Retargeting & Brand Equity
This month we’re covering off retargeting and how to set yourself up for the best balance between efficiency, effectiveness and ethics.
Retargeting. The dirty word of the industry.
We’ve all encountered it – go on a website looking for that one item that they didn’t have and then see adverts from that company everywhere you go for the next three weeks! Not what you want.
There are two key elements to proper retargeting we must consider; frequency and recency. Let’s explore these
Frequency is the probably the most well known component of retargeting. It literally denotes how often we show an ad to a person. The reason it is so important is because if we show ads to the same person too often, not only will we waste our budget on someone who doesn’t want what we’re offering but we also affect how they perceive us.
The interesting balance here is that often showing an ad just once to someone is not enough to convince them of what we have to offer them. So there is a balance to be struck here of showing enough ads to someone to convince them of what we want them to do without showing them too many to make them never want to hear from us ever again. Tricky stuff.
The second component is recency. This denotes how long we should show ads to someone that has expressed interest in our business. If we continue to show ads to someone for too long means that we could overexpose them as well as wasting our money.
However, as with frequency, there is a balance to be struck. Showing ads at the right time to that person is totally unique. It cannot be tracked by any technology either. So what we don’t want to do is stop showing our ads to them right before the perfect moment for them would be to take up the offer we are giving them. So we must use data over time to assess what the best overall time is to keep showing ads to people are as a whole.
Despite how efficient retargeting can be for your business and even if you have a campaign live now that is performing, you could be irreparably damaging your brand equity by overexposing your site visitors for too long. If someone hits your site and doesn’t convert and you retarget them into oblivion – ignoring the obvious media efficiency issue – if you then do get in or create a product they could be interested in later down the line, they will not consider you or your proposition purely based on how they now perceive you after being followed around the internet for 3 months after being on your site. What you’ve done here is erode your brand equity i.e all the good work you’ve done so far to create a brand that is trustworthy, cost effective and valuable. Even if you’re still that brand.
Perception matters. If you get it wrong, it will cost you even more to try and get it back. Getting it right from the start is incredibly important.
When running retargeting for businesses, we always discuss ahead of launch what our ideas are for things like frequency of ads to show people and over how long. We then build your campaigns to consider these rules but to not lose those site visitor-non converters to be fed back into your prospecting efforts after a certain time has elapsed.