We’ve always been big believers that paid search coupled with a right display campaign makes sense for most brands, but just recently have we been able to add even more relevance to our client’s digital strategies thanks to search retargeting.
Until now, paid search has always been a pull medium with unknown amounts of inventory. The amount you get is dependent on the amount of times searchers hit the search button — which is currently around 530M times a day. This seems like a lot of inventory, but advertisers want more. Because of the consistently high ROI that paid search delivers, a lot of brands have allocated more and more of their budgets to it over the years. And even though this is good news for the medium, several industries are seeing a rise in rates to record highs — posing an uphill battle in continuing to achieve effective ROI metrics.
Behold…
Access to more scale is now available with search retargeting. Here’s how it works. I like to think of it like a boomerang.
A searcher types something into a search engine, but then they get distracted or they aren’t happy with the search results and walk away. A day or so later, that same person receives a display ad that is directly related to what they’ve recently searched for. In other words, it takes a qualified lead based on real and recent consumer intents, and gives your brand another chance to get in front of that person moving them along the purchase funnel. They threw something out there with search, and a relevant offer or product came back around to them through display – like a boomerang.
Even cooler are the different ways to target based on the search query data. You can target by keyword, topic or category. Location targeting is also an option. And frequency capping is another important consideration.
We’ve now met with over 10 ad networks that offer searching retargeting based on search queries from Google, Yahoo! or Bing. And as we introduce more clients to this product offering, we hope to have more success stories to share. There are endless opportunities for targeting scenarios and compelling creative! More boomerangs to come.
