Ads – can’t live with them, can’t live without them
I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship to ads. As a concept, I think it is great – give away some of my attention to the advertisers, get something good in return (like a good tech article). Unless you prefer to pay for every TV channel, newspaper or media website, ads are good.
The problem with ads, however, is that they quite honestly, on average, suck. Personally, I hate the laundry ads that plague our television channels the most, but there are plenty of contenders to the throne. The problem is relevance – I’m just not interested in knowing more about laundry detergents. I don’t care if I am in their target segment, or happen to be watching a TV show that they have connected to their target segment, and so brought it on myself. Being constantly annoyed by those ads is not worth the price.
The promise of personalized advertising
Let me take an example. This is Sweden’s largest daily news site, Aftonbladet.
The ad selection is just all over the place – two dating sites, some kind of premium content subscription, jobs to sell salami sausages, price-comparison sites for electricity. Who benefits from this mess? I don’t – I just find it annoying. Aftonbladet and their advertisers do not either, since I would never click these ads.
So what should Aftonbladet look like, in a perfect world? With a bit of copy-and-pasting, I give you my ideal Aftonbladet experience:
At the top – a cool dock for my smartphone, just what I have been searching for. Next to that, the just released updated Macbook Air to replace the old one I have. History books and audio books, because those are the only categories of books I buy. I might even care more for these ads than for the news on the site.
So this is all dreams, isn’t it? No. Just as we can personalize on-site merchandising based on what behavior tells us about a consumer’s tastes and interests, an ad could also be tailored to each individual viewing it. They could show only the retailers, categories, brands and products that you are interested in. They could actually become ads you would want to click.
Making this dream of relevant advertising come true is something that I and my colleagues at Avail are spending a large bulk of our time on, and I’m proud to report we are about to launch our first new solution in this space.
Relevant, respectful retargeting
Personalized retargeting, where you target people who have visited your site based on what they did on the site, is just one form of personalized advertising. There are many other use cases, making it possible even to target people who have never been to your site on a personalized level.
But it is a quick win – a significant improvement compared to the standard, unpersonalized retargeting – and so we chose to prioritize it. Personalized retargeting focuses on the on average 97% of all visits to your site that did not result in a purchase, but did leave you with enough information to tailor any subsequent ads to that person by promoting only products of interests to them. The benefit is much higher click-through rates and conversion rates (we have even seen higher average order values) compared to both generic banners and unpersonalized retargeting, resulting in a very attractive ROI.
Of course, personalized retargeting is not new. Many retailers already have pilots. But up until now, retargeting ads have been pretty stupid – i.e. irrelevant – focusing just on pushing the last products clicked, over and over again. But the last product clicked might not have been what I wanted, but what finally made me give up and leave the site. The richer the customer data you have, the more relevant you can make the ads. And when you’re already collecting and measuring every customer interaction on a site, you have a huge advantage.
Personalized retargeting campaigns have also generally been hard to control for the retailer. They have been tied into specific retargeting networks, and had limited control over how products displayed are selected. To ensure full control over their brand exposure, and the sometimes outrageous arbitrages currently collected by retargeting networks, retailers need to get back in the driver’s seat on retargeting.
And this is just the beginning of what is possible. Online advertising – including retargeting – still has a long way to go.
Show me the money
If you are interested in learning more about Avail’s new solutions for personalized retargeting, our new Managed Campaigns service makes it extremely easy and quick to get started.
Follow this link and we’ll contact you to set up a demonstration:
Request a demo.
