Advanced Retargeting Balancing the art and science of online sales conversions

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1 Contents Intro...2 Multi-Network Solution Advantages...3 The Dynamics of Dynamic Messaging...4 Relationship Building...6 Increasing Engagement...6 Measuring Attribution Beyond Clicks...8 Optimization - Don t Just Set It and Forget It...10 Contact...12 Advanced Retargeting Balancing the art and science of online sales conversions 2011 Fetchback, Inc.

2 Display campaigns and retargeting efforts to reclaim lost customers, although each occur in similar online environments, are two fundamentally different strategies. Interactive marketing professionals who understand retargeting complexities, and skillfully apply and measure them, are most likely to achieve their true value. Some [marketers] simply repeat print media practices online when they really need to take advantage of targeting opportunities to nurture leads throughout the buying process. Retargeting is the method of putting the right messages in front of prospects who have left a website and bringing them back to finish a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or whatever call to action is desired. This process is sometimes referred to as remarketing. Forrester Research confirms display marketing is part of most B2B interactive marketers plans, but few are prepared to unlock its full potential. Some simply repeat print media practices online when they really need to take advantage of targeting opportunities to nurture leads throughout the buying process. (Forrester Research, Making Online Display Marketing Work For B2B, Michael Greene, March 2011) When running a display campaign to drive new prospects to your site you have a massive pool of people to choose from. Retargeting is quite a different animal. Having only so many unique prospects to address makes retargeting most analogous to marketing consumers have expressed interest by providing you their addresses or, in retargeting s case, have expressed interest by visiting your website. You only have so many good addresses to market to, and only so many prospects who have visited your site. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 2

3 You wouldn t take that list and send the exact same message to someone who hasn t been exposed to your brand or expressed interest. You also wouldn t use multiple management solutions to send unknown numbers of s to people that say the exact same thing. Not only would your conversion rates be horrible, but you would overextend your welcome and likely alienate prospects. If it doesn t make sense to use just one message in an campaign, it doesn t make sense in a retargeting campaign either. Yet we see plenty of marketers doing exactly that by: Using their same display ad messages in an attempt to recapture prospects. Creative that is not specific for its audience is less effective. Purchasing ads through multiple networks or Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) in hope of increasing reach and conversions. This eliminates any possible frequency cap causing consumers to receive far more ads than necessary, potentially driving them away from your offer. Implementing click-based offers which on the surface seem attractive but underneath create incentive for providers to send as many messages as possible to generate clicks. If your provider was driven on a model of providing you clicks, how many messages do you think they would send? The emergence of multi-network specialists for retargeting seeks to solve two primary issues: making retargeting easier for marketers by blending the best of creative and technology advances, and making it more effective via targeted messaging, continuous optimization, and adhering to ad frequency caps. When not using a multi-network specialist it is advisable to limit your number of networks, DSPs or exchanges to one. Otherwise you risk turning off consumers with oversaturated ads. Running direct retargeting campaigns can be effective but will not maximize results. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 3

4 We re experienced with all types of media groupsallowing us to evaluate, buy and measure media across the spectrum, while giving you a single pricing plan for a custom campaign that reaches the majority of your lost prospects. Multi-Network Solution Advantages Managing ad frequency is critical to successful retargeting campaigns. While delivering too many ads to your target audience can create a strong backlash, running too few limits your profitability. Multi-network solutions including FetchBack are designed to help marketers navigate this delicate balance and maximize online advertising efforts. In a multi-network campaign model a single ad server manages multiple traffic sources, ensuring frequency control and delivery of unique sales messages that have the highest probability of returning prospects to your offer and converting them to customers. Providers who can authentically deliver your dynamic ads with unique messages for each lost prospect must support you with a single-server framework. If you purchase retargeting from multiple providers, prospects will receive multiple messages making it impossible to deliver sequential ad campaigns where messages change each time the ad is delivered. The variety and personalized aspects of sequential campaigns are powerful tactics you should not operate without. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 4

5 More than 100 analytic points help us transform ad units into powerful, precise content. The Dynamics Of Dynamic Messaging Additional research from Forrester suggests marketers can significantly improve the scope and effectiveness of their remarketing efforts by taking advantage of additional digital touch points, employing segmentation strategies, and aligning creative with these segments. (Forrester Research, Remarketing Done Right, Joanna O Connell, March 2011) Retargeting positions marketers to realize the great promise of online advertising: moving away from mass advertising that is limited by generic messages, to messages that are unique for each individual prospect. Dynamic ads, however, are not merely a creative art. There is an exact science to making them work. Among their key components are analytics to help identify a prospect s interests and search or browsing patterns so unique messages can be created and served on appropriate websites; optimization of hundreds of ever-changing data points including search/ ad algorithms and frequency caps; actionable data for tuning messages onthe-fly to increase conversion probability, and a multi-network technology framework to manage all these moving parts effectively. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 5

