Google AdWords introducing “Remarketing”
Today we welcome a guest post from Thomas Holtz.
Google has just rolled out a new AdWords feature called Remarketing. It is a modification of the AdSense model which so far couldn’t even get close to the traffic quality of the search engine. But now, that might change somewhat.
Remarketing provides a second chance for advertisers to reach someone who clicked on an ad and didn’t convert. During the first visit, they failed to convince a prospect to buy, but remarketing ads will be shown on content networks sites that they subsequently visit, allowing the advertiser to offer additional incentives or reinforce a message.
Until now ads being shown on AdSense participating sites were picked based on the page content and the matching advertiser keywords. Remarketing breaks with this tradition, adding in consideration for advertisers that have already received a click.
For Google this might greatly increase the net worth of the AdSense traffic. Or it might be Pandora’s box, because the downside if it feels to consumers a bit like stalking, or if the remarketing clicks are expensive and still don’t convert. You can already read words like “creepy” in the forum comments. It might even be abused for pranks. A link that someone points out as funny, might in fact redirect you to a shop for, well, for example adult products. And even if you’re really not interested, the shop’s ads would follow you to almost any site that you visit from now on. Try explaining that to your spouse.
So we will have to see if the new feature is a blessing or a curse for Google’s AdSense traffic. The risk seems to be small for advertisers to try retargeting, as long as they’re not too obviously “stalking” or providing inappropriate landing pages.
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Thomas Holz is the owner of ITSTH and author of the Outlook duplicate removal software 1-Click Duplicate Delete for Outlook.
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April 5th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I strongly suspect that advertisers won’t run into stalking problems or that users will see that much abuse. There are two reasons: first, content ads typically enjoy low visbility and very low CTR, so remarketing is unlikely to evoke a large amount of attention and clicks. Second, there is no guarantee that the ad will be shown on subsequent visits to content sites; you’ll still be competing with all other advertisers, and each ad view is still not “free” in the same sense that regular views aren’t.