Avoid These Five Online Advertising No-No’s

In today’s world, you don’t have to go to Hollywood to be a star. All you need is a YouTube account, and of course, something interesting to share.

You don’t need to be a director to make a movie. You don’t need to be a newscaster to deliver news. And you don’t need to be a stock broker to trade on the stock market.

With today’s technology, anyone can do anything, and that includes online advertising. What used to be the exclusive purview of advertising companies can now be done by anyone. You simply decide what platform you want to use, and then sign up. More and more businesses are going it alone in what seems to be an under-the-radar trend.

But the tools making the world more accessible are also making it more dangerous. If you play the stock market without knowing what you’re doing, you could end up broke. Online advertising is definitely something you don’t want to do on a whim.

Here are five simple mistakes that can cause big problems:

1. Not Understanding or Noticing Location Options

If you have ever seen an ad on Google that had nothing to do with your location, it was probably a result of the campaign manager not using targeted location.

When setting location in AdWords, there is a small + tab that opens up the advanced options settings. The default setting is “People in, or who show interest in my targeted location.” This means that if you place ads for a pizzeria, and a searcher is looking for “American Pizza,” they will see your ads even if they are located in Africa. To avoid this, always choose “People in my targeted location.”

2. Placing Ads on Your Own Selling Websites

Ad placement such as AdSense is an easy way for websites to fill their ad inventory and make some extra money. This is usually a great fix for large news websites, blogs, and other sites that don’t sell online.

However, often, you can find these ads on sites belonging to SMB’s that don’t understand the ads do more harm than good. For example, you won’t see AdSense on the Kissmetrics site because it degrades the user experience and takes attention away from the messaging.

Having ads on a selling site usually does not generate a lot of revenue, and worse still, it takes customers off your site. Additionally, it opens an option for competitors to promote their products on your site.

3. Being an Advertising Yes-Man

Many advertising platforms, such as AdWords, highlight certain features that sound great but don’t always work to your benefit. For example, when choosing your bid strategy on AdWords, you are offered an option to use “Enhanced CPC”. What this actually does (if you look at the fine print) is allow AdWords to raise your bids by 30% in order to get you better placement.

While it may do just that, if you set a certain budget and forget about this setting, then every time you raise the budget, you will essentially be increasing the 30% allowance.

4. Not Understanding the Platform’s Algorithms

You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should have a general grasp of how the platform you choose to advertise on works. It can make a huge difference. For example, AdWords Search is highly based on relevance (Quality Score). The more relevant your keywords, ads, and landing page, the higher your quality score and the less you will pay per click.

On Facebook, each user has an actual value based on how active they are on the site. A user who spends money on Facebook has a higher value than one who doesn’t. Why is that important? Well, if you have an audience of 100k users and the suggested bid is $2, but you decide to place a bid of $0.50, you are in fact telling the algorithm that you want to show only for users who have a value of $0.50.

If $0.50-value users make up 10% of your total audience, your true audience in this case would be 10k users, not 100k. Your budget, set to reach 100k, will show the ads only to the 10k $0.50-value users in your audience over and over again. Eventually, your frequency will get too high, and you will be spamming that audience, which will in turn make your cost higher. And the worst part is that you will never even reach the value audience you really wanted to reach in the first place.

5. Being Your Own Competition

When it comes to bidding, it’s easy to get carried away with your bids. And most platforms make it easy for you to overspend by suggesting what you should pay in order to beat your competition.

If you underpay, your ads might not appear as often. However, this doesn’t mean you should overpay.

You should bid according to your ROI, not your ego. Overpaying puts all your competitors into overdrive and raises bids for everyone. On most major platforms, there are enough impressions to go around.

On AdWords, some advertisers even overbid on their own brand keywords. This makes no sense at all since usually you are the only one buying your brand keywords. Essentially, raising bids on branded keywords simply lets the algorithm know you are willing to pay more, and so you will.

There are cases where your competition might be buying your keywords. Remember, you should always have a higher quality score than they do, and you can beat them that way.

So, should you tackle online advertising on your own?

