Retargeting marketing has become controversial, since some consumers are complaining that they feel their privacy is being invaded, tracked, and a lot of times annoying, since some ads are being presented to them based on items that they have already purchased. It’s been getting a lot of buzz the last year about this controversy, but for eCommerce companies, Business-to-Consumer and Business to Business software marketers, retargeting statistically has helped to increase purchasing of an abandoned item, as high as 4 times more, than without the retargeted ads. How?
Many eCommerce companies and marketers are now utilizing technology to track consumers, such as with Adroll, which allows marketers to cookie the consumer that has landed on their website, but left regardless of whether they purchased the item or not and then shows ads that are specific to the items that were reviewed to appear throughout the AdRoll network of participating websites, such as on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. So, this is the issue, ads are being shown to consumers that have purchased or downloaded the items, which is why many of the consumers are annoyed by being shown ads that are not necessarily providing any value to them, since they already have the item and potentially can hurt the brand that is being marketed to the consumer.
Retargeting marketing is a step backwards to targeting target audiences based on behaviors for now, since the technology currently is missing the key checkout data to properly present ads based on the shopper’s current needs, but it will get better over time, just as every other technology has for digital marketing. When checkout data can be matched to consumers that have purchased and only show ads of items that they have not purchased, retargeting marketing will have move towards the future and may become, as or more important than Search, since ads will be presented strictly by purchasing behavior and anticipating what the consumer needs for the future.
So, yes consumers will have to stay annoyed for now, since the technology cannot determine between purchased items and not purchased items, but statistics don’t lie for the items that were not purchased, have a higher likelihood of being bought.