Cookies are used by Online Retailers for all types of Tracking

Online consumers have become increasingly smart and increasingly picky about the products they research and buy online. Most customers will spend a significant amount of time researching products before they make a purchase, and many customers are open to using different websites to make their purchases if they see a better deal. The challenge for retailers is how to target their advertising to the customers who are most likely to make purchases from that retailer. That’s where our technology comes in – by using behavioral targeting and retargeting to put your site in front of the consumers who are most likely to buy.

Behavioral targeting can be used in numerous ways to give visitors to any site a personalized and relevant experience. We use cookies as a way to collect information about users without requiring the user to input information and without accessing any private information. Cookies are used by all kinds of websites for many reasons- such as tracking session information, maintaining site preferences, and keeping items in online shopping carts. Information contained in cookies does not identify the individual user, so you can be sure that your customer’s privacy is maintained, an important consideration for many users.

Imagine being able to release a television ad that was only seen by people wanting to by your product, right when they wanted to buy it. That is exactly the concept of behavioral targeting. When a customer visits your website, information about the things they have been shopping for is automatically collected in the form of cookies. That information is used to help load advertisements that relate to those items, turning a browser into a buyer by giving them the information they are looking for when they are looking for it. There are a number of ways that we can get your message in front of the right customers using behavioral targeting. For example, say that a potential customer visits the manufacturer’s site for a particular brand of small kitchen appliance. Gourmet Ads can track this visit, and then display an advertisement featuring that product on your website. Thus increasing the likelihood the consumer will purchase the product.

The problem with most traditional methods of advertising (say television or radio) is that they are essentially a guessing game, throwing your ad in front of visitors and hoping that they will connect the dots offline. Using technologies like behavioral targeted (also retargeting and sequential advertising) is the best way of making your advertising dollars work. Essentially, you are improving the odds that the people who see your advertisement are interested in buying your product. Behavioral targeting can be used not only to display certain advertisements at certain times, but also to offer specials and savings to customers who are likely to take advantage of those offers. For example, if a customer is searching through several sites looking for the best deal on a new mixer, offering free shipping or pointing out your rebate offer on new mixers can provide a significant benefit to your customer as well as increasing sales.

Cookies are the backbone of Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting

The combination of behavioral targeting and an ad campaign designed to turn shoppers into buyers can make your advertising dollars go farther. Gourmet Ads helps retailers market to the right customers at the right time by designing ad campaigns designed to make the shopping experience as personalized as possible. Cookies are the backbone of Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting.

Cookies and Online Retailers is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

I want to share a strategy which we developed for a client who advertised every other month on Gourmet Ads last year. This client wanted Gourmet Ads to develop ideas for a yearlong campaign in 2010 which would be booked in addition to the other booked branding campaigns throughout the year. Most important to her was that whatever we did it had to be targeted to reach possible consumers of her product.

What we developed was rather simple and just a few weeks into the campaign is already proving fruitful and driving sales and subscriptions. Although this client is in the food industry, the same strategy we developed could easily be applied to any industry.

So what was the all year campaign that we developed? Well it’s basically a Retargeting which uses a variety of creative to drive people back to her site depending on pre determined trigger points. In fact we plan to change the creative every couple of weeks.

The client added JavaScript to their site late last year, which meant they starting dropping cookies in the lead up to Christmas when their site had increased traffic. Now any people that visited our client’s site and didn’t make a purchase or signup to their newsletter is targeted for the year long campaign. Effectively we’re bringing back people that have already visited their website, who in theory are more likely to convert than first time visitors.

To even refine the targeting further we’re also time day parting the campaign as purchasers are more likely to purchase on weekdays from 10am through to 10pm at night. So the ads will only be displayed during these times. Once again we’re drilling down the targeting for ROI purposes.

This is an ideal strategy for any sort of company whose goal is customer acquisition or online sales. We would of course suggest that you also run far reaching branding campaigns to drive additional traffic. These could be short run campaigns or around key dates in the year.

Yearlong Campaign is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Have you developed a Retargeting Strategy for your Brand’s Website ?

We recently wrote a blog on Search Retargeting and how you use the search engines to find relevant users for your products then using display advertising via Retargeting them with highly related advertising. Since the Search Retargeting blog, we’ve had a great deal of enquiry asking about developing a client’s Retargeting Strategy to help generate a high return on investment for your online campaigns.

If you’re selling products online, the most important thing is for you to develop some sort of Retargeting Strategy. The sooner you start serving cookies, the sooner you can start retargeting and generating sales.

So first off what is retargeting?
Retargeting is tactic used by online advertisers who target previous website visitors and serve them an advertisement encouraging them to revisit the site and complete a purchase. With a developed Retargeting Strategy, the advertisements which get served could be via a roadblock or sequential targeting and can offer the user a range of advertising messages in order to complete the sale. This is done by dropping a cookie on the user’s machine depending on behaviour targeting criteria which we’ll go into detail further.

Why would I want to use retargeting?
There is no doubt that consumers do a great deal of research online before making a purchase and for products with long purchasing cycles retargeting is a strategy to keep your brand or website top of mind with your target audience. Often when a user starts off researching a product to buy they will visit a wide range of sites looking for information on the product. At this time if you drop a cookie with some information on their behavior you can target this later in the purchasing cycle.

Who do you target?
There are few options to consider.

1. Everyone – you should begin immediately gathering data on who visits your site, particularly if you’re a smaller or niche ecommerce site. You can target these users with branding campaigns in the future.
2. People who look at particular products. I’d personally mark any user that looks at a high margin product. It’s no good marking low margin products because you’ll eliminate the margin with the advertising cost. Just stick to high margin products. These sorts of people can be targeted with product specific advertising, drawing them back to the site in the future.
3. People that don’t complete the shopping cart. These types of people are obviously ready to buy, but there was something in the way that stopped the transaction. It’s usually either comes down to price or shipping costs. If you can eliminate an obstacle and bring people back to complete their shopping cart with 20% off your order if you buy today or free shipping then your conversion rate increases and you get the sale.
4. People that signup for a member or newsletter but don’t purchase. They are obviously interested in your products, but are not ready to buy. Could these people benefit from offering them a free catalogue or a discount coupon in order to buy?

What are some of the offers or messaging I could retarget my audience with?
Anything really, the ideas are endless. The key is running different retargeting creative which appeals to that audience demographic. Some ideas on retargeting campaigns could include;

• 24 hour sale (everything reduced)
• Discount Code or Coupon Code
• Specific discount on a particular product
• Become a member and get a catalogue or white paper
• Signup to the Newsletter

Where would the Retargeting Campaign run?
The campaign would be run back in the Gourmet Ads network traffic pool. Our systems will start locating your retargeting cookies the moment they leave your site. So if a user has had a cookie dropped on your site, then visits a site within our network, they’ll see retargeting campaigns straight away.

Re-Reach your Audience with a defined Retargeting Strategy

With a proper retargeting strategy, you can expose that consumer to specific ads as they surf and shop outside the walls of your site. For products with a longer purchase cycle, a Retargeting Strategy can leverage Sequential Advertising to reinforce your message as the consumer goes through the research and consideration process prior to completing a purchase.

Retargeting Strategy is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.