Editorial Articles

Personalised retargeting is the new kid on the online block. Targeted banner ads – underpinned by anonymous user data through cookies – is 40 times more effective than other online display ads, and is creating a ‘third way’ of reaching consumers, with a combination of traditional push and pull marketing techniques.

Stop Pushing!
As the web continues to favour personalisation and individual choice advertisers are fast learning that their customers want a more ‘real’ web; one that listens to and appreciates who they are and is authentic in its offering.

Even now, web analytics show that a staggering 90% to 95% of people still leave e-commerce websites without making a purchase, equating to billions of pounds in lost revenue for retailers.

However a revolution in online marketing is causing a stir and helping advertisers to continue the dialogue with customers beyond their own website. Personalised retargeting is an anonymous cookie-driven service whereby ads are dynamically created and personalised for each customer based on the products they have viewed or purchased. This may be in the form of complementary products to those purchased or incentives to encourage purchase of products viewed. The consumer is offered relevant and timely advertising which is equally proving to be a powerful tool for advertisers, increasing online conversion rates and sales.

The importance of understanding ‘who I am and what I want’, and the tailoring of the advertising experience to reflect that in real-time, is what we call ‘scalable personalised retargeting’. We work with an advertiser’s data to understand each individual customer’s interaction with their products and services. To give people what they want, advertisers need understand what motivates them, what they’re looking for, and how to convert those needs into sales. Ads are then produced dynamically with a multitude of executions available. And, like search, all this is underpinned and optimised with hard performance-based metrics. Results show that this technique drives click-through and conversion-to-sale rates that are significantly higher than the industry average.

Personalised retargeting creates a curious yet effective hybrid between traditional ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing models. While the Internet has been responsible for a drift from traditional push (the ‘here’s our product, now buy it’ approach) to pull (where consumers assume control for allowing brands to approach them), personalised retargeting provides the best of both worlds. It allows retailers to reach a highly qualified audience with a one-to-one product communication relevant to that individual consumer. The consumer being targeted is already interested in finding products they want online at potentially discounted prices.

There are other factors intrinsic to personalised retargeting that are piquing the interest of the online retail community. Advertisers are now able to optimise their creative around click-through rates and other performance-based metrics. If one piece of creative is proving unsuccessful it can be dropped altogether, and more successful pieces pushed to the fore. With such a huge array of factors and data sources combining to produce the right creative at the right time, we could quite easily get to the point where one million customers will see one million different banners.

In an age when consumers are bombarded with marketing messages at every turn and are increasingly becoming savvy to the old standalone models of push and pull marketing, the value of personalised retargeting is evident for both sides.

The future of online display is about predicting intent through real-time data management and optimisation, while delivering a personalised message to each and every consumer relevant to your brand. That future is here now, and is being delivered by a clever combination of push and pull marketing.

Michael Steckler
Managing Director, Criteo UK