Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

Retargeting as a concept is so counterintuitive.

User X visited your site and bounced. Now you need to show an ad to convince him to come back.

If this is a solution to visitors bouncing, this seems to be going about it incorrectly. You should give them a good reason to stay on your site in the first place. If this is a solution to visitor retention - as in people leaving because they used your site and forgot about it - then you need to provide them a reminder that you exist as well as some ongoing value proposition.

I guess if this is delivering ROI though then I'm totally wrong.

View on HN

You're not far off at all. Think about how you use the web. Right now I personally have 9 tabs open in my browser and I'm flitting from task to task. Lots and lots of people browse that way.

Imagine you have an online store or a web service. You are working hard to drive traffic to your site, but only 5-6% might be "converting" in the desired way.

There's many reasons for this including outright lack of interest.

But for many, conversion doesn't happen because the time just wasn't right, or they got distracted, or life intervened. And seeing a reminder about that service a day or two later can be enough to bringing someone back to convert, when they're ready and clear-headed.

All that said, at end of day, it comes down to ROI. And with retargeting, folks are able to spend $1 and get $8-12 in sales back from that dollar. It works, and can work really, really well.

Happy to answer any other questions you might have!

Advertising success is hugely dependent on repetition and retargeting is pretty much the perfect way to inexpensively get repeated impressions in front of a defined audience with a confirmed interest.

It's also being used for branding. You see an ad for a service or product everywhere, and you'll think they're big.

This is almost always the first reaction from customers. They love that they are able be "everywhere" for relatively little money.

There's an old saying about advertising frequency:

    The first time people look at any given ad, they don't even see it.
    The second time, they don't notice it.
    The third time, they are aware that it is there.
    The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they've seen it somewhere before.
    The fifth time, they actually read the ad.
    The sixth time they thumb their nose at it.
    The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with it.
    The eighth time, they start to think, "Here's that confounded ad again."
    The ninth time, they start to wonder if they're missing out on something.
    The tenth time, they ask their friends and neighbors if they've tried it.
    The eleventh time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
    The twelfth time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
    The thirteenth time, they start to feel the product has value.
    The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting a product exactly like this for a long time.
    The fifteenth time, they start to yearn for it because they can't afford to buy it.
    The sixteenth time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
    The seventeenth time, they make a note to buy the product.
    The eighteenth time, they curse their poverty for not allowing them to buy this terrific product.
    The nineteenth time, they count their money very carefully.
    The twentieth time prospects see the ad, they buy what is offering.

What a waste of everyone's time and money.

This could be brainwashing, but luckily we seem to have developed a sort of banner-blindness to all the visual pollution this kind of marketing had caused.

That's why Perfect Audience has invested bigtime in conversion tracking. Most ad platforms build the bare minimum product and then staff up on sales dudes. That often leaves conversion tracking in the dust.

With Perfect Audience, our customers can store user data like e-mail addresses or order data like price or ID at the time of conversion, and then browse back through that data in our dashboard to see which orders or sign-ups came from their campaigns. We even show you which ad the user clicks on or viwed.

Using tools like this, we make it easy to show how our campaigns are driving ROI and results for the advertiser. No hand-waving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com