Re-Marketing. Trend or Long-timer?

[Alex Snyder]

The next craze (past craze for some of us on DealerRefresh) is Remarketing. If you're not familiar with Re-Marketing, it is basically the practice of receiving a visitor to a online property that triggers an advertisement to show to that visitor on other online properties.

The most vocal supporter of this advertising method, in automotive, is Paul Potratz: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f40/too-much-potratz-1745.html

A lot of people are saying there isn't a future in this advertising channel because:

1. Web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE, etc) are adding more functionality for anonymous browsing and making it a default status
2. People find this "big-brothering" creepy and are opting-out of it
3. It is a deterrent for consumers to visit websites that engage in it as many people don't know how to opt-out

What are your thoughts?

 

[Billfred]

Got to say, seeing the big yellow PCG Pit Stop banner ads every other page is a little unnerving. (Nothing against Brian and his crew--don't hate the player, hate the game--but those yellow ones stick out like nobody's business.)

I'm going to wait and see on this one, as the next generation of browsers and their adoption rates (coughIEcough) should be telling.

 

[Mitch Gallant]

I think it's as good as gold. I too keep seeing those bloody yellow PCG ads EVERY-FRIGEN-WHERE.

All I can think is, damn, that's amazing - how do I get my ads in front of people like that.

It's solving the problem of knowing the audience and serving the right message. I think the pros vastly outweigh the cons. Also note that I'm currently in a honeymoon phase where I'm about to launch our very first remarketing campaign.... I'll have to see if my opinion changes.

When you're talking about advertising you need to make sure that the results are weighed not the complaints. Nothing better then someone coming in and complaining about the annoying radio spots, terrible tv commercial and now big brother banner ads... it means it worked!!

I give remarketing 4.5 giddyups out of 5 Yeeee Haaaa!

 

[joe.pistell]

IMO, it's brilliant marketing.

We all know the car shopper racks up 11 hours of internet shopping spread out over MONTHS.

Over that multi-month period, the car shopper is *everywhere on the net. What more brilliant tactic is there than serving them up reminders?

What if you had an up and the up walked. 2 weeks later while driving down the interstate a "smart billboard" saw the guy coming and served your shopper a "look at what we got" message.

Brilliant.

I don't even care about the CTR (Click Thru Rate), the impressions are the best money can buy... aka, money in the bank.


*Checking the weather
*Looking for sports scores
*reading his/her favorite hobbysites
*YouTube-ing
*FaceBook-ing
*Twitter-ing
*CraigsList browsing
*Ebay-ing
*and on and on...

Just Uncle Joe's $0.02

 

[Eley Duke]

There's no way you can have this thread without;
I am just waiting for Paul to pop-up on my TV at home one night!!

I am on the fence about Re-Marketing because it seems intrusive and too much sometimes, and I saw no return from it. We use to participate with Cobalts GM Digital Advertising Program, we got millions of impressions a month and they jumped up and down all the time telling me how great we were doing. I had people telling me they see our ad online all the time. The problem was we never saw an increase in web traffic or leads!

Cobalt could never produce any data showing me click thru rates, or when asked to produce data from any dealer that showed a % gained in web traffic, increase in leads, or any hard data attributed to the DAP program; they couldnt. We decided to run our Cobalt site in the back ground and have a Dealer.com site using PPC and SEM starting Apr 1st, so far we have seen a significant improvement in leads and we have doubled our online sales in May through just SEM and PPC campaigns! I never saw any increase in leads with re-marketing from Cobalt.

I think re-marketing has a place, and there are probably companies that can do a much better job than the $3,000 we were spending with Cobalt through GM. I would be all for it if I could see good data on it, and there be some type of filters so its not intrusive to the customer. Perhaps filters that limited the ad to appear 1x or 2x day, then pop back up 2 days later. Sorry Potratz, but seeing you 5 times a day is a bit too much! I think limiting the amount of times you ad appears gives more meaning than blasting the customer and creating a stalking effect! Thats just my own opinion.

So far for us, a good SEM and PPC plan has been a great improvement, and we are just getting cranked up! I cant say the same when we turned on the DAP with Cobalt.

 

[Mitch Gallant]

Joe I love your thinking. It's the constant reminder that puts that advertiser top of mind or at the tip of the tongue. I also think your bridge between smart billboard and digital banner ad would make a ton of sense to a dealer and is a great take away for anyone trying to pitch this or try and sell it on their boss.

