• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 22, 2007

Post-search retargeting gives marketers a second chance ... sometimes.

Why not make the most of that pricey search traffic after it leaves your landing pages? Even on a good day, many keyword campaigns only convert 4 percent to 5 percent of the click-throughs to a sale. In recent months, many marketers deploying so-called performance marketing tactics are turning to behavioral networks such as AlmondNet, Revenue Science, and 24/7 Real Media to tag and stalk these hand-raisers as they move off the landing pages and browse elsewhere.

Hartland Ross, CEO of eBridge Solutions uses the technique with his Web-hosting clients who pay upwards of $300 to acquire a single new customer through repeated hits off of high-priced keywords. By profiling and tagging incoming traffic by the keywords and campaigns that brought them, Ross can identify someone as a small business owner, for instance, and retarget them with appropriate creative as they venture onto other sites in a behavioral network. By getting a second chance with the customer without having to repurchase a $20 keyword, Ross has seen his cost-per-acquisition in that channel decrease to the $70-$80 range. "As we started seeing success and CPAs that were considerably less than what they were paying in other channels, we began to expand it to other clients," Ross notes.

"When they can get results, the results are good," says Chris Copeland, senior partner at Outrider. He has been using behavioral targeting (BT) networks over the past six months to retarget search traffic for a pharmaceutical company that spends as much on keywords as its does on TV. The technique gives big search buyers the opportunity to maximize that one keyword entry and hit the consumer repeatedly without having to repurchase him or her.

"I look at it as an insurance policy," says David Honig, vice president of media services,

Did-it Search Marketing, who has 14 clients using post-search tagging and tracking. He can cookie someone as a "plasma TV" searcher entering a retail site and try to capture them again as they travel elsewhere. "We match up about 30 percent to 40 percent of the cookies in the first three days, and we are selling a lot of the users," Honig says.

Other behavioral targeting networks and search agencies appear to boast similar numbers. While a typical banner click-through rate may be 1 percent, ads that have been behaviorally retargeted from a search query are producing .75 percent click-through rates. "It's absolutely amazing," says Tim Vanderhook, CEO at Specific Media. "We have seen retargeted segments driving 7 percent to 10 percent of all impressions but account for 25 percent of purchases," adds Matt Kain, senior vice president of business development at 24/7. By combining the self-declared intentionality of a search query with a BT network's ability to segment and trail a customer to a point lower in the consideration cycle, an e-tailer stays in the consumer's face closer to the point of purchase. "We have also seen retargeting to users of search drive much higher order sizes than other media," says Kain.

Well, that's when you can find those lost conversions in order to retarget them. "The results are mixed," Outrider's Copeland warns. "The volume is lower than advertised for many of them." Even with a large search program, once you slice the traffic by behavioral segments and then hope to find those groups out on a BT network in a reasonably tight time frame, the addressable audience shrinks in a hurry. Volume is the key problem for eBridge's Ross and his Web-hosting clients. Everything depends on the flow of initial search traffic and how well it overlaps with the BT network in a timely way. "The problem with the larger companies is it becomes unscalable. [Clients] see results and they want to double their spend, but there is nothing we can do to double their spend," Ross notes.

Behavioral targeting systems theoretically can tag a consumer according to which engine sends them and even the keyword used so it could bring them back against that keyword. "You can get down to the 'nth' degree," says Jeff Hirsch, chief revenue officer at Revenue Science. But, he says, you need a lot of traffic coming in up front and then strike a balance "to find the value against the conversion while maintaining volume."

Post-search BT is more of a value play than a volume play, most agree, and it may only account for 5 percent to 10 percent of a performance marketing campaign budget in the end. But folding search traffic into a behavioral engine may have additional benefits that the nascent practice is only beginning to realize.

BT systems can offer marketers additional insights into their customers' behavior - what motivates them to buy and when, and even which keywords trigger their interest at various points in the purchase cycle. The number of conversions generated from a retargeted buy may be small, but the knowledge and the savings they deliver can increase the overall effectiveness of a search campaign by locating the most valuable keywords.

The idea behind the search-plus-behavioral concept is that the retargeting has a benefit larger than the initial results. "Our vision is to be able to tie in the retargeting and conversion to the specific keywords where the advertiser can bid more and increase their market share," says Did-it's Honig.