The Retargeting Illusion

We know that optimizing for business outcomes reduces exposure to simple click bots, but it doesn't mean your campaign is immune to fraud. In a chase for platform attributed ROAS, the biggest mistake you can make is over-allocating budget to retargeting.

People in performance marketing thought it'd be a good idea to target people who've visited the brand's website because those users have shown interest in the brand and are more likely to purchase. It plays out in ad platforms with retargeting seemingly driving lower costs per sale and higher ROAS. In theory it makes sense to give these higher interest users a marketing push to drive the sale.

The first problem is that the tactic is overused because of how attractive the metrics look and then users feel creeped out by ads following them around the internet. Besides it's overuse, the second problem is that retargeting is a favorite money-maker for bots. Bots that get paid for loading ads can simply visit the brands website and then visit MFA sites to load ads and cash out. The bot makers will earn higher CPMs by having their bot included in the retargeting audience because advertisers are willing to pay more for an audience that they think with convert better. You can see below the relative quality of retargeting campaigns for these 2 advertisers with more than 50% bots.

The third problem is that even if the retargeting campaign has sales or leads attributed to the campaign, that might have happened anyway because those users were already interested in the brand/product. Performance marketing and retargeting in particular is great at taking credit for sales that were driven by less attributable channels like TV or Out of Home or those that were driven organically. It's easy to attribute sales to retargeting because it's often the last click before purchase.

Challenge this. You can run a simple experiment -- turn off retargeting campaigns for a week and see if there's any change in sales, leads, business outcomes, etc. Is retargeting driving sales above and beyond what would have happened anyway?

The worst thing you can do is assume everything is fine and that your campaigns are not affected by fraud. Advanced marketers challenge assumptions, carefully review analytics, run experiments and use holdout groups to prove incrementality of their campaigns.

FouAnalytics on-site measurement can help by measuring the sources of the traffic that visit your site and monitoring clicks, mouse movements and touches to ensure your retargeting audiences are human. In-ad measurement can help detect bots who are simply loading the ads to get paid high CPMs. The tags only take a few minutes to install on your site or in your ads (within the DSP and/or ad server). If you want to "see fou yourself" whether your campaigns are impacted, I'm happy to offer you a trial of the platform.