At the end of the day, it depends on the scope of your business, the results you expect to gain from your campaigns, the budget you plan to spend, and your willingness to learn a new trade. There are many plusses to running your own campaigns, such as full transparency and the ability to monitor your spending and branding. After all, no one knows your business as well as you do.

It is possible to do your own online marketing, but be aware that the endeavor will require the same amount of preparation as doing your own taxes, representing yourself in court, or flying your own plane. You will need to do some homework, understand the inner workings of the platform, and choose settings carefully. If you don’t know what something means, look it up. That’s what Google is for.

Everyone makes mistakes, even the pro’s. Learning to spot the mistakes is key. If something seems off, if you aren’t getting the results you believe you should be, then investigate, go over your settings, and make sure you’re not committing any major advertising no-no’s.

About the Author: Daniel Rosenfeld is a Digital Marketing Professional, always looking for the smallest details which have the largest impact.

How Marketing Funnels Work

If you’ve spent any time learning about marketing analytics, you’ve probably come across the term “funnels.” If you’re curious about what they are and how they can help, this post is for you.

What Are Funnels?

You undoubtedly want visitors on your website to take certain actions. Maybe you want them to make a purchase, sign up, or fill out a form. When someone does something you want them to do, it’s known as a conversion. The visitor converts from browsing to taking the action you want them to take.

A funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach the conversion.

Think about the Amazon purchase funnel. There are a few steps a visitor has to go through before they can purchase a product. Here’s how it looks:

• They have to visit Amazon.com
• They have to view a product
• They have to add a product to the cart
• They have to purchase

There are additional steps/actions that can be taken in between each of these steps, but they do not matter in the purchase funnel. For example, a visitor may view Amazon’s About page, Contact page, and Careers page, but we don’t need to count these in the funnel because they aren’t necessary steps.

Why is the set of steps to conversion called a “funnel”? Because at the beginning of the process, there are a lot of people who take the first step. Then, as the people continue along and take the next steps, some of them drop out, and the size of the crowd thins or narrows. (And even further along in the process, your sales team gets involved to help close the deal.)

The top of the funnel is where everyone goes in (visiting your site). Only the most interested buyers will move further down your funnel.

So when you hear people say “widen the funnel,” you now know what they are referring to. They want to cast a larger net by advertising to new audiences, increasing their brand awareness, adding inbound marketing, etc. in order to drive more people to their site, thus widening their funnel. The more people there are in a funnel, the wider it is.

You aren’t limited to using your funnel strictly for signing up and/or purchasing. You can put funnels all over your website to see how visitors move through a specific website flow.

You may want to track newsletter signup (Viewing newsletter signup form > Submitting form > Confirming email) or a simple page conversion (Viewing a signup page > Submitting signup). Figure out what your goals are and what you want visitors to do on your site, and you can create a funnel for it.

Once you have the data, you’ll be able to see where roadblocks are and optimize your funnel. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.

Why Funnels Are Beneficial

With a funnel report, you can see where you are losing customers.

Let’s take your average SaaS business as an example. Here’s how a funnel may look for them:

• Visited site
• Signed up for a trial
• Used product
• Upgraded to paying

Do people have to use the product before paying? They don’t, but it’s a good idea to track it so you can see if it’s a roadblock for them.

Here’s how that funnel would look in the Kissmetrics Funnel Report:

In this example, the business manages to get 165 people to use the product, but only 13 people convert to Billed. There are opportunities for improvement at every step of the funnel, but it’s important to first work on the areas that need the most attention. The more people they can convert to Billed, the more revenue they’ll have. This should be the first area of the funnel to optimize.

A Funnel in Real Life

Funnels occur everyday with consumers. Let’s look at the funnel process for a retail store and see the corresponding steps in an ecommerce store. We’ll be tracking a purchase funnel.

The Ecommerce store has the fortune of being able to see a funnel. If they use Kissmetrics, they’ll see the exact number of people that move through the funnel, and where and when they drop off in the purchase process.

Okay, so now we have an understanding of what a funnel is and why it helps. Let’s take a look at two products that offer funnels – Google Analytics and Kissmetrics.

