eCommerce Analytics

Over the last few weeks Google has been rolling out remarketing features to users of its AdWords platform. These new features allow companies to continuously target visitors with ads after they’ve left its website in the hopes of luring them back. Think email remarketing but with ads on a content network.

Remarketing (often called retargeting) is not new. Dozens of companies have been offering this functionality for some time, including Criteo, Fetchback, Dotomi, and Adroll.

So why all the fuss? One big reason. Nearly every online retailer already has an AdWords account. This means the friction of setting up a remarketing program has suddenly been drastically reduced.

The Case For Google Remarketing

For many online retailers, the easiest way to dip a toe into remarketing is to do it with Google’s new features. There are no contracts to sign, no new relationships to forge, and a familiar PPC cost structure. It’s also relatively easy to set up a simple remarketing campaign that retargets site visitors with a generic ad.

Most important, the reach of Google’s AdSense network cannot be beat. No matter where your visitors go after they leave your site, you can be sure that they’ll soon be seeing an ad from Google’s network.

The Case Against Google Remarketing

The biggest drawback to using Google for your remarketing program (if you’re a typical online retailer) is the sheer scale of Google’s business. Google has to make its features appeal to every company in the world in order to make the tiniest contribution to their overall growth. They simply cannot afford to concentrate on adding features specific to integrating with e-commerce processes. Instead, Google’s business dictates that they must provide a self-service set of tools in the hopes that companies will do the heavy lifting with regards to business logic.

The result of Google’s reliance on self-service tools is that you’ll likely need a front-end developer to modify Google’s tracking code on the fly and a lot of patience for manually defining groups and rules in the AdWords interface. And if you want to integrate your remarketing program and reporting with your other systems, it’ll be up to you to do it since Google offers no professional services.

Should You be Using AdWords Remarketing?

If you are a tech savvy organization or are looking to get started with a basic remarketing program, then Google Adwords could be the perfect solution. It has familiar interface, a name you more or less trust, and solid functionality.

But if you are looking to implement a more sophisticated remarketing program or you need some expert help to guide you then you will want to look elsewhere. Like the rest of its tools, Google’s remarketing features are made exclusively for the self-service crowd.

With so many reports out there talking about why retailers are going to be taking such a hit this year, I thought it might be worthwhile to focus on the positive. The down economy has opened up several opportunities for retailers to try out new and interesting ways of reaching their customers.  I wanted to share a few of these with you.

• Read Surviving the Holidays: 5 Marketing Tips for Retailers »

With today’s news peppered with articles about the possible demise of Circuit City, the sinking Dow, and the continued decline in consumer spending, many companies are concerned about how their customers are going to respond to the tough times ahead. Several online retailers are already going down the discount path to try and get customers to spend their money early– well before their credit dries up. I’m sure many of you have already been hit up like I have with numerous discounts from shops that don’t typically give discounts – I’ve been surprised by the recent emails I’ve received from the likes of JCrew, a company that never seems to discount their merchandise.

Read Finding Customers Who Will Weather This Storm: Customer Segmentation in a Down Economy »

While working on a proposal the other day for a prospective customer, I decided that I’d go the extra length for him in an attempt to demonstrate where exactly the company could make up some ground in its effort to realize a bit more bang for its buck in its email marketing program. That is, the company wanted to make more money from its existing customer base. When I looked at the company’s email marketing statistics, I was surprised to find that their clickthroughs per purchase was much higher than any company I’d seen.

Read Clickthroughs Per Purchase is the Gold Standard for Targeted Email »

I was going through my usual news download this morning when I happened across the following blog article (here) from the washingtonpost.com that talks about the recent disclosure by major search providers that they are tracking ever increasing information on their users without their users’ explicit consent. The reason why their collecting this information? Better ad targeting.

For many online retailers, this may not seem like the worst idea - better information from search providers means a better understanding of who’s buying their products, when they’re buying them, and what they’re most likely to buy next.  For many consumers though, there is an increasingly fuzzy line between companies collecting information about their buying habits to better meet their needs and companies invading their privacy.  Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass) is actually proposing new legislation that would limit what businesses could collect and ultimately do with their data, whether it be analyzing clickstream data to track customer behavior on their own site or trading information with data providers and other retailers to get better qualified lead information.

As someone who is entrenched in the analytics business, I fear the backlash from overzealous companies that trade on customer trust in return for increased revenue streams. There is much discussion online over NebuAd’s deep packet inspection technology being deployed by many ISPs to track individual user’s web activity for micro-advertising. While they provide an opt-out service for consumers, it’s still unclear whether you are opting out of receiving micro-ads or opting out of being tracked by the service. There was a similar outcry with the launch of Facebook’s Beacon technology which sent data from external websites back to Facebook for better ad targeting. Although they too now provide an opt-out for users, many bloggers and websites have resorted to publishing step by step instructions for completely blocking the Beacon technology through your browser.

Clearly, there is a middle ground where both consumers and businesses will feel comfortable with the amount of data being tracked and analyzed - my hope would be that this is can be found through best practices and not legislated through Congress. In the meantime, companies should focus on the following to maintain a level of trust with their customers:

• Transparency - Most important, let your customers know what information you intend to collect and how you intend to use it - and more importantly make this statement prominent and easily accessible on your website. Many customers don’t mind being targeted as long as they know up front how the company aims to target them.
• Opt-Out and Opt-Down - All companies should provide an opt-out of targeted advertising, but most should also provide an opt-down - the ability to decrease (or in the rare case, increase) how often or which types of products get advertised to the individual user.
• Anonymization and Obfuscation - While email targeting usually comes down to the individual level, most data analysis is done in aggregate and doesn’t necessarily need personally identifiable information to come up with important rules and formulas. If you’re working with a data analysis provider, they should be able to outline what information they need and what information can by anonymized or obfuscated to hide the identity of the underlying customer.

If all companies could follow these simple guidelines, I think we could find a happy medium between information collection and consumer privacy that wouldn’t necessitate legislative intervention.