Experts weigh in on Google Chrome’s filtering announcement

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“Letting users mute retargeting ads hands back some control to users. However, the underlying issue still exists – that marketers continue to take a flawed approach to retargeting. If they were optimizing their media spend correctly, the users they served ads to likely wouldn’t need to block them at all,” said Ryan Kelly, VP of Marketing, Nanigans. “This is a clear indicator that marketers have been wasting spend by repeatedly serving ads to consumers who’s decision to purchase won’t be influenced by them. By allowing users to mute ads, Google is opening a space for marketers to stop and rethink their strategies. Marketers should be optimizing their retargeting spend based on incrementality, bidding on those users who need that extra push to purchase that an ad impression can provide. Anyone who mutes an ad definitely wasn’t incremental in the first place.”

Hal Bailey agrees, and goes a bit further to posit that low-quality content will likely see the biggest impact from the mute button – a clear signal that marketers must up their content game.
“Publishers are already increasingly focused on diversifying revenue streams, placing ever-greater importance on direct revenue models like subscriptions. This tool will likely only hasten that process. At the same time, the ad blocker is likely to impact low-quality content on the web to the greatest degree, as there is often a correlation between low-quality content and the more invasive ads on the web. Publishers that offer high-quality content are often already adhering to standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads, and may need only minor adjustments to avoid being blocked,” said Hal Bailey, Chief Revenue Officer, LaterPay.

As to how marketers and publishers should be approaching retargeted advertising, Kelly believes the key is focusing on the data.

“The only [metric] that should matter to CMOs and marketers in charge of retargeting campaigns is incremental lift,” said Kelly. “That’s how many sales are generated when companies spend money on retargeting versus how many sales they get when marketers don’t spend money on retargeting. Marketers launch retargeting campaigns, they don’t change anything, and then on a quarterly basis they attempt to figure out if the campaign worked. What they need to do is invest in hiring talented individuals who know how to run tests and embrace a data-driven decision making process. This is the first step in order to stop overspending on users who are predisposed to purchase and/or annoyed by your retargeting ads. The second step is to select the right partner who can elevate your retargeting strategy by optimizing spend toward users that are predicted to have high incremental lift based on behavioral data such as how many add to carts, site visits and purchases they’ve had over time.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.