At the time, of course, few online marketers even understood search retargeting, let alone used it. Yet, as word of its power spread, more and more users adopted it until there was a stampede of ad networks and DSPs eager to include search retargeting among their offerings.

There’s nothing new about this. It’s what business gurus call the “law of comparative advantage” — as soon as someone sets up a profitable lemonade stand, another person sets up another across the street offering a different flavor, followed by yet another contender offering snacks, and so on.

Keyword-Level Search Retargeting Vs. Keyword-Only Segments

Unfortunately, just as in our lemonade stand analogy, these new converts were not actually mirroring the original tool. Instead of practicing true keyword-level search retargeting, most were employing keyword-only data sets packaged into traditional audience segments. Legacy companies that already had revenues in the display business went to their data brokers and asked for audience segments built exclusively from searched keywords from their publisher network.

As a result of these keyword-only audience segments, one of the most effective behavioral targeting solutions in recent history — capable of generating significant performance lift for direct response and branding campaigns alike — became awash in misunderstandings.

Many of the marketers who’ve tried what they believe to be search retargeting are underwhelmed and cynical about its reach because they haven’t been exposed to a technology that views and manages keywords as they were intended. They have not leveraged keywords the way search marketers always have — one keyword at a time at the keyword level.

Collective misperceptions aside, the truth is that search retargeting can deliver unparalleled precision and insight.

Read the full article on Search Engine Land here

While highly successful, search does have some significant limitations. Limited frequency is one issue, in that advertisers only have the opportunity to communicate with prospects at the time of their search. Another issue is search’s limited effectiveness as a branding tool, as search ads consist of several lines of text, mostly without graphics or animation.

This is where display advertising enters with its broad reach, high frequency and wide-ranging graphical capabilities. Exchange-traded display, real-time bidding , demand-side platforms and the like have the potential to combine the effectiveness of search with the reach and brand impact of display. But display still has a long way to catch up with search in terms of advertiser spend.

So what lessons can display advertisers learn from search to become effective and attract more budget? Here’s a look at a few of the most important lessons.

Read the full article on AdExchanger here

Karen Eoff, Director of Sales, Southwest

1. What is your favorite drink? Bud light with a little bit of olive juice and 2 olives (TexasMartini) 
2. When was the last time you laughed uncontrollably? All the time with my daughter, she is ridiculous!
3. If you were a food what kind of food would you be? Parfait, because parfait has layers (in Donkey’s voice)
4. Do you believe in magic? Only when it does not effect me! I ain’t mess’n with that 
5. Biggest fear? Sharks, I do not swim in the ocean because of sharks!
6. What is your favorite band, or who is your favorite musician? My favorite musician is P!nk and I absolutely luv her husband Carey Hart! My favorite band would have to be Bon Jovi, even though I usually skip over their songs on my iPhone, I can’t hit the notes
7. Anything else we should know about you? I luv movies.  My favorite movies are with car chases and shoot um ups! I can watch Bad Boys II over and over again! I enjoy camping with my friends, but I will not rough it.  Has to be in RV will full hook ups.

About Karen: Karen graduated from the University of Phoenix with a BS in Marketing.  She has a 16 year old daughter who will soon be starting her senior year of high school. Karen loves to travel and is a total tourist.  She will search out every touristy thing to do wherever she visits from Codzilla in Boston, MA to Map of the Stars in Hollywood, CA. Karen loves spending time at the beach but has never surfed and will not swim in the ocean, because there are sharks out there! She is a California girl that enjoys everything that comes along with living in California, including the happy cows!

Jae Scarborough, Director of Sales, Southeast

1. What is your favorite drink? Atlanta’s own Coca-Cola (with a lil bourbon) or Chick-Fil-A Cookies & Cream Ice Dream Shake.
2. When was the last time you laughed uncontrollably? Last night when I negotiated bedtime with a 3 year old.
3. If you were a food what kind of food would you be? Sweet potato pie.
4. Do you believe in magic? Yes, I saw him on ESPN last week, but Jordan’s still the greatest.
5. Biggest fear? That I’m capable of more than I think I am.
6. What is your favorite band, or who is your favorite musician? Tie between Outkast, Cee-lo and Frank Sinatra – weren’t expecting that last one huh?
7. Anything else we should know about you? - I double as the Cookie Monster (personally – see pic) and now professionally (Simpli.fi).