How Google Analytics Funnels Work

Google Analytics offers funnels, and we’ve written extensively about it in the past. There are a few things you’ll need to know when creating funnels in Google Analytics:

• It’s a pretty basic funnel. If you don’t want to dive deep into the data and optimize, you can go with this.
• You cannot go back and retroactively view data. Once you create your funnel, you’ll only be able to the funnel going forward as the data comes in.

Click here to learn how to set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics.

How Kissmetrics Funnels Work

Kissmetrics funnels, on the other hand, are simpler. You just create your events and then set up the report. Events are various actions people take on your website. These may include signing up, downloading something, clicking on something, viewing a page, using a feature, etc. Once you have these set up, you can create funnels. There are a few benefits to Kissmetrics funnels:

• You can go back and retroactively view data. Want to create a funnel that views your performance 3 months ago? No problem. As long as you were tracking data during that time, you can go back and view your performance. If you weren’t tracking data during that time, there are ways to import data into Kissmetrics.
• It doesn’t matter if people leave your funnel and then return to it and convert. In other words, they don’t have to follow a strict path. In the example funnel above, a visitor can go on other pages of your site before signing up. They don’t have to go to your homepage and then straight to signing up. If they go to your homepage, then your About page, your Contact page, and your Pricing page, and then enter signup, they’ll still be counted.
• It doesn’t matter if the conversion takes a long time to happen. As long as it’s within your date range, you can track it. Do you have people who visit your site one day and sign up 20 days later? If it’s within your date range, Kissmetrics will register the signup conversion.
• You can segment your traffic to see your most valuable segments. This can come in especially useful if you’re tracking traffic or UTM segments. Tracking these can help you find your highest converting sources. Once you know what they are, you can put more effort into getting more traffic from those sources. We covered this in this blog post on increasing conversions.
• We don’t track pageviews. Our technology tracks every person on your site. This means you can see each person in every step of your funnel. Take, for instance, the example funnel above. With the Kissmetrics funnel, you can see the people who did not convert to “Billed.” You can then email them to gather feedback and find out why they decided not to convert to paying. You can then take this information back into your product development and marketing.

Recap

We’ve gone through a fair amount, here’s a recap:

• When someone on your website does something you want them to do (i.e., sign up, make a purchase, fill out a form, etc.), it is known as a conversion.
• A funnel is used to track the steps that lead up to that conversion. For example, Ecommerce companies want people to purchase products on their website. Their funnel may have these steps – visited site > viewed product > placed product in cart > purchased.
• Using a funnel report you can see where people are dropping off in the path to conversion.
• Both Google Analytics and Kissmetrics provide funnels. Each have their unique use cases. Kissmetrics provides additional reports in addition to the Funnel Report.

Video Explanation

Want to know more about the Kissmetrics Funnel Report? Just click play below.

Ready to see how the Funnel Report and other Kissmetrics reports can be used to grow your business? Then request a personal demo today.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

Resource-Based Marketing: 5 SaaS Companies That Are Doing It Right

Want to put your company on the map? There are many ways you can approach your marketing in order to get eyeballs and grow your business.

From press releases that result in media mentions to a great paid campaign for your social media page, and from an ad that gets you seen in search engines to a commercial on TV or an ad on a website, there is no shortage of opportunities to grow your online footprint.

A lot of people use the aforementioned tactics to build visibility. When you think about it, online marketing typically encompasses the three standard marketing components: SEO, social media marketing, and PPC. That’s your SEM (search engine marketing) in a nutshell.

But what people don’t seem to recognize is that there are other creative tactics to use within SEM that could be incredibly valuable to your company’s bottom line.

What tactics, you ask?

Tools and education!

Lots of companies are using free tools and resources as well as education to power massive customer acquisition. In this article, I’d like to showcase five companies that have created significant resources which really helped grow awareness of their product.

1. HubSpot: Building a Product to Drive Leads

Inbound marketing company HubSpot is your classic example. Years ago, it launched to appeal to a niche audience of marketers by creating the now defunct Twitter Grader, which would grade your presence on the social media platform. At the time, the social media space was abuzz with news about the tool, and everyone wanted to share their statistics. The result was significant awareness (the company went public last year).

