How can a business accurately quantify the effect that their efforts have on consumer awareness? In most cases you simply hope that all of the dollars you spend on marketing and advertising show tangible effects on sales or on some other meaningful call to action. However, through our Retargeting efforts, we can accurately pinpoint how much more valuable a consumer is that has shopped your site and seen your products versus someone who has never run across your business. The results can sometimes be startling.

Several months ago we began a campaign dedicated to serving banner ads on general real estate sites with the goal to drive traffic for our builders and convert home shoppers into new home shoppers.  The results were fair, with click thru rates marginally above the industry average (.20%, or 2 clicks/1,000 impressions).

However, as the campaign progressed and we became more in tune with the ins and outs of Retargeting, we came across something interesting. Simply sending banner ads to websites that may be in your line of business may drive large volume in terms of impressions, but it may not be the best way to go about things. The real value comes when your banners follow those consumers who have shopped your site and THEN go to visit other sites.

For example, our real estate campaign received an impressive amount of volume from Homes.com, but we saw low performance in terms of click-through’s and consumer action.  The click-through rate hovered around a .10% and did not merit additional dollars towards this website. However, when we had users who had already shopped our site and were then retargeted on Homes.com, we saw an incredible lift in performance. In the month of October, our Retargeted users are more than 10 times more likely to click one of our banners than a new consumer would on the same website. We saw an even more extreme example on Hotpads.com, a highly valued partner in our Vertical Ad Network. Historically our campaign dedicated to getting new traffic on this site averaged a .20CTR. In the month of October, our pool of Retargeted users is averaging a 2.79CTR. 10X that of our regular campaign and 27 times the industry average!

From all of this, we can deduce that while a traditional campaign dedicated to new users certainly has merit, performance will not be as strong as it could be when targeted to pre-existing users. It’s obvious that in the world of online banner ads, there’s no better resource for your business than the people who have already shopped your site and are familiar with your product and brand.

Jaime Lintner, BDX Ad Ops Assistant, helps manages over 30 million ad impressions per month across a network of real estate websites for hundreds of homebuilders. For more information about advertising on the BDX websites and our network of affiliates, email info@thebdx or contact your local sales rep.