About Jae: Jae Scarborough has worked in interactive media and digital advertising since 2005 and possesses a unique perspective of digital advertising and its immediate and long-term impact. He’s had the good fortune of working with local growing, thriving brands and agencies as well as some of the top and most internationally known firms. Jae graduated in 2003 from the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelors of Business Administration where he majored in Marketing. He has remained active with the University through its Alumni association and board. In addition to his work with Notre Dame, he also volunteers with Atlanta’s chapter of “A Better Chance” and his former youth track team. He is married to his best friend of 17 years, Jessica Cooke Scarborough, and is a busy father to their 3-year old daughter, Rikki Joelle. He describes himself as one of the coolest nerds / geeks you’ll ever meet, who is loyal, fun, and positive, yet analytical and focused on results. Results that empower. 

Maris Emanuel, Director of Sales, Midwest

Given this audacious goal, small businesses can be forgiven for thinking that “Big Data” is relegated to, well, “Big” companies. But it isn’t. The fact is that the ability to extract powerful insights from your own data and from 3rd party data – be it for audience building, behavior targeting, or real-time offer management – holds incredible potential for your display advertising campaigns. These insights can be realized and made actionable regardless of the size of your organization. The question ultimately is how to manage these large amounts of data effectively.

We speak often to the benefits of unstructured data and what the term means. Well, what does it mean? Unstructured data is data that is in its organic form, not grouped together with other like data elements. Data for data’s sake. Leaving data in this form allows you to derive real value from it. Treating each piece of data as its own individual element valuable on it’s own. For example, you may notice that users are clicking on your sunglasses display ad when you target them after viewing pages containing the keyword “designer sunglasses” but are not converting when you target them after viewing pages containing the keyword “prescription sunglasses”. In seeing these pages and conversions at the keyword level you can adjust your bid up for “designer sunglasses” and down (or completely remove the keyword) for the keyword “perscription sunglasses” – allocating dollars where they count. On the flip side, if this keyword or page data was grouped together into a segment you’d see nothing but the conversion rate for the group of keywords as a whole. Seems a bit off doesn’t it?  Our philosophy is simple – it makes a lot more sense to run campaigns target a set of behaviors while maintaining transparency into the volume, pricing, and performance of each individual behavior and/or site where the behavior is measured. This enables more spend to be allocated to the best performing behaviors for better ROI and better performance.

Here are some ways our clients use unstructured data for targeting on our platform:

• Keyword Level Search Retargeting – Search retargeting where keywords are not grouped into segments, but instead targeted at the individual keyword level. Campaigns can target over 100K individual keywords and maintain bidding, reporting, and optimizing at the keyword level for optimum performance.
• Keyword Contextual Targeting – Create custom contextual categories defined by the keywords that are meaningful to your campaign. Bid, report and optimize at the keyword level based on which pages contain which keyword.
• Element Level Site Retargeting – Instead of grouping visitors to a site into just a few audience segments, ads are targeted based on the individual incoming, or referring search terms, individual pages visited, and/or the products that have been put into shopping carts.
• Element Level Behavioral Targeting – Campaigns target a set of behaviors while maintaining transparency into the volume, pricing, and performance of each individual behavior and/or site where the behavior is measured. This enables more spend to be allocated to the best performing behaviors.

Use data in its purest, unstructured form to inform your campaigns. Don’t accept less. Aggressively measure your existing display advertising campaigns through metrics that are meaningful to your goals. Work with a data management platform that gives you transparent access to your own data and lets you see it at granular levels to inform your campaigns. If you want to learn more, contact us.

The focus of the panel was data firms that don’t just create more data, but more data insights or business intelligence, rather than getting caught up in the bells and whistles of measurement systems, whether an analytics package or data from ad management, other paid media, or earned media. Unfortunately for many businesses, the process of adding meaningful insights often falls by the wayside. The panel explored questions around balancing insight with data management process to extract true and actionable business intelligence. Panelists debated strategies for big data, small data, and everything between.

