Retargeting, or remarketing, is a method of internet advertising that has been exponentially gaining attention and popularity. While traditional advertising employs targeting various demographics, retargeting includes a very specific form of targeting--reaching consumers that have previously visited your website or mobile app. This increases conversion by a significant amount because you're targeting consumers not only by the fact that they fall into a group of people that you know might be interested in your product or services, but that you know have been familiarized to your product and services in the past and are reengaging them. Watch our Daily Brown Bag to learn about our in-depth study on retargeting, learn what retargeting is and how it can help you, and look at how consumers are reacting to retargeting.
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Hello, and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today, we’re going to be talking about Semify’s recent eBook on retargeting statistics. I’m Chad Hill, and I’m joined by Adam Stetzer.
Yeah, good morning, Chad. Welcome to the Brown Bag. We’re doing some original research here, Chad, which is pretty exciting. The topic is Retargeting. Specifically, in February we conducted a survey to measure consumer sentiment about this online advertising technique known as retargeting, or remarketing. We went out and actually surveyed 300 folks -- these were both male and female consumers between the ages of 18 and 65 -- and to open the conversation, Chad, I’d just like to talk a little bit about “what is retargeting.” Probably, not everyone in our audience knows about it, and then I want to hear a little bit about what some of this exciting research uncovered.
What is Retargeting or Remarketing?
Retargeting: these are basically tailored ads, displayed to a consumer after they’ve been to a specific website, and the tricky part here is then the ads are shown on other websites they go to. So, we like to talk about this in terms of advertising that sort of follows you around the internet. And this is possible because Google, primarily, has such large reach across properties who run their advertising platform, and I think, Chad, a lot of consumers notice this effect; they notice they’re seeing ads for something they’ve been to in the last day, or week, or even month, but they don’t necessarily understand the mechanism of how it’s working or why it’s working, and they don’t know that this is called retargeting, or that it was specifically designed for this. And that’s where I think our survey results get interesting -- when we started to explore how consumers feel about this.
Consumers notice retargeting
Yeah, absolutely, and this was a fun study to do. Some of this information, you know, confirms things we suspected, but it’s always nice to have good stats to quote. So, I’m going to read some of the information we were able to gather from these people that we surveyed. 66% of the people surveyed said that they had noticed an ad for a product that they recently viewed, which is the best way of understanding that they might be remarketed to or retargeted to. 64% of those people said that they actually had clicked on one of those ads. When we asked about, in general, where were people clicking on ads, of course, the majority of people are still saying that they’re primarily clicking on ads in search engines, but the next biggest group there were people that were clicking on ads in social media platforms.
So, of course, this is good for Facebook because a lot of what they’re trying to do is, obviously, figure out a better way to advertise, and remarketing inside Facebook has been one of those growth platforms for them. We did hear some people, you know, talking about -- at least, we’ve seen on Facebook -- saying, “How do they know,” on Facebook, “how do they know I recently visited that website?” So, there still are a lot of people that do sort of feel the creepy factor.
Consumers find retargeting helpful
Another couple of things that we’ve found, two more things we’ve found, is that actually a lot of people have said that they don’t really mind seeing those remarketing ads, or retargeting ads, and, in fact, 30% of people said that they find them helpful; they see them almost as a reminder to go back and do something that they started on another website.
The people who did say that they didn’t like retargeting ads, 28% said that, they listed privacy as the primary concern, that, you know, basically, people have so much information about them that were able to retarget, and they felt that broke the privacy wall there. Another couple things we asked about: “Are people using ad-blocking technologies?” Very few people were, and I think, really, the summary of our survey and the gist of our eBook is that businesses should be using retargeting.
You Should Be Thinking About Retargeting
We’re finding that when we run the math on it that it can often drop the cost per conversion of either an SEO or paid search campaign, in some cases by as much as, you know, 25 to 50%, which is a huge game-changer in terms of being able to turn the ROI from break-even, maybe even slightly negative, to very positive when you start using retargeting.
So, download our eBook, learn more about it, and be sure to ask us any questions in the chat that we put up on our website.
2014 Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Retargeting Statistics
In February 2014, Semify conducted a PPC research study to measure consumer reaction to the unique type of pay-per-click advertising known as Retargeting or Remarketing.
The goal of the retargeting statistics survey was to better understand consumer awareness of and sentiment toward PPC retargeting ads so that we can better advise our Reseller clients on the use of this lucrative and growing online advertising strategy.
Download the eBook by clicking here.