I was talking to my dealer about it this morning and explaining it (including a half dozen screen grabs of pcg ads) and his retort was the same but he used the newspaper for his analogy.

 

[joe.pistell]

...Cobalt could never produce any data showing me click thru rates, or when asked to produce data from any dealer that showed a % gained in web traffic, increase in leads, or any hard data attributed to the DAP program; they couldnt. We decided to run our Cobalt site in the back ground and have a Dealer.com site using PPC and SEM starting Apr 1st, so far we have seen a significant improvement in leads and we have doubled our online sales in May through just SEM and PPC campaigns! I never saw any increase in leads with re-marketing from Cobalt.

I think re-marketing has a place, and there are probably companies that can do a much better job than the $3,000 we were spending with Cobalt through GM. I would be all for it if I could see good data on it, and there be some type of filters so its not intrusive to the customer. Perhaps filters that limited the ad to appear 1x or 2x day, then pop back up 2 days later. Sorry Potratz, but seeing you 5 times a day is a bit too much! I think limiting the amount of times you ad appears gives more meaning than blasting the customer and creating a stalking effect! Thats just my own opinion.

So far for us, a good SEM and PPC plan has been a great improvement, and we are just getting cranked up! I cant say the same when we turned on the DAP with Cobalt.

$3000...gulp? Was that annually Eley?

I'm 60 days into my remarketing.
131,749 Impressions
347 Clicks
$430.00 60 day cost

 

[joe.pistell]

I went super custom. I figured a SUV shopper wants a SUV message and a COnvertible visitor wants a convertible message... so I segmented my retargeting scripts into 9 different classes.

1. SUV
2. MiniVans
3. Trucks
4. Sedans
5. Coupes
6. HatchBacks
7. Convertibles
8. Over 30MPG
9. Under $250 per month

So, come to my site and the message that I serve to you can be more "personal".

 

[ryan.leslie]

The first time I noticed that Google was scraping my gmail account and serving up ads based on the text in my emails I was somewhere between impressed and feeling like I had stepped into the movie Minority Report, but I agree with Eley, I think this may be the marketing version of the old movie Duel where the consumer is Dennis Weaver and the advertiser is the angry trucker. It doesn't matter where I go this thing keeps trying to run me down...

YouTube - ‪Duel (1971) Theatrical Trailer‬‏

You are going to rub some folks the wrong way trying to stay top of mind.

Some questions:

If you take off your "marketer" hat and look at this strategy as a consumer, how would you feel about this level of presence from a business? How would your elderly mother that still uses a 56k modem to access aol and check her Facebook feel about it? Maybe the real question is how many impressions does it take to leave a bad impression?

As with all ads, the message is probably the only factor that determines the answer to that question.

On a hopefully humorous note, since you brought up the billboards, I would love to see this outdoor media company's strategy implemented in re-marketing. Every 10 impressions advances them to the next stage. I'd buy from that angry trucker

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I believe most know where I stand on re-targeting/re-marketing. I personally LOVE it. However, you need to approach knowing this is a top of mind branding piece but a highly targeted one.

There are a few other threads here in the forums on Display Advertising and Re-Marketing that I have commented on...

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/display-advertising-retargeting-276.html

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/banner-advertising-campaigns-650.html

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/behavioral-targeting-campaign-576.html

First Question: Trend or Long-timer?

This is nothing new, we are just hearing more and more about it as more and more real-estate becomes available and affordable. As for Long Timer, this is going to depend on what the GOV determines.

There are a few select people crying over very little. Stats show that a majority consumers don't give 2 shits about ad placement and re-marketing. Most don't even know it's happening. I'm not saying that makes it right, but what makes it wrong?

If you take off your "marketer" hat and look at this strategy as a consumer, how would you feel about this level of presence from a business? How would your elderly mother that still uses a 56k modem to access aol and check her Facebook feel about it? Maybe the real question is how many impressions does it take to leave a bad impression?

If I were on a site and didn't pull the trigger on a purchase I was considering, I don't care if they use up some advertising real-estate on sites I happen to visit later on. It's better than a more irrelevant ad was going to display anyways.

No matter what, we are going to be marketed to. If so - track my behavior, know what sites I have been on before and show me an Ad that I might actually respond to. Show me an ad to something I might actually be interested in rather some ad I could care less about. I personally welcome it.