Imagine walking into a shoe shop in the high street, picking up and looking at a few pairs of shoes, before putting them down and leaving the store. Then imagine checking out a few other shops before popping into a newsagent, where you start flicking through a newspaper. As you do this, a display appears with the exact same shoes that you were interested in half an hour earlier, along with a deal attempting to lure you back to make a purchase.
That experience is pretty much analogous to personalised retargeting in the online advertising world and might explain why you might sometimes feel like those shoes or those bikes are stalking you across the web.
Brands such as Office and Halfords are amongst the first in the UK to employ this sort of retargeting technology, provided by companies such as Criteo and Struq. Take a visit to one of their websites, browse a few items and then check out thesun.co.uk and you are pretty likely to be greeted by your selected items in an ad on the side of the site. See below:
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
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Google have implemented this too.. once click on an ad that uses it and it’ll be following you around for days. It’s quit effective might I add.
I watch so many ads and look at so many products that their algorithm probably won’t work on me. What I want to see is not what I looked at and decided I don’t want, but new stuff that I didn’t look at yet (so I haven’t decided I don’t want it yet, so the ads could help me there). Where do I tick to change the stalking behaviour to this?
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Its pretty clever, I REALLY wanted a pair of boots from office but they were expensive so I was trying to persuade myself not to buy them but then almost every website I went on had an ad for them. I finally gave up and went to the website and even their actual shop to try to buy the boots but neither had my size in stock and there was no way to get them. Now those boots just follow me around the web taunting me.
Facebook mines your profile to deliver ads relevant to your location and interests. This is most noticable when you live among a relatively small population, as I do. Rather than make me want to buy the products or services, they make me angry for the sheer fkn intrusiveness of it. How to rile a GenXer. Really, they can fk off.
That’s quite ingenious in an intrusive sort of way. Shame I’ve got this program that reduces all ads to a black square with a play button on it on the off-chance I want to see whatever guff is being strewn across my screen. Better luck next time chaps…
Trader-end cyber-haggling. “To you, madam, £20. No? Alright, £15? How about £12.50?” as they follow you from shop to shop. Nightmare.
haha sarah. maybe the new ad system is evil
i think Facebook are also getting clever-clever in a similiar sense to this.
Has anyone else noticed the creepy little heading just above the ad? Not ‘Advertisement’, just above that…next to the red arrow…
I’ve already used this for clients with the likes of pixels and networks, based on users jouneys within a site you can retarget accordingly. For instance, we broadcast a generic banner for PC world, the user clicks it then visits the site and ends up venturing through to laptops, then doesn’t convert to a sale. We simply tag that each page, based on each step the user takes we then retarget. Lets say that user got up to one page before ‘buy now’ we assume the have strong intent yet need a little more so we target them on their surfing journey with laptop creative and some sort of discount.
Been going on for a while. Although stats show 25% of UK users are now deleting cookies after sessions, which this tech depends on.
oh and I meant Journies