Is Remarketing a Great Advertising Strategy or is it Considered Stalking or “Big Brother” Watching?

Has this ever happened to you? While online you start shopping around for a particular shirt, you click around on a few websites and find the perfect shirt, but for whatever reason you decide not to purchase at that time. A few moments later you go and check up on your Facebook activity and you notice, either in the timeline or on the right hand side, there is an advertisement for the EXACT shirt that you were just shopping for. Or, you decide to actually get some work done and login to your online email account and the same shirt is staring you right in the face!

If you are an avid user of the internet, I’m pretty confident that this has happened to you. Do you consider this stalking, or maybe even having big brother watching your activity? The fact is that the number of advertisers utilizing this marketing strategy is growing rapidly. The reason is very simple, the advertiser now has a way to know what product you showed interest in and can now follow your daily activities and constantly show you the product. Overall from the advertiser side, the cost of this advertising is lower than other methods and the cost per acquisition is higher, so why wouldn’t all advertisers utilize it?

But the bigger question is how do you feel about it? As the consumer, are you happy that the ads being displayed to you are very relevant, or are you turned off that big brother is watching? I’m not claiming to have an answer for this, but I do know that remarketing and retargeting are here to stay. Our agency, Vertical Marketing Group, is suggesting and implementing remarketing with the large majority of our clients. We are seeing remarketing campaign on the display network saw click costs 60% lower than the average of all the regular search campaigns (not including remarketing for search). As click costs were so much lower, the CPA was also lower, around 80% lower, and the conversion rate was 132% higher for the remarketing campaign. Not one of our clients have complained about spending less money while getting more sales!

So the question still stands, as a consumer are you comfortable with remarketing? Feel free to share your thoughts here, or email them to: team@myverticalmarketing.com. We look forward to hearing from you!