This is the current perception, but the reality is that display advertising has not had a good reputation since it was born 25 years ago.
At first we clicked almost out of curiosity, when the clicks dropped we started making bigger and more annoying ads that occupied the best positions and when the media and agencies saw that there was a lot of unsold space (what was called general rotation), programmatic advertising was invented (this was germany phone number list free its initial objective) to optimize its sales.
The advertising industry makes the same mistakes over and over again
Although we could summarise these errors in a single statement: the solution to poor results is to increase advertising pressure.
That is, applying the rule of traditional media. The more people are impacted by my ad, the more sales I will get . Obviously there is some truth to this, because sales increase. But at what cost?
I am not just referring to the increase in cost per sale (CPA), but also to the reputational cost for brands and its medium-term effects on sales.
I have always been in favor of using common sense and combining:
Actions that give us visibility quickly: paid advertising both on and off.
Segmented and differentiated actions for each phase of the purchasing process:
Knowledge : actions that capture and enhance the echo of paid advertising: from traditional display campaigns to programmatic campaigns, to SEO, actions on social networks, etc.
Consideration : retargeting applied to what really adds value (convincing our audience to buy, and not impacting those who were going to buy anyway), content, email marketing , social networks, etc.
Action : Google Ads, email marketing , affiliate marketing, CRO, abandoned cart recovery, etc.
Loyalty : and once the sale is made, we must continue our strategy with our own resources.
I think it is better to optimize the investment to achieve better results than to throw money away.
We can achieve the same results with a lower investment. Once we have achieved this optimization, we can gradually increase the investment, seeking that balance between advertising pressure and results.
Retargeting marketing doesn't work
Or at least not very well.
According to a study by several American universities, the difference between the income generated by impressions issued to cookies compared to those made to anonymous users is only 4% .
Beyond arguing about whether this percentage is higher or lower, I think this tells us that we are doing something wrong. If we only manage to improve our results by 4%, why so much segmentation, costs and technology?
Don't you think we could do things better? I think the potential of the tools we have at our disposal is much greater.
Incrementality , the way to check the real effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns
Proof that these low results are real is that ways have already emerged to measure the incremental effect of retargeting marketing campaigns.
I am talking to you about the concept of incrementality (I understand that this has been the methodology used in the study I mentioned earlier).
This involves comparing the results between a random control group that we did not impact, with those obtained by our retargeting campaigns (all in a scalable and automated way). You can read more here: How to check if your retargeting campaigns are effective .
Why retargeting campaigns don't work well?
The reasons may be diverse, but I think these are the main ones:
1. Impact people who would have bought anyway
Generally, these campaigns are designed with users in mind who have had behaviors close to (prior to) the purchase.
When these behaviors are too close to the moment of purchase, we are impacting people who are already convinced. Of course, we are going to get sales that we could have lost (incremental value of the campaign), but this percentage is very low as we have seen.
In my opinion, we should think of campaigns that help convince those who are not convinced. It is obvious, but seeing the type of campaigns that are being carried out, we should look for a way.
2. Omnichannel effect
Another reason why retargeting campaigns lose effectiveness is the omnichannel effect that overexposure of creatives generates sales on other websites and even on offline channels.
If we haven't bought a product on a website, it's because something has stopped us: a decision not made, shipping costs, lack of trust in the website, someone recommended another site to us, etc. There can be many reasons.