Home Content Studio Now Is The Time To Refocus On Retargeting. Don’t Do It Alone.

Now Is The Time To Refocus On Retargeting. Don’t Do It Alone.

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Every marketer knows the old adage: It costs much more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. How much more may vary, but the principle holds true, and it’s the basic idea behind retargeting.

So why is retargeting still overlooked and underfunded by almost every app marketer?

Because too many are trying to do retargeting all on their own – in-house or through self-service – and it’s creating a self-fulfilling cycle of less-than-optimal value.

The limits of self-serve and in-house retargeting

Today’s self-serve retargeting platforms are better than ever. They provide a great starting point for a lot of app marketers that are just dipping their toes in retargeting. Using a self-serve platform makes sense for a lot of other apps, too – not just the small startups. If you know you’re not able to dedicate much budget to retargeting, working with a partner is probably not an option right now.

On the flip side, more and more larger organizations are taking on retargeting in-house, building their own internal teams. In theory, in-house retargeting gives you full transparency and complete control over exactly where your retargeting spend is going – and what it’s bringing back to your business.

But as apps scale up retargeting, get more ambitious and complex with their goals, and feel more pressure to prove results, both the self-serve and in-house approach run into inevitable limits. For smaller organizations, these limits quickly become obvious: not enough time and expertise to go beyond pretty basic retargeting campaigns. For larger organizations, the limitations of an in-house approach might not even be apparent – more insidiously limiting their results and ROI.

Here’s why just about every app marketer should be leveraging a retargeting partner to get more out of their retargeting spend:

  1. Free up bandwidth within your team

No matter the size, app publishers’ core business is not retargeting. That means resources dedicated to retargeting (either managing self-service or an in-house team) are resources diverted from the core business functions.

Retargeting partners are geared to more efficiently manage a company’s retargeting needs and goals. That typically brings cost efficiencies – if not to the bottom line, then in terms of “bang for the buck.” But just as importantly, moving some (or most) of your retargeting burden to a partner frees up limited internal resources to focus directly on the core business.

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  1. Years of data points and know-how

Not only do most app publishers lack the bandwidth to include retargeting as an essential part of their app marketing efforts, but even those apps with a large data science and product team don’t often have the breadth of experience and data that a retargeting partner can offer.

Veteran retargeting partners bring the historical knowledge of billions of data points accumulated across hundreds of apps in different verticals. While app publishers have undoubtedly accumulated plenty of insights about their own users, an app reengagement partner can go much further, providing deep insights about the universe of app user engagement at large, including understanding how users behave overall within specific verticals, not just one single app. These insights inform ideal bid prices, indicate which strategies will work the best for which types of apps, show how to maintain revenue streams as IDFA collection decreases, etc.

It would take an app publisher lots of time, effort and a large chunk of their budget to arrive at this level of experience and know-how. An expert retargeting partner comes with that knowledge on Day 1.

Even an app publisher with an established in-house retargeting program can derive significant incremental value from these kinds of detailed external insights.

  1. Extra strategic recommendations and creative expertise

Here’s another common roadblock in both the self-serve and in-house approach: Your retargeting program is resourced for steady day-to-day operation, but bandwidth and expertise limitations make it difficult (or impossible) to do ad hoc analyses and more complex campaigns.

A good retargeting partner can provide customized, data-driven strategic recommendations from the start – and throughout your engagement. A partner can do custom analyses and reports to tailor algorithms based on your app’s specific needs. Experts can offer consultations about the strategies that work best for your app based on vertical, geo, audience size, or any other relevant factors. Leading retargeting partners can even deliver custom creatives, including video and playables, to make sure you’re not just hitting the right targets but delivering the exact right message.

  1. Provide scale and increase accuracy

As you scale your reengagement campaigns, the reality is most app marketers are missing a significant portion of their addressable retargeting audiences. A good retargeting partner can help you boost that reach up to 90% of your possible retargetable audience.

For example, many self-serve retargeting platforms use static lists of users for campaigns. Expert partners will use dynamic cohorts that optimize campaigns based on user behavior in real time, rather than after the fact. This increases the efficiency of your budget and ensures you’re targeting the correct users for the right product or service.

Case in point: With static user lists, the likelihood of users seeing the same ad for a product they’ve already purchased is higher since it is not updated in real time. Dynamic cohorts update automatically to ensure that the user being served the impression is actually seeing an ad that’s relevant to them.

Moreover, even if you’re reaching a substantial portion of your audience, you may not be targeting them with the specificity needed to deliver a relevant message that drives action. An expert partner can also go deeper to create custom audience segments or groups of users that are much more detailed than what you’ll find on self-service platforms – and provide algorithms that are simply much more sophisticated than what most in-house teams are using.

Adding inventory and deploying a different media buying methodology will increase the number of users your campaigns will reach, improving performance.

  1. Get a full picture of performance

Similar to the custom audience analysis problem mentioned above, many app marketers struggle to fully understand their retargeting results because they lack the resources to do more in-depth analysis. For example, when you see that one group of users is performing well while another is not. A retargeting partner can provide the supplemental analysis to dig into this matter. Perhaps more importantly, an expert partner has likely seen this phenomenon before. They’re not starting from scratch; they know where (and how) to investigate to get at the root of the issue and provide the meaningful, actionable insights you want.

Many app publishers with large, sophisticated, and successful in-house retargeting programs also engage a retargeting partner. Not just to provide on-demand resources but to provide a third-party check on their results. This validation helps them confidently adjust and improve their retargeting campaigns to drive higher ROI over time continually.

With a recession looming, now’s the time to re-focus on retargeting

As app publishers tighten up in anticipation of an almost-certain slowdown in 2023, marketing budgets are often the first to go. Retargeting has typically played second fiddle to user acquisition, so it’s tempting to cut back on reengagement campaigns and double down on UA.

That strategy may work for some apps. But the classic marketing maxim is perhaps even more true during a recession: It usually costs more to bring in new users than to reengage existing ones. That’s especially true for more specialized apps and those that depend on deeper engagement.

Now is the time to reconsider how you’re reengaging your highest-value/highest-paying users. Are you getting the ROI you should?

For more articles featuring Margot Miller, click here.

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