I started making a living in web marketing when AOL still had a little sway. Of our partners, I am not the oldest. We make a sincere effort to stay at least a bit cutting edge, but it’s fair to say that we are well seasoned. From among a handful of people, we’ve seen many hundreds of sales and marketing innovations claiming to deliver the best thing since direct mail.

As a result, we tend to be a bit jaded. Our business really is our clients. It would be foolish to risk hard earned relationships by bringing them new ideas or technologies that we hadn’t played with ourselves. So, we did with retargeting what we always do; quick and dirty testing on one of our smaller sites. Then we ran retargeting campaigns on a few bigger websites, in different verticals, and with both direct sales and lead generation as the goals. After a number of months of unequivocal successes, we all sat down and talked about how genuinely shocked we all were.

You can read for yourself in previous posts about the hard to believe numbers, and why we genuinely think you are throwing away money if you aren’t retargeting your previous web visitors. We added it to our suite of services and thought it would be a “no-brainer”. A few months in we were all talking about how our slam dunk to make our clients more money was becoming really hard to sell.

Therein lay our genuine puzzlement. We really don’t sell. We are an ROI driven web marketing company that selectively uses different approaches and technologies based on our clients’ needs. We aren’t beholden to any, just generating a return on the investment our client makes in us. As a result, we don’t generally “sell” a particular software or tactic. We recommend options.

We were all convinced that retargeting would work for virtually all of our clients. But when we ran into consistent objections with clients that we’d had for over a decade, and we knew trusted us, we were perplexed. Some of these clients had even become our friends. They always trust us, so what is different with retargeting?

When one of the most zen of my partners said to me privately that he just wanted to grab his friend by the lapels and say “you gotta do this”, I decided to put in some thought on the question I initially posed here; “Again….why aren’t you doing retargeting”. This is the best I have so far.

The answers to that question have obviously varied from client to client. However, they were unusually vague across the board. They seem to fall into one of two general groups; retargeting is overly intrusive/aggressive, or the numbers don’t make sense.

Is Retargeting Overly Aggressive?

We obviously don’t think so. But I have considered that the easiest way to explain retargeting to the uninitiated is to say something like, “we put a tracker on everyone who comes to your web site, then we follow them around the web and pop up your ads when they visit other sites that sell ad space”. That can sound a little creepy.

We came at it from the other direction when we started playing with retargeting. Our clients collectively spend millions of dollars annually generating new traffic to “feed” their sales, lead or PR engines online. Even the most basic tracking can tell you where those customers came from (the referring URL). As web marketers, we always wanted to know why they didn’t buy, and where they went after was a bonus. Retargeting allows us the opportunity to answer those questions.

The absolute best sites can convert 5%, with most converting tenths and hundredths of one percent. We have always focused on conversion. The ability to reach out to people who had essentially prequalified by visiting a client web site is amazing to us. Take for example a law firm or plastic surgery practice. Their websites have to be all about image, credibility, and trust. Long on information and easy on the marketing. But we could market differently to them when they were on social media and google after visiting our clients’ sites.

Nevertheless, in vertical after vertical, our clients were hesitant. “Image”, “privacy”, and “intrusive” were the words most often used. It has taken some time, but coming to it from the consumer’s perspective has allowed us to make some headway. We simply point out that everyone knows that we are tracked. It’s in the user agreement on every app and social media web site we register with. We also point out that no matter what, you are going to get marketed to constantly online. Why not us? Especially if we do it carefully and intelligently.

Any marketing can be intrusive and annoying. Sometimes purposefully so. Privacy is indeed an issue that businesses should take seriously, but this really isn’t about that. While we thought the Orwellian objections to how the web works had subsided a decade ago, it seems that retargeting has been drudging up issues long dormant.

Are the numbers getting in the way?

We initially expected that our clients buying traffic to sell products direct would be the earliest adopters. We have helped many to hone their pitch and site to a point where we know that $X Thousands of Google ad buys equals $X in sales. These are numbers people who spend thousands buying traffic to test products and messages on a weekly basis. When we move them from1% to 1.2% conversion, we are heroes.

We were more shocked that many of these folks didn’t even want to run retargeting tests. So, we leaned in on the numbers. Our initial blog posts and conversations with clients were numbers intensive. They generally went something like this;

• You are buying 1,000,000 impressions a week
• Conversion is running in the .01% range, delivering 100 visitors
• Google is charging you $1,000 for those 100
• You know you are converting 5 of those people on-site
• You are making money now at a client acquisition cost of $200
• Our retargeting tests are showing conversion rates of about 5%
• That would mean 1,000,000 retargeting impressions would deliver 50,000 visitors
• If on-site sales conversion rate was just the same, client acquisition cost would be in the $2.50 range.

We initially thought it was an easy concept, especially for “numbers people”. That wasn’t the case. Were the numbers just too crazy good? Did we sound like the people who we always rolled our eyes at? Did it sound like we were saying that retargeting was the best thing in marketing since direct mail?

What we are coming to realize is that the overall hesitation with retargeting seems to come from a confluence of these two primary objections. When retargeting first started taking hold, the early adopters were indeed the “numbers people”. They went out and bought retargeting impressions like they did normal ones. And they still do.

The problem is what happens when your site has 1,000 unique visitors a day and you try to buy 1,000,000 retargeting impressions. Google and their advertising competitors will find a way to spend your ad dollars. NOW you are annoying and intrusive and can hurt your band.

We’ve all had that experience when you look at something randomly online, and for the next week it’s like that product follows you everywhere. That is almost always very badly implemented retargeting. Unless you have a pop-up restaurant or going out of business sale this weekend only, that kind of in-your-face marketing is annoying and rarely effective.

We’ve learned over time how to better explain retargeting. Clients are also understandably receptive to the idea that you don’t want to spend nearly as much on retargeting impressions as you would straight traffic. Like most things in business, successful retargeting campaigns take work and thought to be successful. We remain convinced that it can be a huge opportunity for most web marketing efforts. Unfortunately, challenges persist because there’s always going to be those outliers who use retargeting like a flame thrower and make it harder on us all.