Some of the more interesting points covered by the panel were:

• Whatever it is that you’re doing – the next iteration of your next marketing efforts is to make it smarter. Turn insight into foresight – leverage data to inform tactics and strategy.
• 10/90 rule – invest 10% in data and tools and 90% in the people to analyze data. Everyone heard of this rule, not many doing this.
• Data gives opportunity to get rid of silos and use data available across other mediums, for example keywords from search marketing for use in display or Facebook. Use the data to grow and optimize other media.
• When asked what some of the wrong metrics the panels sees being tracked Dave Zinman spoke to attribution and the wrong attribution models employed currently.
• What engagement metrics matter? Frost Prioleau, Simpli.fi CEO, spoke to CPA and conversions over CTR.
• Data sets being obfuscated by new browsers or search engines and always changing moving parts – how do we adapt? Predict behavior and better understand the intent of the audience coming to your site.
• Understanding why someone coming to your site and what their intent is in that moment is fundamental to conversion rate, response to pages and serving relevant ads

Follow any of the panelists or the moderator on Twitter:

Simpli.fi CEO: Frost Prioleau: @phrossed

Infolinks CEO: Dave Zinman @davebehappy

Moderator: Rob Garner – @robgarner

As an online marketer you may have seen the phrases “search retargeting” and “site retargeting” bandied about quite often. If you’re more toward the expert side of the spectrum when it comes to digital marketing then you are probably well versed in exactly what these phrases mean. But if this is your first foray into digital marketing or display advertising, you may think these terms to be interchangeable – but they are not. Let’s compare them to see how they are different.

Search Retargeting

Search retargeting essentially enables you to target individuals, based on the searches they perform across major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo & Bing. You can target users based on keywords that you deem important or relevant to your campaign.

Now because the same keyword may be relevant to many different types of businesses (e.g., the word “coffee” would be applicable to both restaurants and cafes, but it would also be relevant to fair trade practices in Latin America), the person doing the search could be searching for another type of business than the one you have. Keep their intent mind when doing this type of retargeting as you don’t want to flood non-interested searchers with advertisements or special offers. Thus comes in the importance of being able to see performance on a keyword level. Using a DSP that offers the ability to look at each keyword to see performance on an individual level quickly allows the restaurant to see that the keyword “coffee”, although a relevant keyword, doesn’t perform as well for them as the keyword “to go food” for example. The restaurant can now allocate budget to “to go food” and away from “coffee” to maximize ROI.

Site Retargeting

Site retargeting  (also referred to just as retargeting) allows you to target individuals who have already visited your website. This is a critical distinction, because in essence, whereas you are targeting potential customers with search retargeting – site retargeting allows you to target users who already know about you.  After the user leaves your site without converting (buying, filling out a contact form etc.) they can be targeted with your advertisement as they search other places and navigate the web. Some of the most common campaign types we see on the Simpli.fi platform are:

- Landing page retargeting

- Category site retargeting

- Product level site retargeting

- Cart abandonment

- Affinity retargeting

- Loyalty campaigns

These targeting options are powerful on their own, but even more powerful when used in conjunction. Shoot us an email at hi@simpli.fi to get more info or start the conversation about a campaign that fits your needs.

Mandy Kleinhans 

1. How many 5 year olds could you take in a fight? Who has time to fight?  If I had to though, I could probably take on 4 at a time, one for each limb.  Kick, kick, slap, slap. 
2. Celebrity you love to hate? That Guy Fieri, dude from Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. I don’t know if it’s his hair, the way he devours food, or personality is more annoying.
3. You’re on a desert island and you can bring 3 items, what are they? I’ll go ahead and consider my dogs as items and take both of them and a knife.
4. Biggest accomplishment? As Drake says … “started from the bottom now I’m here.”
5. What’s your super power? I’ve got pretty dang good intuition.
6. If you were a car what kind of car would you be? A Smart Car because I don’t have any room for baggage.
7. Anything else we should know about you? Dare I say, I’m addicted to sugar free Rockstar and Freebird’s burritos – An extremely healthy combo, I know.