While Twitter Grader doesn’t exist anymore, HubSpot replaced it with a more ubiquitous (and more appropriate for its product offering) Website Marketing Grader. But, now, even that’s out of date, so HubSpot is building a better version at Website Grader.

Once you grade your site, you get pitched to try out HubSpot’s service offerings, all of which can help with your website presence online. By doing this, HubSpot not only offers a tool that’s relevant to what it does, it also captures leads regularly.

What you can learn from HubSpot: Product-based launches that are relevant to your business are best. Offer a tool that will lead people to want to know how to “fix” the problems you identify for them.

2. Groove: Building a Business on the Back of a Super Informative Blog

If you haven’t checked out Groove yet, you should. It’s one of my favorite blogs, and if you have a look, you’ll see why.

GrooveHQ is a relatively simple helpdesk application for small businesses. Beyond having a really great interface, their customer experience goes far beyond the product offering. Their blog is a goldmine of great content, and it keeps on getting better and better.

Groove has three blogs. Their main blog is the Startup Journey, and it is authored by their insanely intelligent CEO, Alex Turnbull. In it, Alex talks about his journey and gives tips on how people can learn from other businesses just like his. For example, he talks about how he grew his email subscription base to 50k, how to manage remote teams, and what he learned from failing to hit his 12-month growth goal. The blog is beautifully designed, giving readers a true chronology of his successes (and failures).

Groove’s second blog is the Customer Support blog. True to its name, it covers topics related to customer support, such as a weekly customer service maintenance checklist and articles on how to reduce the number of customer service emails you get, how to deal with bad reviews of your business, and how to turn your most unhappy customers into brand promoters. It is chock full of good content, as is their third blog, which is product-oriented.

The Product blog covers new feature additions written in such a way as to engage the reader. It also covers topics like “how Company ABC switched to Groove,” product hacks (i.e., how to make the product better with some hacking), and more. The way these posts are written is refreshing and really conveys a true interest in connecting with the reader. It’s not your typical educational blog. It is passion in (digital) print. No wonder Groove is growing so much.

What you can learn from Groove: If you write amazing content, your business blog can soar above the rest. It’s even better if you are transparent about your journey as a business, discussing your successes and failures so that people can really identify with you and the situations you describe.

3. Synup: Building a Resource that Drives Awareness on top of What You’re Already Selling

Synup, a local listings tool, has been really making waves in the local SEO space. Earlier this summer, it launched the Local SEO Checklist to help anyone working on local SEO to learn what steps need to be taken to ensure their local website has the best possible SEO. The tool is totally free, and it is a true checklist of every step necessary to grow a local online footprint.

Synup’s tool has worked. Their service has attracted thousands of new users in the past three months who needed to do more with their local SEO. After all, Synup’s offering is tangential to review monitoring for small local businesses. This complements the standard local SEO tips wonderfully. With the checklist, one will learn the steps it takes to be visible, while their review offering gives companies the tools to maintain positive visibility.

What you can learn from Synup: Customer acquisition can be jump-started by offering value-added functionality that enhances what you already offer, especially if it is tangential to your product offering. With Synup’s checklist and its review management solution, one gets a great grasp of local online marketing.

4. Zapier: Gated Content that Drives Product Awareness and Customer Acquisition

Zapier is a tool that connects apps you use and helps you automate tasks to get more out of your data. For example, you may want to use Zapier to add a Google Calendar entry to your to-do list or add basic information from LinkedIn contacts to a Google Spreadsheet or send emails directly to Slack.

Zapier has grown on me, especially through their great content promotions. Beyond their blog (which is incredible, just like Groove’s), they also have a learning center with more exhaustive guides that are way too big for a standard blog post. My favorite, by far, is “The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work” because it speaks to my lifestyle as well.

As you can see, not only are these guides beautifully designed, they are also pretty informative, too. The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing talks about how great emails are made, the top 25 best apps, how to grow your subscriber base, how to segment email lists, how to import/copy/remove subscribers, the basics of drip marketing with 25 tools to do so, the best 7 tools for transactional emails, how to a/b test, 21 mistakes to avoid, and how to keep sending great emails.

