Retargeting. Another victim falls.

An interesting story today in Metro regarding a Tory MPs blunder about the ads served on Labour’s website. He went onto the site and saw banner ads promoting the dating of Arab women. He swiftly took to Twitter to mock his adversaries declaring that he didn’t realise how short of funding they were.

However, Labour were equally quick with the rebuttle. Garvin Barwell (the MP in question) had in fact been specifically served the ad based on his own surfing habits.

If you or I visit the same site we (hopefully) will get served different ads. We should note here that retargeting is not 100% accurate and is related to the IP of the laptop used not necessarily the individual at the keyboard.

You will have seen this retargeting on many sites you’ve visited.

You’re browsing electrical goods, then you disappear off to another site and the banner ads are trying to sell you the very products you were looking at earlier on what you think was a completely non related site.

This is how Google Adsense works and why cookie policies have been ramped up. When you visit a site, Google records the visit, what you looked at etc and then advertisers can use this information to serve relevant ads as you continue to surf in the same session or even the following day or week. This is retargeting and although its been around a while its becoming more and more accessible to advertisers.

In the past you’d need a specialist media buying agency to do this but now you can virtually do it yourself in your Google Adwords account. The only technical knowledge you need is to be able add a Google generated snippet of code to the pages you want to include in retargeting. Pretty simple.

Then Google will show the ad on any site within the Google Partner Network.

Is retargeting worth it. Well the click through rates on these ads is certainly higher than other ads purely targeted by the demographics of the site. Which is great. The CPC is higher – but you’d expect that.

Knife Box get the impression that people find it a little intrusive and a little big brother – but it’s all about providing a more relevant experience. And that is what Google is all about.

Ask Gavin Barwell on the other hand and you’ll probably get another answer all together.