Search Retargeting: Effective Online Ad Prospecting

Lots of marketers are familiar with ad retargeting to promote to site visitors. They serve display ads to users based on their online behavior, with the ads seemingly following the user as he or she travels around the web. But what if you could use display ad retargeting to entice new customers who have never been to your site, using only their search keywords? And what if you could do so less expensively than a Google keyword campaign? Welcome to the world of search retargeting. A recent Marketing Profs article outlined the steps to getting started. Search retargeting serves display impressions to users based on the keywords they've typed into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines, and so is similar to the SEM paid search campaign. But search retargeting is on the rise because advertisers have discovered that they can purchase keywords at a fraction of the cost they'd pay to Google. You bid for keywords in real-time auctions in ad exchanges, where the advertisers or vendors determine how much they're willing to pay to serve impressions to specific (anonymous) individuals. The algorithms do the rest. If you sell Louboutin shoes. as an example, you target users who have searched for "Louboutin shoes." Once a user performs that search and travels to the site of a publisher that's participating in your ad exchange, your creative will appear as long as you've placed the winning bid for that impression. And you often place the winning bid because you know the impression's hidden value. Once your campaign is up and running, a search retargeting vendor will monitor the behaviors of the clicks and conversions, so make sure you set up benchmarks for your sales funnel. As conversions roll in, don't rest on your laurels; use a good DSP to uncover new keywords to target based on patterns revealed by your existing campaign, a process known as look-a-like targeting, For more about search retargeting, see the article at http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/24094/search-retargeting-a-quick-how-to-guide