In other words, there are 15-20 blog posts in one super cool and informative eBook. And it’s free. This puts Zapier’s amazing service in front of many people who would be interested in learning more about what they have to offer.

What you can learn from Zapier: Going a step beyond what Groove did, rich pieces of informative content that read like eBooks are fantastic ways to acquire customers. Significantly, they shouldn’t be boring whitepapers, but rather cool content about a variety of topics that would be of interest to your audience, even if they’re not actually about what you’re selling!

5. Dropbox: Building a Product that Enhances the Usefulness of the Main Offering

Dropbox is one of the world’s topmost file sharing and storage tools out there, allowing people to easily store their most important files online with cloud backup and redundancy. Files can be synced from one computer to the next seamlessly. Dropbox has gotten better and better through the years and has enhanced its offering substantially.

While Dropbox has a lot of business applicability, it also has a lot of personal applicability. Dropbox encourages users to automatically upload photos to its platform, and that’s synced to its Carousel gallery app.

Carousel advertises itself as a “lifetime of photos, simplified.” It’s an amazing organizational tool for photographs, allowing users to see the photos anywhere. This app can also help you review what you’ve been doing in previous years, giving you small flashbacks into your life in the past.

These flashbacks are similar to a lesser-used Facebook feature (and what Timehop already does), but they are far more appropriate to the medium in this case. Since Dropbox stores files from the past and the present on the cloud, having photographs with a historical perspective at your fingertips is not just fun but applicable to the primary tool. Carousel is an optional download that simply enhances the Dropbox experience.

What you can learn from Dropbox: Offering tools that make your service more appealing to use is a great way to acquire customers. Your SaaS service or business may not be very exciting, but adding small tools that make product usage fun (even if it isn’t directly correlated to your business offering) is another great way to acquire new customers.

Create Resources to Grow Your Business

There are many terrific ways to market your product. Creating content or an app to enhance its presence online is an excellent way for your brand to stand out.

Has this article inspired you to create something outstanding? Then I hope you do so and reap the benefits.

About the Author: Tamar Weinberg is a professional hustler and author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on The Social Web. She blogs about all things tech, productivity, and social media customer success at Techipedia.

5 Hacks to Make the Most of Social Advertising on Mobile

Social and mobile are exploding. That much is a given. With the powerful insights and data that social brings to the table, and the far stretching reach mobile offers, when we put the two together we’re left with digital’s power couple.

Perhaps these numbers will paint a better picture: on Pinterest 92% of users are logging in via their mobile devices, compared to 86% of Twitter users and 68% of Facebookers, not to mention mobile-only networks like SnapChat and Instagram. Needless to say, social on mobile is definitely where you want to be.

Here are five proven hacks to make your social advertising more effective and meaningful on mobile going forward.

1. Utilize Targeting Options Built for Mobile

One of the most useful aspects of social advertising is its plethora of advanced targeting options – the result of an enormous amount of data that’s unique, accurate and tied to specific users with known interests. What unique targeting options do social campaigns offer that are unique to mobile?

Hyper-local Ads: As a mobile marketer working with social media, location based ads will become one of your most powerful tools. Engaging with nearby customers can be extremely valuable whether you’re at an event, an owner of a restaurant, or a brick and mortar shop. By channeling the GPS capabilities of your smartphone, Facebook and Twitter can help businesses by allowing them to enter the business’ address along with a predetermined radius to notify users in the area.

For example, fashion retailers can target users who have an interest in fashion when they are near one of their stores. If they happen to know that a user viewed a stunning new dress in their app, they can retarget that user when she’s near the store by encouraging her to actually try it on. Lots of potential here.

Platform & Device Targeting: Another very useful targeting method for mobile marketers is related to the user’s mobile device. This includes fine tuning based on OS, OS version, device type and model.

OS version enables you, among other things, to exclude users with an out of date OS version that may not be compatible with your app or does not perform as well as with newer versions.

When targeting by device type, it is recommended to customize your ad using images of that same device you’re targeting. In device model, you should target new phones as the ‘new phone’ market is a great one for app developers as they’re the ones currently on the hunt for all of the latest and greatest apps to fill their 32 GB with.

