I’ve been staring at the blank page for a few minutes now, because I didn’t quite know where to start this blogpost. Should I explain the benefits of remarketing and why it is such an important part of the customer journey in some businesses? Should I go with a disclaimer telling you why I mix up and use retargeting and remarketing synonymously? Or should I just dive right in and write about the technical backgrounds?
This topic is huge, maybe even bigger than it deserves to be.
Which is why I decided to start with telling you about the customer journey I experienced today – with me being the customer. My husband and I are just about to celebrate ten years of being together. At one of our first dates, we were meeting at mine for dinner and netflix, I made a big pasta bake. That day, I had a miniscule cold, though, and my taste wasn’t quite on point.
So this damn pasta bake was salty. Really salty. Saltier than anything I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. Problem is, I’ve only really tasted it the next day when my runny nose finally got better and my taste went back to normal. Fabi, the real gentleman he was, had eaten 2 plates full of what felt like plain salt with a bit of pasta the day before. He still married me a couple years later, but he never stopped joking about this pasta evening – and he’s been the one who did the cooking ever since.
And because cooking is more fun with the right utensils, he’s been thinking about buying new pans, Stur cast-iron pans, specifically. He wanted these because they come pre-seasoned, and still he never bought them because you don’t just randomly spend 400 bucks on two pans. They do make the perfect “thank you for politely eating my salty-shit-food ten years ago and cooking for me every single day without fail ever since”-gift, though.
Which is why I bought them this morning.
The order went smoothly, just as you’d expect with a Shopify Shop, the confirmation e-mail I got at 8:55 in the morning was one of the cutest I’ve ever gotten, and overall I was really happy with the purchase, not knowing what was yet to come.
Then I opened Instagram and the wildest remarketing ride of all times started:
I left the timestamps in and, yes, my phone indeed was glued to my hand today. Don’t judge.
Why Ad-Campaigns need proper targeting exclusions
At that point, I’m just insanely annoyed by seeing these Ads over and over and over again and I would probably cancel the order if it wasn’t a present. So I keep waiting for the pans to be shipped and write a non-comprehensive list of reasons why you should consider targeting exclusions in your Ad Campaigns:
- You’re annoying your users
- Which, in return, might hurt your brand
- You’re spending too much money on ads
Are “Wear-Out”-Effects a real thing?
What I’m describing by “annoying your users”, is officially known as “Wear Out Effect” in Marketing. The Wear-Out-Theory has been around since the 1960s already and it’s been confirmed as well as refuted by various studies and experts in the field.
Based on experience, not only in my own customer journeys and browsing behaviour, but also in ad campaigns I managed, I can tell that there is actually a Wear-Out-Effect and Ads can have a negative impact if you overdo it.
Why am I assuming that you’re spending too much money on ads if you don’t use buyer’s exclusions in your targeting?
When discussing targeting exclusions with industry friends or customers, one argument always comes up: “What about up- and cross-sells?”. And honestly, fair point. There are cases where upsell- and cross-sell-campaigns work pretty well and I personally really like them myself.
But.
They have to be well thought through and realistically timed.
You could also do retargeting campaigns with informational content around the product the user just bought, especially if there are cool tips and tricks around the product. Stur, in order to stick with my pan example, could have shown me some videos explaining how to use the cast iron pans to make things non-stick. Or some recipe videos. Or a tutorial on how to care for the pan. This probably wouldn’t have prompted an upsell either, but it would’ve had a nice effect on the brand, if done right.
By “done right” I mean:
- Don’t send informational / how-to-content-ads before the product had a chance to arrive. Sprinkle them in at a very low frequency once the product is there in order to plant some inspiration and accelerate the hype and urge to start using the product.
- Start with upsell / cross-sell-ads once the user had a chance to thoroughly try and love the product. Or, in case of consumables, once the product might empty up. This way, you got a way more realistic chance to sell.
Remarketing-Audiences, Exclusions and what Cookies and Apples and Foxes have to do with that
Traditionally, Custom Audiences used for targeting, remarketing and exclusions are Cookie-Based. You visit a website, you catch a cookie, you fall into a remarketing list, you’ll be getting ads (or being excluded, depending on how the list is used).
With Apple’s ITP & ATT, Firefox’s Privacy Initiatives, Cookie Restrictions and Privacy Laws, Cookie-Based Audience Lists got increasingly worse over the last 6-8 years and as of today, it’s pretty hard to get a good remarketing setup solely based on Cookie-Audiences, which is why a lot of advertisers fall back on Custom Audience Uploads & Customer Match.
With Customer Match, you basically upload a list of SHA-256-Hashed User Data, including E-Mails, Phone Numbers and possibly even home addresses. Google, Facebook (& others) can use this data to identify the users beyond cookies and you’ll be able to retarget or exclude them properly.
Technically, that’s pretty easy. But:
Are Customer Match, Audience Lists and PII Upload allowed and legal, from a privacy perspective?
Surprisingly, you can do whatever Audience Upload you want to do, if you get the users’ consent for that. Most advertisers I know just put the option in their consent banner and roll with it.
You should check with your data protection officer, though.
And what are we thinking from an ethical point of view?
Welp. I’m not a big fan of my personal data being passed to Google, Meta etc., but I think ultimately, every business owner and advertiser has to make their own decision about that – and most advertisers I know already give the data away with advanced matching, enhanced conversions and alike.
Ad Platforms pretty much have been pressuring for PII for the last 5 years now, so most businesses gave in at some point in the past. Can as well use the data properly and on our terms, if we’re already passing it anyways for tracking, right?
I’ll be talking about privacy and the legal and moral perspective of passing PII to ad platforms at this year’s SMX – so maybe we can catch up there in detail? 🙂
Audiences & Exclusions in ASC Campaigns
We’ve been talking about technical limitations on the privacy-side. There’s one more thing we need to talk about, though: Technical limitations on platform-level.
With ad-platforms striving for more and more control and developing their campaigns and formats accordingly, we as advertisers are increasingly more limited when it comes to properly target, retarget or exclude a specific group of users, following the trend of “targeting by creative”.
And, don’t get me wrong, modern campaign formats are not always that bad. There might be cases where a ASC+ is the best choice. But even though I’d love to see them keep their promises and work just as well as the Platforms claim them to (campaign management would be so much easier if Meta just always hit the spot), experience shows we’re not quite there yet and more often than not the classic setups with the well-known “old” campaign types lead to way better results.
Control isn’t always that bad.
So… I desperately want to try these pans now.
I’m kind of a big procrastinator when it comes to writing blog posts and I always take breaks and scroll Insta for a while. Today, every single time I opened the App, I got another Stur Ad that reminded me of what I’m supposed to do right now.
Therefore you could say that the massive amount of retargeting ads I got today was a good thing, after all.
I’ll turn off my phone now and go on a little digital detox for the rest of the weekend – and I’m really excited to see if our new pans live up to the high expectations I have after seeing what feels like 138 Insta-Ads in a row and browsing their YouTube Channel and the Affiliate-Blog the founders first started with before developing the product. If you’re into cooking, you should really check these out, you’ll find some amazing content up there.
And who knows, if the lionsmane-steaks Derek Sarno from the Wicked Kitchen has on his YouTube channel (first thing I want to try, because you need two cast-iron pans for that, which is just the amount of cast-iron pans we’ll have available next week 🙂 ) is working out and not sticking to the pan, I’ll probably even forget about the wild Ad-Ride we shared today.
Keeping you posted 🙂