Lightburn

Let’s face it; people rarely take action on their first visit. Now this certainly isn’t a new revelation and it certainly isn’t something that’s going to change anytime soon. To make matters worse, this is an even bigger challenge for smaller retailers and lesser know brands and businesses.

For pay-per-click advertisers, this is becoming a larger and larger problem. With the cost per click sky rocketing and competition getting more and more aggressive, the once slam dunk tactic of pay-per-click marketing is starting to loose some of it glory.

It’s widely accepted that a good conversion rate on pay-per-click advertising is somewhere around 1.5 – 2%. Historically, advertisers were happy with this and why wouldn’t they be? For just a small per/click fee they had the ability to drive a lot of traffic to their sites for very little. That was then, this is now. Over the last 24 months per click fees have gone up significantly, average order sizes have gone down and now that once acceptable conversion rate is struggling to keep up with the costs. In a nutshell those once profitable campaigns are now unprofitable. What’s an advertiser to do?

There are a lot of things advertisers can do such as improve their conversion rates, deploy complex bidding strategies, redesign landing pages, adjust pricing and on and on. These are all things that in my opinion should always be done – profitable campaign or not. However, one relatively new tactic available to both Yahoo! and Google Adwords marketers is ad re-targeting. (or in Google’s terminology remarketing).

This is an interesting new tactic that allows advertisers of all sizes to show display advertising to visitors who previously visited your website. So let’s say and advertiser had a visitor that enters a site through a PPC ad, browses around and then joins the 98% who don’t convert into an instant customer. For smaller advertisers, this would normally be the end of the road and chalked up as a cost of doing business.

Not any more. With PPC re-targeting an advertiser can now tag that visitor and begin to target them as they continue on with their internet travels.  As the once lost prospect visits their favorite news sites, blogs and other media outlets advertisers can automatically start showing them targeted coupons, promotional offers and other incentives via display ads, without even having to roll-out a traditional display media purchase. This direct targeting can certainly go along way to boosting conversion rates and making those pay-per-click ads profitable again.

The best part of this tactic is the advertiser doesn’t have to be a user of traditional display advertising. Allowing marketers focused solely on pay-per-click advertising to leverage a medium that traditionally may not be in their budget.

So if you ever feel like you’re being followed by a marketer, there’s a good chance you are.