How Do People Feel About Retargeting? | Hacker News Reader

How Do People Feel About Retargeting?

blog.buysellads.com

27 pointsjaybol18 comments

One thing I haven't seen mentioned about retargeting is that it can also keep potential customers from seeing competitors' ads for a few days after visiting your site.

that's a good point and an interesting way to look at it - anti-up on your retargeting spend to help block out competitors. i wonder if the re-targeting networks have a way for advertisers to mark competitors and then bid against them?

Not quite keep customers from seeing ANY competitor ads. The amount of inventory that retargeting networks can bid on or buy from is limited so not all ad spaces that a potential customer sees are available to bid on. Also doesn't make sense for most networks to do so if they are getting paid on a CPC or CPA basis and buying on a CPM (as most do).

in theory i don't have a problem with these minority report scenarios. i do think at some point advertisers need to stop thinking with their proverbial dicks and start thinking about dinner and chocolates. there's a reason i didn't get that leather jacket, just like there's a reason you're not getting laid on the first date. continuing to ask me won't help.

"Fetchback, a retargeting ad platform claims that 2010 Valentines Day advertisers received a 600% or higher return on investment. They also claim that, in general, retargeting can perform 74% better than a standard pay-per-click campaign."

Seems like it works better. I agree that the probability of you buying a jacket given that you visited the website and didn't buy is lower than the probability of you buying a jacket given that you visited the website (sorry that's a mouthful). But the probability of you buying the jacket given that you visited the website and didn't buy is higher than the probability of you buying the jacket given that you didn't visit the website.

TL;DR: P(buying|visited the website and didn't buy) > P(buying)

haha, yes, agreed. no doubt the % return is higher than pitching me a product i've never seen.

my point is more along the lines of, i'd like to see ads serve me a little better rather than serve the advertiser. the priorities are advertiser > site > buyer. should be opposite.

I think most if not all of the time they are serving you the best possible ad they can come up with.

re-targeting probably works better in the scenario where you have an impending date for purchase (Valentine's Day gift/card)... so knowing holidays and the SO's bday, wedding date, etc, would be extremely powerful for re-targeting.

ad network guy here...

Yes, with retargeting you hit a lot of people that aren't interested in the product, but you also hit a lot of people that are lukewarm to warm leads. We're talking about the difference between, say, .05% CTR running ads in a content category versus .1%+ with retargeting across ad exchanges.

Specifics vary between advertisers: try visiting Shopify and you're going to see their ads 10x+ per day every day for a month... but less aggressive retargeting frequency (1-3x/day) is used all the time.

There's an old advertising maxim that a potential customer needs to see an ad 7 times (or 3 times) before acting on it, but it seems to be only weakly supported by statistics. Maybe it's just something they say to get you to buy more advertising, but it does seem to make sense that repetition would increase the effectiveness of your advertising (remember the Head-On commercials? apply directly to the forehead!).

I don't really care about retargeting in the current sense, but I would advise BuySellAds to PLEASE proofread what you post. Many typographical errors to be found on that page.

Also, what's the deal with that stock images that doesn't add anything but noise?

I have done some fairly extensive work building out a retargeting platform for the BI Engineering department that I currently work in. At times, it feels very sleazy to be tracking the user behavior without their knowledge in order to show them Ads which they are more likely to click.

I think the main question is, does the retargeting deliver any value to the user besides subliminally convincing them to go back to whence they came. I think it is possible to improve a user's experience with retargeting, especially if content is involved. Sometimes people get fixated on Advertising when discussing the concept of retargeting, but it is a concept that can be leveraged in many different ways.

For instance, if a given site knows that a user has been visiting the manufacturer websites for different types of laptops in the recent past, I believe it improves the user experience to personalize the content on your site automatically with articles on the best laptop manufacturers, the top 10 laptops on the market right now, etc. This can be done through the same retargeting that is used to decide which Ad to show to a user.

In the case of advertising, if a user is being retargeted, I also believe that it is helpful to that user if the Ad they are shown involves some type of discount or special offer. Yes, the end goal is to incentivize the user even further to move from the consideration phase to the purchasing phase by clicking on the Ad, but at least they will be saving some money when purchasing something they most likely were planning on purchasing at some point in time anyways.

In general, I think the question is around the added value to the user. If seeing a relevant Ad, possibly with an additional discount or coupon, helps the user make a decision, I don't see any problem with that.

A lot of the outcry reminds me of when Gmail first announced that they would serve ads based on the content of your e-mail. A lot of people freaked out at first but these days few care.

Once people understand what's going on I don't think it will be a big deal. The technology has always been there, it's just recently it's been widely adopted enough to be noticeable.

One of the disadvantages of traditional ad media is the lack of a negative feedback mechanism to the advertiser from the consumer. This wastes advertiser money and consumer time and goodwill. But with the web, there's no excuse not to have this.

In a recent example, Yahoo News has been displaying an ad for Allstate Insurance containing lots of motion. Once or twice, fine. But after dozens of times, it's sufficiently far into the realm of irritating that I'm writing this comment. I should be able to right-click on the ad and indicate I never want to see it again. Presumably that's something the advertiser would want to know, and I want to tell them.

I don't use ad blockers. I'd rather not and I shouldn't have to. Web marketers, please fix this.

Interactive Advertising? The problem is, people generally don't want ads, so you're looking at a largely negative feedback base.

How do you sort the signal from the noise?

The signal is weak but extremely detectable.

It's exactly like the signal for a positive response; in general, click through rates for various things are around one or two tenths of a percent. If Ad A is getting a tenth of a percent and Ad B is getting two tenths of a percent, Ad B is clearly way better.

If 99.5% of people give negative feedback for Ad A, and 99.8% of people give negative feedback for Ad B, then Ad A is clearly way better.

It's funny that while I was reading about users feeling "stalked," the social media box on the left was creepily following me up and down the page as I scrolled.

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