video targeting also appear to be propitious opportunities of growth in the following year and it would not be surprising if they gain a large share of retargeting market strategy in the coming times.
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