Do You Think Remarketing is Annoying?

I’m sure you’ve seen these ads before. You go to a website, browse around for a bit, then leave… only to find that nearly every website you visit after that shows you ads of that first site, continuously… for weeks. This is called remarketing, and it’s the latest and greatest of behavioural ad targeting. Marketers love it, but consumers have mixed emotions.

As the product evolves, we’re beginning to better understand how best to employ it in marketing campaigns. Google recently release some new features that allow advertiser to determine the point at which their ads stop performing, and just become annoying background noise. This new report is called the Frequency report. It shows an advertiser the click-through and conversion metrics on display campaigns and remarketing. Here’s a snapshot of a report we ran on a client who was running a remarketing campaign.

This report gives you some very solid insight into the performance of your remarketing. While from a branding perspective these ads may be effective past the 8 impression mark, from a conversion perspective, you just become white noise. For the most part a customer who was likely to convert would have done so in 7 impressions or less. What this is telling us as well, is that we’re wasting a large portion of our budget on clicks that are not likely to convert. This money could go to better use in other campaigns.