Don’t Be an Adhole: Remarketing Tips

A study done by Hans-Bernd Brosius and Christina Peter talks about selective exposure as such: “[…]people choose certain types of media content and avoid other types.” Do you know what this means? No? I’ll get back to that later.

Let’s make an example for the sake of keeping things simple. I was leaving for a workshop the other day – in a town called Fredrikstad. It’s quite far away from Oslo, so my superior booked me a rental car. I visited multiple sites, and ended up on a certain rental car service. Booked the car, and got it the other day.

Several days passed, and I found myself in a situation I guess many have been before me. Being on the internet became a hassle. Everywhere I went – I was stalked by rental car ads. Now, If I hadn’t booked the car or finished the booking process altogether, I’d that they are retargeting me. But guys – come on! It’s been days! I’m done with the car!

Let me ask you – have you ever found your Facebook News Feed, and every website you visit literally trying to force you to book a hotelroom after visiting a travel related website?

Remarketing can be a fantastic tool to re-engage potential customers and turn them to paying customers. But you have to tread very carefully. This is where selective exposure comes in. If you push irrelevant messages in front of people – for instance, pushing a product I have purchased to me, over and over again – I’ll selectively hide your ad.

What this means to you, is that I’ll opt-out from viewing your post. I’m basically telling Facebook I’m not interested in viewing content from you. If it turns out many of your ads is irrelevant to me, and I opt out from seeing them – I might even opt out from ever seeing anything from you again.

But at the end – setting up remarketing campaigns can be hard. You have to track pixels, create content and make sure they’re set to send traffic to the right place. I don’t blame you. But please, try to comprehend how your ads and the frequency of your ads is perceived. This is how you can avoid being an adhole:

Simply treat your audiences differently. On one side you have the ones that visit your website but never completes a purchase, and then you have the ones that actually did. Now, why would you expose the latter group with the same ad? Simply exclude the people who have performed a purchase from the first remarketing campaign! If you’re clever enough, you can upsell to the latter group with something that might be relevant to what they purchased. Perhaps camera lenses to the ones that bought a camera from you?

At 24SevenSocial, we’ve developed an awesome tool we like to call “Cruise Control”. What this does is to allow you to set if-and-or parameters to your ad, so IF your ad is shown more than twice to your audience, it will be turned off. I can already hear the sound of rejoyce from webshop visitors.