Multiple Retargeting Strategy

Choosing a retargeting company is a major decision in digital advertising, yet many businesses still judge performance by the metric least connected to revenue. In this article, we explain what retargeting companies actually do, why clicks are a misleading measure of success, and how to compare retargeting platforms so that campaigns are evaluated on real marketing ROI, not vanity metrics.

Travel industries face numerous challenges when marketing online. To help you better understand how to form your marketing strategy for the modern world, we’ve compiled a series of 2-minute podcasts hosted by Jim Price, Head of Travel for RTB House America. Here’s a sneak peek of the first few.

The Catwalk Ready Collection of banners from RTB House proves that your online ad campaigns can be elegantly seductive whatever the context. Tailored for the user with a precision beyond even Savile Row, the Fashion-focussed creatives of RTB House are versatile yet striking, timeless yet still very much ‘now’.

Yes, the stylish and provocative designs of Paris, London, Milan, and New York, turn heads, but this collection is underpinned by a smarter dress code. Deep Learning algorithms ensure that our banners not only transform with the seasons, but change to match whichever unique individual they are shown to.

Ask ten marketers whether you should run two retargeting vendors simultaneously and you'll get ten different answers. We think the data settles it—but we'll let you decide.

Core takeaway

Multiple retargeting means running two or more retargeting vendors simultaneously against the same pool of site visitors. Because each vendor uses different algorithms to evaluate user intent, they identify different high-value opportunities within the same audience. The result: more conversions, without proportionally increasing your budget. The biggest objections—overlap, bid inflation, added complexity—don't hold up under scrutiny. The data consistently favors a stack approach.

Many of the world’s biggest brands choose to deploy a multiple retargeting strategy (using more than one retargeting vendor in combination) because it delivers a host of benefits like larger audiences, more efficient advertising, and a higher return on ad spend. Despite the advantages, or maybe because of them, it can be tempting for organizations to wonder exactly how much value, in isolation, each provider brings.

But is a straight comparison, as seen with head-to-head testing, a strategically sound approach, or should brands be focusing on the wider picture of true added value? Let’s investigate.

Legacy Machine Learning solutions have much to lose when clients learn an inconvenient truth: using two different-in-kind retargeters leads to demonstrably superior performance. For this reason, legacy vendors tout a “one retargeter” approach to programmatic advertising that doesn’t align with the lived reality of marketers. The one retargeter strategy is driven by a vendor’s internal business concerns, not by what’s best for their clients. If a single-vendor retargeting strategy were so superior and so powerful, why would a proper retargeting stack be such a threat to legacy Machine Learning vendors?

I’m going to look at, and then disprove, four myths around the choice of a single- or multiple-vendor retargeting strategy. And I’ll explain why sophisticated markers build programmatic marketing stacks.