Survey results from 1000 US marketers and analysis from billions of ad impressions show increased programmatic investment, adoption of new use cases, and boost in mobile and social media performance.
AdRoll, the world's most widely adopted retargeting platform, today published the State of the Industry Report:A Close Look at Retargeting and the Programmatic Marketer. The report is the most in depth study of its kind and examines the drivers that have made retargeting a breakout tactic for performance marketers, and explores how adoption trends might evolve in the future.
For this report, AdRoll partnered with third-party research company, Qualtrics, to garner an unbiased view of how marketers are using retargeting across their marketing mix. In addition to 1,000 survey responses from U.S. marketers, AdRoll analyzed aggregated campaign data from 11,000 US advertisers serving more than 3.7 billion ad impressions a month.
The survey finds that 71% of marketers plan to spend 10-50% of their digital budgets on retargeting in 2014, up from 53% in 2013. This massive growth is being driven by performance and ROI compared to other channels. Ninety-two percent of marketers report retargeting performs equal to or better than search, 91 percent equal to or better than email, and 92 percent equal to or better than other display.
"Retargeting has become a must-have advertising channel for marketers with performance objectives. It solves a clear business problem by helping brands stay engaged with customers who demonstrate intent to purchase," said Adam Berke, AdRoll president and chief marketing officer. "However, we were interested in exploring how the definitions and use cases of this channel are evolving and how adoption patterns are likely to change in the future. Given the scale of the sample, this report provides unique insight into what has driven the adoption of retargeting to date, and how these strategies are likely to evolve in 2015 and beyond."
The report details how investments in retargeting have increased dramatically year over year as marketers leverage first-party customer data for much more than just driving bottom of the funnel conversions. The report also found that social and mobile advertising, as well as attribution challenges, are top of mind for marketers. Key findings include:
Increased investment based on high performance
Seventy-one percent of marketers spend 10 to 50 percent of their entire online ad budget on retargeting; up from 34 percent in 2013.
Seventy percent of marketers use retargeting for brand awareness, 60 percent for social engagement, and 58 percent for customer retention.
Fifty-four percent of B2B marketers cite "insights into customer behavior" as the number one campaign success metric, while 57% percent of B2C marketers cite "total conversions" as the number one campaign success metric.
Mobile and social retargeting adoption fuel massive returns:
Fifty four percent of marketers are retargeting on mobile; 69% of those not running campaigns on mobile cite not having a mobile site or app as the reason.
Fifty-four percent of marketers believe that social media is the hottest topic in retargeting right now. Second choice is mobile retargeting with 20% percent of marketers.
According to AdRoll campaign data, advertisers garner 2.84X more impressions, 3.05X more clicks and 2.18X more conversions when adding Facebook to their retargeting mix.
According to AdRoll campaign data, advertisers garner 1.05x more impressions , 1.23X more clicks and 1.08x more conversions when adding mobile to their Facebook and web retargeting mix.
Attribution Is critical, but challenges marketers
Consumers are multi-device and multi-platform, yet 58 percent of marketers still use single-touch attribution.
Ninety-one percent of marketers consider attribution important or critical to success, but one in three aren't clear on how to develop and analyze attribution models.