Make sure to optimize your bid for each segment, as competition on prices may vary between different OS versions, device types, and models. This will maximize your ROI by paying the right price for the right audience.

Selecting Android devices to advertise on Twitter

Wi-Fi: If your app is heavy, you should only encourage users to download it when connected to wi-fi. By turning this feature on or off, you’re in control.
Last but not least, know that there is always a tradeoff between depth and reach. The more granular you target, the higher the cost, but also the greater the value generated. So, if you know your audience, great. If not, you can get a fairly good understanding by investing several thousand dollars, starting wide and letting the social networks’ machine learning figure it out.

2. Adapt the Right Native Format

Native advertising is red hot. By creating ads that are in the same format as the editorial content, marketers are providing a much more streamlined user experience, especially on mobile. According to Yahoo, effectively integrated native ads gained 3X more attention than non-native mobile ads, and a 2.6X higher CTR than other Yahoo mobile display ads.

Within native, social will account for the biggest share of ad revenue, according to BI Intelligence. This comes as no surprise as social is perhaps the “nativist” form of native advertising with powerful social sharing tools and an algorithm that most likely increases frequency of sponsored posts liked and shared by your friends.

Before choosing where to run your native ad, think hard about which format best suits your product. Facebook, for example, offers advertisers sponsored news feed posts, photo sharing apps like Instagram offer sponsored photo posts, while Pinterest offers sponsored pins. So if you want to advertise design-related products, Pinterest, with its powerful visual platform is a great match. Likewise, if you’re a travel app you can share images of your spectacular traveling destinations on Instagram.

3. Video in Social on Mobile

If mobile and social are the dynamic duo of digital advertising, video in social on mobile is what makes up the golden triangle. Although more costly, the format’s level of engagement is a world of its own (take Facebook’s video ads that generate 5-6% higher engagement than non-video Facebook ads).

Video ads on mobile are already working strong for YouTube, whose users are 1.4x as likely to watch ads on smartphones and also 1.4 times more likely to share the ads they watch on mobile; for Facebook with its whopping 3 billion views on mobile (many of them auto-played but impressive); and for Twitter where 90% of Promoted Video views take place on mobile devices.

Pinterest has just introduced Cinematic Pins, which can be classified as a form of video ads. They are a new motion-based mobile ad format that moves during scrolling.

If millennials are your aim, social networks like Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat are rising steadily in popularity, with new native video ads expected to be the next big thing.

Having said that, it’s important to note that video advertising is expensive and when it comes to creative it’s fairly static. What this means is that you should start running with video only once you already know what you want to say, and what worked for you on other channels. In other words, video is not the best testing format for new companies with limited budgets.

The auto-play function provides an excellent opportunity to catch your user’s attention. And best of all, you can also use a performance model here as Facebook will only charge you if your video was viewed for at least 10 seconds, while with Twitter you’ll only pay if the video was 100% in-view on a user’s device for at least three seconds.

4. Deep-Links for Optimal Social Sharing

Deeplinking is the technology that connects different mobile environments (app-to-app and mobile web-to-app), while allowing the opening of a specific app screen. Linkage is a non-issue on the web but on mobile it certainly is with lots and lots of broken user experiences.

For example, imagine you’re scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed and you receive an invite from a friend to play a game (Farmville, CandyCrush, whatever floats your boat). The invitation promises some type of reward i.e. 10 free coins, or all new powers, etc. If you want to create a seamless experience for your user, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to cash in on that promised incentive. Deep links allow you to bring users to a unique landing page within your app enabling them to cash-in on their freebie.

There are two ways you can use this feature on Facebook, one being through App Links, Facebook’s deeplinking tool, by following these implementation methods. If you haven’t enabled App Links, Facebook has created a new field in their app creation tool allowing developers to define the exact location they want to link their ads to.

Twitter enables deeplinking as well as allowing users to tap a link in twitter and end up on the specific page within the given app – if they’ve already installed it on their device. If not – they’ll be taken to the app store to download it. In order to enable the deeplinking feature on your Twitter ads, you’ll just need this new set of markup tags.

