Early retargeting advertising lures customers back

Retargeting is a marketing strategy in which seller websites use cookies to store and use shoppers' preferences to serve them personalized ads again on other websites.

"Retargeting is an efficient marketing strategy, because it means providers don't always have to address a target group completely cold. It also makes sense to use this strategy early on, because then the impression of the buying experience is still fresh in the mind," says online marketing expert Björn Tantau in an interview with the news agency Pressetext.

Effective for undecideds

For the study, researchers examined the buying behavior of more than 230,000 visitors to the Canadian sales website BuildDirect. This site uses different platforms for retargeting advertising, but the study focused only on the use of DoubleClick, a tool from Google that can track customers based on cookies and their user ID.

It turned out that retargeting is particularly effective with visitors who only look at a page and don't buy anything. For these users, retargeting increased the likelihood of returning to BuildDirect by 15 percent. In addition, the effect is significantly higher when consumers see ads as soon as possible after their visit. The strongest effects took place in the first three days.

"Defensive" role for website

According to the researchers, retargeting advertising has a strong effect even if it does not offer any new information, but merely recalls the page visited. This type of advertising also has a "defensive" role for websites, because it makes it harder for competitors to poach customers from them.

According to Tantau, retargeting raises the question of whether a recommendation appeals to customers' tastes. "Sellers assume that customers want a similar product to a previous purchase. Here, they use the information they have about consumers. If the offer fits, retargeting is very effective," says the expert. (pte)