About Mandy: She graduated from Texas Tech with a BA in Electronic Media and Communications and comes from an extremely artsy family.  Both of her parents were high school teachers and she actually had both of them during her school years (which, as you can imagine, was totally embarrassing at that age.)  After graduating college, she lived and worked in San Antonio for a year before moving to Dallas, which is where she plans to stay, although Austin, Texas will always have her heart.  

Jeff Callison

The good news? It doesn’t have to be this hard. An evolving market has far more benefits than disadvantages, if only you know how to wrangle them. Personalization is just one example of this, especially within site retargeting.

Before you scratch your head and think that personalization is already in full force within site retargeting, take a step back and let me explain. I’ll walk you through the evolution, current landscape, and actionable steps you can take to truly weave personalization into your site retargeting for unmatched ROI and impact.

Understand The Evolution

Site retargeting is a powerful idea that began as something really elementary. Initially, the process went like this:

Buyer visits site. Buyer leaves. Buyer is served a relevant ad.

Simple. Basic. Effective. Of course, we quickly realized that this powerhouse needed to be let loose — cue, audience segmentation on the website. The next stage of the process went like this:

Buyer visits site. Buyer’s behavior on site is collected, including categories searched, products viewed, cart abandonment, etc. Buyer is bucketed into a segment with other buyers of similar actions. Buyer is served ads based on the bucket he/she was relegated to.

At this stage, site retargeting basically evolved from serving the same ad to everyone in the ocean to segregating the audience into smaller ponds. It made some sense, but we knew that more could be done. So, we began tapping even further into the world of personalization, and the process evolved to look like this:

Buyer visits site. Buyer is segmented into a bucket of like-buyers. Buyer is served personalized creative based on product(s) viewed, recommended products, product interaction, etc.

With this latest evolution, creative aspects were tailored to fit specific visitors’ behaviors — to very successful ends, I might add. The shortcoming? For most companies, personalization stopped there. The site retargeting train was making serious progress, but those segmented buckets we talked about earlier slammed on the brakes — hard.

If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know that I’m a fan of unstructured data rather than segmented data. Personalization of creative is great, but there’s a huge opportunity to take it even further by treating each individual visitor as a “segment of one,” thus ensuring that bidding and optimization decisions are also personalized. And — you guessed it — that means looking at and using raw, unstructured data rather than their bucketed cousins.

Read the full story here on Marketing Land

Advertisers need to find ways to tame the chaos and deliver maximum performance on their advertising campaigns. Many see unstructured data as a chaotic addition to their advertising mix, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to use the powerhouse of unstructured data to transform your chaos into unmatched performance.

Nix Pre-Packaged Segments & Embrace Unstructured Data

If you’re using a Demand Side Platform or other targeting platform, you are most likely targeting based on pre-packaged data segments. That’s the way most platforms work, and they’re rife with the same data that everyone else uses. This can significantly undermine your campaign performance. With segment-level data, performance is averaged across the highest and lowest performing elements of the audience segment, with limited ability to understand which elements are working and why.

When you run campaigns powered by unstructured data – something I’m a believer in – you’ll not only improve performance but also get a clear view into which data elements are successful and which aren’t.

Read the full article on Search Engine Land

The cost per click (CPC) delivered through search engine marketing becomes more costly compared with search retargeting, especially in high-value verticals like personal finance. CPCs for search marketing on finance savings came in at $5.24 vs. search retargeting at $2.03; loan rates, $5.30 vs. $2.65; investing, $6.62 vs. $1.87; mortgage lenders, $7.77 vs. $2.46; and retirement planning, $18 vs. $2.13, respectively.

A study by Simpli.fi laid out a side-by-side comparison of the cost per click of keywords in high demand among search marketing and search retargeting by industry.

The differences in the cost for search engine marketing and search retargeting were enormous, with car donation at $80.32 vs. $2.48; car donations, $78.11 vs. $2.70; donations, $7.38 vs. $1.11; donate, $12.84 vs. $1.23; and donate auto, $85.61 vs. $5.81, respectively.

Read the full article here