Are online advertisements following you around?

Remarketing is probably responsible for the spooky way advertisements for things you have been looking at keep appearing wherever you go on the web.

Look at some options for holidays for example - flights, car hire, hotels - and the chances are that next time you browse online, advertisements for these specific services are shown to you. Not just generic content but flights to the particular airport you were researching. They are probably there due to Google Dynamic Remarketing which allows advertisers to slew their advertising dollars to find people who have already visited your web site and in effect put their hand up that they are in the market for your products or services. I  worked for a company where the financial director was fond of the quotation attributed to a John Wanamaker - "Half the money I  spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I  don't know which half." Dynamic Remarketing takes the guessing out by providing templates to show advertisements to people who already have been to your web site. So you slew advertising dollars to people who know you, have looked at your products, but may not have taken the desired step of actually buying the stuff. Or they may be existing customers who have consumed the product they bought from you before and are ready to buy a replacement.

Of course for b-2-b marketers, customers of high ticket items, or items of major capital investment may only have a need or indeed funding for a major piece of kit once every few years. The engineers who specified the original equipment may have moved on, or even retired when it comes to replacing major plant after say ten years. And of course unless your marketing communications has kept in touch with the company in the intervening years, your brand might no longer have any top of the mind awareness amongst the new specifying team. Remarketing could be used to keep the brand in front of them.

However the ethics of remarking have been called into question along with privacy issues that seem to allow advertisers to stalk prospects by kind of following them around the Internet. Individuals can tighten up their privacy settings and not accept cookies, but few actually bother. Then of course there is the subliminal effect of frequently being exposed to personally targeted messages - a technique not allowed in advertising. Your mind clocks all these ads and contributes to building top of the mind awareness for the brand.