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Search retargeting relies on two things, data and media. The data piece allows search retargeting companies to know who to target with a display ad, and the media is where that ad is placed. Each of these elements has to be right, and they have to work together. In my agency days, I bought data and quickly learnt that if that data was not used correctly, even good data did not work as it should have.

Thankfully, Chango built its own RTB (Real Time Bidding) platform from the start, and this turned out to be critical! If you do not have your own ties to the media exchanges, you are forced to group searchers into buckets and buy segments of people due to a lack of control at the keyword level.

But search retargeting is all about individuals expressing intent, the intent that matters to you. Why go to the trouble of generating billions of search data points on individuals and then force them back into crowds?

It doesn’t make sense to do that.

On a recent retailer campaign we saw terrific results. We exceeded everything else on the plan except a highly related premium placement, and saw some detailed information that proves this need for granularity.

Let’s look at some examples:

Clothes shop – CTR = 0.87%

Clothes shopping – CTR = 0.25%

Shoes – CTR = 0.11%

Shoes mens – CTR = 0.16%

Mens shoes – CTR = 0.21%

And the term ‘deal’ generated a 50% higher CTR than the term ‘deals’.

Any search marketer will tell you that bidding on a keyword using phrase match is a very different scenario than using the same keyword on a broad match basis. This, too, is also true of search retargeting. Why? Because each search event carries its own intent and that intent should be treated differently per campaign.

Because of our RTB platform, we can bid a different price for the media depending on the individual keyword, the media placement and the client’s needs while factoring in other information such as time since search event, time of day and day of week.

If you are thinking about trying search retargeting, make sure you have full control of each keyword in this way. It’s what generates the performance and scale.