5. Measure, Measure, Measure

It goes without saying that if you want to become a super ‘social on mobile’ marketer, you need to measure your efforts. And do so tirelessly. You can either use the social networks’ analytics dashboards to understand what’s working and what’s not, or an analytics partner to get advanced functionalities like retention and cohort reports, multi-touch attribution, enhanced lifetime value analysis and comparison to multiple marketing activities across hundreds of media sources.

It is important to stress that the only way to measure campaigns on Facebook and Twitter is by either integrating their SDK in your app or the SDK of its official mobile measurement partners (here’s the Facebook list, and here’s Twitter’s).

Facebook has also announced that as of November 4th, 2015, advertisers will no longer have access to device level data from app install campaigns running on the social network. That means the only way to use this data in your Custom Audiences campaigns is by working with a mobile measurement partner that can transfer this rich in-app event data to Facebook for this purpose.

The Bottom Line

Mobile has taken the popularity of social networks to a whole new level entirely. Social engagement on mobile is dominating digital today, and this includes advertising – because it’s native, it’s video and it’s based on amazing data that leads to super sharp targeting with capabilities unique to mobile devices. When advertisers across the board embrace deeplinking to create unified user experiences and analytics to generate smart, data-driven decision making, the potential will be met in its fullest.

About the Author: Ran Avrahamy is the Head of Marketing at AppsFlyer.com. Managing a complicated relationship with mobile. (Too) early adopter. Loves being an entrepreneur – Hates the word entrepreneur.

The Dark Side of Retargeting: How Retargeting Could Be Killing Your Sales

Retargeting is the holy grail of digital marketing. It’s the solution to shopping cart abandonment. It’s the end of wasted Adwords revenue. It’s the panacea for everything that ails you.

It’s awesome. Except when it isn’t.

Before I launch into what comes next, I want to make it clear that I am a fan of retargeting/remarketing. I use it. I recommend it. I think it rocks.

Whether you’re trying to sell a pair of shoes or marketing a SaaS, retargeting has major advantages. It works on social media, general web browsing, and even across devices. Remarketing is a smart technique with a ton of advantages.

But is there a dark side to retargeting? The short answer is yes. Let me explain.

Retargeting Can Be Expensive

Many marketers leap into retargeting because they assume that it would somehow reduce their overall advertising costs.

For a long time, PPC experts have been strategizing the means and methods for reducing adspend. The high cost of Adwords and the meteoric bidding levels for ultra-competitive terms have sabotaged some marketing budgets.

Based on the promises of many retargeting services, it seemed the obvious solution.

In reality, however, the way to reduce spending is to make a decision and stick to it. While retargeting may have a higher ad ROI, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’re going to spend less on it.

Here’s one popular retargeting claim:

Sounds awesome, right? Well it is. But you are ultimately in charge of your retargeting costs. If you let things get out of hand, you can end up spending just as much if not more, and you may have diminishing returns on investment.

Don’t allow your excitement over retargeting to blind you to its real cost.

Retargeting Can Annoy or Anger Customers

When it comes right down to it, what does your customer think of retargeting? This is a significant issue, because ultimately, retargeting is about them (not you).

Take a look at the data. InSkin Media’s consumer survey found that the two main responses to a retargeted ad were annoyance and anger.

Source

Based on the data, the more frequently an ad is displayed, the more aggravating it can be. By the tenth time someone sees an ad, they get the message. More impressions aren’t going to compel them. You’ve driven them off a cliff. It’s too late.

What do these emotions mean for sales? Again, let’s look at the data. The news isn’t great.

• 55% of customers put off buying
• 53% get irritated
• Only 10% buy

Source

If you are retargeting, it’s probably not a good idea to increase the number of impressions. The higher your frequency, the greater the likelihood of ticking someone off.

The chance at gaining 10% is nice. But what about the remainder of your potential customers? Are you gaining a few at the expense of alienating a majority?

Rather than risk it, it’s best to err on the side of fewer impressions and happier potential customers.

