Retargeting

Gone Wrong

Retargeting is the panacea to all problems of the online marketing world, it’s the ultimate answer to cart abandonment and the absolute formula for getting customers back to buy what they strayed away from.

But unfortunately, there’s another side of the coin. And the dark side is, retargeting doesn’t work all the time, in fact, sometimes it does the exact opposite. Here are a few examples of how retargeting can go grossly wrong, some pitfalls you might want to avoid with your retargeting.

Retargeting can actually annoy your customers

More than what marketers feel about retargeting, the question is, how do customers feel about retargeting. According to a survey conducted by InSkin Media, the more consumers are exposed to advertisements of a particular product, the more strongly they despise the brand. And by over exposing customers to the ads, negative impact becomes far greater than the positive impact.

Retargeting is intrusion of privacy

Case in point, Gina a college student, who became pregnant and was looking for pregnancy related information on the internet, was shocked when her parents discovered about her pregnancy because of retargeting ads. Similarly, Tim’s family discovered his not-so-popular sexual orientation due to retargeting ads.

Retargeting can sometimes be based on partial truth

Case in point, Sara, a who works as a researcher, was surfing the Internet for cancer hospitals and treatments available in US. Since Sara was concentrating on pediatric cancer, her research involved around the subject. Sara was taken aback by cancer hospital ads that were crafted around emotionally creating a connect with a parent who’s child has cancer. Most ads were worded around the lines, “…your child has cancer…”, with pictures of cancer struck bald children. The whole experience was very upsetting for Sara.

TLDR

Should companies stop retargeting? No. Not, at all. All said, retargeting still remains a great tool for keen online marketers who have reaped the benefits of retargeting. But companies that opt for retargeting, need to have either a very sophisticated algorithm to pick up genuine interested-prospects from general surfers, or it needs to have some kind of a permission clause that allows companies to see the line between personalization and cyber-stalking.