6 Dynamic messaging further enables targeted marketing techniques that can better reach the true prospects for your product or service and, when Similarly, affinity ads narrow down the related products that can be chosen by a recommendation engine based on specific criteria. For example, when a Philadelphia Eagles football fan visits the team s section on NFL.com ads for Eagles products will be weighted heavier for him or her during future site visits. And there s the classic example of shopping cart abandonment. Showing consumers well-crafted ads that remind them of products left in their cart have a measurable magnetism that can bring them back to fulfill the sale of that item and/or peripheral products. As you can see, none of these techniques can be supported with a onemessage-fits-all retargeting approach. Relationship Building When retargeting is done right it moves marketers beyond merely targeted ads that score first conversions. Too often, marketers assume that once prospects convert they should limit the forms of marketing to perhaps just from that point on. But retargeting is about building relationships over time with your lost prospects and existing customers. Gently reminding them during the holiday season with creative display ads based on their past purchases can be magical for seasonal revenue boosts. And you need not be concerned with appearing creepy to your prospects and customers with such highly targeted ads in this digital age. Many consumers frankly would like to see more marketers using technology in this way to eliminate irrelevant messages and surface the content and products they actually want to consider purchasing. By implementing a retargeting approach you re appealing to their best interests. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 6

7 *Source: Advertising Age, What s the Best Strategy for Targeting your Display Ads April 3, 2011 Increasing Engagement Retargeting campaigns motivate consumers to engage deeper with brands, leading to longer-term conversion success. Retargeting technology combined with effective creative goes beyond clicks to get consumers hooked on or endeared to the brands they are engaged with. Increased revenue is usually not far behind. We spend a lot of time examining how retargeting impacts online retailers, but what about those who sell offline but have an online presence? How can they implement and manage retargeting programs? Engagement can mean something different to each marketer. Retargeting can greatly affect website engagement of both online and offline sellers across multiple measurements including: the quantity of visits to a site or specific web pages, reducing the time between visits to those sites (and in-store visits/purchases for the offline retailer), and total time spent and number of page views when visiting a site. We recommend that offline retailers seeking to implement advanced retargeting use A/B message testing to gauge the lift rates of their specific engagement tactics, because ad engagement is a success metric of both online and offline purchases. Our own A/B reporting tool has shown that consumers receiving FetchBack retargeted ads return to clients websites sooner, more frequently and engage more often with the websites than those who did not receive retargeted ads. Running A/B tests as often as every month will typically show brand engagement increases, and when they do not test data helps isolate which elements of an offer need adjustment or which offers can justifiably be eliminated in favor of funding new content. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 7

8 A/B testing is a proven means to determine just how effective your retargeting campaign is at producing incremental conversions or increased engagement and is a valuable tool to increase conversion rates across all your campaigns. Measuring Attribution Beyond Clicks Retargeting can have a large impact on your marketing budget, but not if you look only at clicks. Too many marketing professionals remain enamored with click metrics, mainly due to their simplicity. How many people clicked on our ad and our call to action? How many clicks can we report to executive management to justify our programs? Measuring clicks is outdated thinking clicks are misleading because they typically do not single out which marketing tool was most influential at making the sale. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 8

9 Only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks. Focusing on the click ignores the 84% of internet users who never click and the 90+% of site visitors who were exposed to ads that had a role in creating a site visit but did not click. Advertisers need to move away from this metric and start measuring the success of a campaign against its actual objectives. Attributing which offers and which sites actually help you convert prospects into customers with those offers is the ideal state marketers should be seeking. Doing so will benefit everyone in the industry: marketers themselves, the vendors and ad networks that help deliver their messages, and consumers who are served with an appropriate frequency of messages they naturally confirm are comfortable to them. Attribution does not need to remain an unsolved mystery. A/B reporting tools demonstrate how other factors besides clicks significantly influence consumer behavior. Consider view-thru metrics. When a consumer searches Google for a product or service and clicks on it from that search, that last Google click gets all the credit. What is often forgotten is how the consumer was influenced in the first place. Due to this last-click attribution model, Google and other search engines grab a larger portion of the pie than deserved. Prospects may see repeated targeted ads for a specific product over a period of time, but when they decide it s time to check them out they may search for the products using Google as a navigation tool. Sophisticated attribution tools can prove how these customers were originally influenced and assign credit where credit is really due. Marketers can begin to see which direct marketing campaigns perform best when advanced attribution tools are implemented, and can shift significant portions of their budgets accordingly. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 9