Retargeting Can Create Concerns Over Privacy

One of the most common complaints about retargeting is that it’s “creepy.” This is why ClickZ had to try to explain away the creepy sentiment surrounding retargeting.

Retargeting may not be creepy in actuality, but that won’t keep customers from thinking it’s creepy. Saying it ain’t so won’t change the fact that they think it’s so.

In a New York Times article on retargeting, reporters quoted Julie Matlin who was innocently looking for shoes.

Her quick glance at a pair of kicks on Zappos.com turned into a recurring marketing experience:

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

The creepy sensation has been enough to increase the interest in Do Not Track laws rolled out by the FTC.

Retargeting Can Ignore the Buy Cycle

It’s ironic. One of the most fundamental of all marketing principles can be so easily overlooked in the frenzied rush towards retargeting.

I’m talking about the marketing buy cycle — the concept that customers go through a cyclical process that prepares them to buy.

It’s similar to the sales funnel, in that the process begins with more customers, and ends up with the converting few.

Source

Retargeting is intended to capture more of those consumers as they proceed through the funnel. If you’re not careful, however, you can actually damage conversion rates by ignoring the buy cycle.

The customer may simply not be ready to buy. They’re no longer leaning towards your alternative. They’ve chosen a competitor. Maybe they already bought the product from a competitor.

If you keep your retargeting window open for a long time, you increase the likelihood that you are retargeting a customer who is no longer in the right spot of the buy cycle.

Retargeting can cause you to abdicate control.
One of the major benefits of retargeting is that it allows a more hands-off approach to marketing.

One B2B blog describes the advantages of a managed retargeting platform:

Managed platforms are ideal for retargeting newcomers who are unlikely to roll up their sleeves and dig into the minutia of managing a retargeting campaign. Managed platform providers will help you run your retargeting campaigns based on the target metrics and settings you specify. These platforms offer account managers and automated optimization tools that help build and tweak campaigns to maximize performance.

Yet this perceived advantage can quickly become a disadvantage. Being hands-off of any marketing effort is risky, to say the least. At worst, it can turn into a sales-killing, prospect-aggravating, brand-ruining fiasco.

I have a very simple recommendation if you’re considering pulling letting your retargeting machine roll along on its own: Don’t do it.

It’s not just about losing control. It’s more about losing all awareness. If there’s one thing that marketers need, it’s a keen understanding of their data and the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. What’s successful and what’s not. Who’s converting on what? Which method has the higher ROI? Which version is adequately reaching our target audience?

Setting up your retargeting, and letting it purr along without your oversight is a risk too great to take.

Retargeting Can Show You Only Partial Data

In the section above, I referenced data — the marketer’s best friend.

Any retargeting platform you use will give you plenty of data. You’ll feel like you are awash in a sea of data. But is it the right kind of data?

Keep in mind that retargeters show you the kind of data that they want you to see. It is in their best interest to compel you to continue purchasing retargeting services and impressions.

Source

Thus, their carefully curated metric presentation can blind you to some of the not-so-pleasant trends in remarketing.

Marketers run risk of overlooking the small customizations and refinements that retargeting requires. Are you presenting multiple impressions on a single page? Are your prospects seeing ads long after their original visit?

Beyond the metric-driven insights, it’s critical to stay aware of the non-data information. Every impression is either enhancing or tarnishing your brand. If your retargeting is ruining your brand’s reputation, the marginal uptick in impressions may actually be a net loss if you take the longview.

The Makegood group provides this cautionary comment:

While retargeting can create a lift in direct response metrics, what is the long impact on branding from being relentlessly stalked like this? It’s a question that smart brands are considering carefully.

Conclusion

Am I saying that you should stop retargeting? Absolutely not.

Retargeting is the modern wave of marketing, and we ought not neglect anything simply because of some attendant risks. We don’t give up on something just because it has risks.

There is risk in doing business. There is risk in life. The pathway to success is paved with bricks of risk. What we must do is be aware of the risks in retargeting.

It’s not the holy grail that some marketers claim it is. It’s powerful. It’s effective. But it does have a dark side. Know this dark side, and you’ll be able to use retargeting with maximum effectiveness.

Have you seen any pitfalls with retargeting?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.