10 Some may be too focused on the acquisition of new visitors and customers and not be spending adequate time on prospects who are already in the pipeline or are existing customers. Proper attribution tools indicate where overspending on new customer acquisitions occurs and shows where to refocus these dollars. Often, shifting part of the budget into customer retention will boost sales, or less-expensive campaigns can deliver more conversions and lower costper-acquisition. But if you cannot track and verify these instances you are wasting money and not even sure where. Retargeting rapidly delivers ROI via recouped budget, although some heavy lifting may initially be required. What is often forgotten is how the consumer was influenced in the first place. Implementing attribution tools can be complicated and is not a minor investment. Marketers seeking to make the case to their executives are encouraged to access a review of an anonymous set of data from a provider of attribution management tools for proof points. ClearSaleing is one such tool. Endeavor to create a short list of retargeting analytics vendors who could help you so you have this on hand when executive interest peaks. Optimization Don t Just Set It And Forget It The majority of retargeting done today is limited to the same display ads with not near enough attention paid to developing unique messages for specific prospects or frequency caps a set it and forget it approach. Marketers minds are ingrained with reliable differentiation elements for their marketing campaigns, and this discipline must also apply to retargeting. Advanced retargeting means you can determine how long to retarget someone after they leave your site. A multi-network specialist can obtain and examine analytics to assess the average amount of time that passes before particular types of customers convert. Likewise an ideal frequency can be assigned within the boundaries of various network and DSP frequency caps. Again, A/B testing is a most valuable tool for marketers across various retargeting disciplines. Multiple campaigns with different messages for selling the same product should be compared so lower performing versions can be altered, or eliminated to free up budget so other aspects of your program can be optimized. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 10

11 Working effectively with ad networks, DSPs and exchanges on your company s or client s behalf is a key ingredient for retargeting success. Each traffic source can work differently for each of your campaigns. Your ads need to be managed with expertise from ad development through placement and analysis; Networks, DSPs and exchanges simply do not offer this. Advanced retargeting is complex and typically not left to marketers or agencies alone. Partnering with specialized multi-network vendors who can manage many different data points to optimize retargeting campaigns is suggested for consideration. Choose wisely. Test often. And optimize. Partnering means advertisers no longer need to deal with the complexities of planning and managing multiple traffic sources, networks, exchanges or publishers on their own. Nor do they need to decipher multiple reports to evaluate campaign success. Likewise, agencies supporting a significant portion of a client s marketing can package and tackle several critical services on the client s behalf through partnering. A retargeting vendor staffed with online advertising, creative design and technology professionals provides the knowledge required and often the multi-network platform required to get retargeting right. Whichever path you choose remember: Most online transactions require multiple impressions before the buyer will act, which is why retargeting is so effective. Engaging creative is at the heart of every advertising campaign especially when uniquely targeted for each prospect and is just as important to driving conversions as ad placement and frequency. Since ads stay visible to prospects even after they have left your site, retargeting campaigns can produce a stream of return visits and attributable revenue that would have otherwise been lost; producing exponential return on investment. Retargeting requires balancing the art and science of online sales conversion and it pays off. By merging creative design, marketing expertise and analytics you can identify and affect a profitable increase in online conversions. Choose wisely. Test often. And optimize. Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 11

12 About FetchBack FetchBack is a fully-managed ad retargeting company that merges art and science to help advertisers reclaim lost customers online and extend brand awareness. Companies that use FetchBack are able to successfully reconnect with customers who have left their website without making a purchase (or other call to action) through the placement of effective, customized advertisements on other sites. FetchBack is not a DSP or Ad Network, but has unlimited reach working with these exchanges and publishers on its clients behalf to provide expert media buying. FetchBack s industry-leading retargeting and analytics technologies use more than 100 data points to optimize online advertising campaigns and maximize their influence to convert browsers to buyers. FetchBack works with more than 700 active advertisers and is recognized as a retargeting pioneer that continually creates innovations that advance the industry FIDO.411 Advanced Retargeting - Balancing the Art and Science of Online Sales Conversions Page 12