Hey Drew,

I used to do Retargeting sales for a local startup out of SLC called MediaForge and have posed the same question numerous times as well. Doesn’t quite make sense for me as my sites do not get large amounts of traffic, but I can see how large websites could see some great results from this. If not from increased conversions, it would be a nice branding tool for future benefit. I’ve posted on an agent forum about this in the past on starting up a biz to provide this service for realtors. Could be pretty useful….

I’m not currently using re-targeting, but I have a strategy that I think would work well. (Have we had this discussion here before?)

For those who are considering re-targeting: what is the problem you are looking to solve? Will bringing a visitor back to a landing page or to a new landing page increase conversions?

If we are talking about home buyers, I doubt it. Even worse, I don’t think the average agent could collect enough meaningful data to prove if it’s working or not.

The one idea I have for re-targeting in the real estate world is this.

Serve ads to those who have visited a landing page for prospective sellers. (“Free CMA request, marketing plan, etc.) For the majority of the ads you serve them, show ads of your current listings. This is a good branding play and will convince the seller that your ads “are everywhere.”  They aren’t likely to click on many of them, so your CPC will be low. You could also serve up a small portion of the ads that re-direct them to another seller focused page. Maybe 10-20% of your ads.

I haven’t tried this strategy because I’m running pretty close to my max as far as listings go, but in a sellers market I think this would be great.

Retargeting is a great way to re-advertise to past PPC visitors. I believe the minimum head count to start a retargeting campaign is 500 in 30 days so there needs to be quite an investment up front (500 clicks x’s $_.__ per click) to even be qualified to use it in Adwords.  For real estate outfits paying for more than 500 clicks per month, this is a good channel to use.

I have retargetting turned on for our Google PPC account, even had a bunch of banners made to go with it.   We got 5 clicks from that campaign last month.   I’m guessing its just like regular PPC, if you dont get good click through rate right off the bat, your ads wont run. 

Seems like  a great concept, I get “retargetted’ all the time when Im surfing the web, just not working out that much for us anyways.

I have retargetting turned on for our Google PPC account, even had a bunch of banners made to go with it.   We got 5 clicks from that campaign last month.   I’m guessing its just like regular PPC, if you dont get good click through rate right off the bat, your ads wont run. 

Seems like  a great concept, I get “retargetted’ all the time when Im surfing the web, just not working out that much for us anyways.

I get retargeted all the time in my own surfing. Seems that jewelry companies are big uses of this tactic. If it were a financially realistic option for single agents, I would SO try it out.

I’ve suggested this as a strategy numerous times. It’s actually not that expensive to set up a retargeting campaign. Fetchback looks like an interesting service. I’ve been itching to give them a try for quite some time.

Everytime I mention it though, it’s always pretty low on the totem poll compared to seo/sem/social campaigns.

The idea of retargeting is to serve ads to people who have already shown a certain level of engagement with your brand (e.g. they have visited your website).

You DON’T need to have a large amount of traffic for this to be effective – you just need to have people who are legitimately interested in what you’re offering to visit your site, and then leave and forget about you. Retargeting reminds your audience of your existence, and allows them to go back to your site and fill out a lead form.
There are numerous reasons as to why this works, but think of it this way: you’re spending thousands of dollars to drive traffic to your site, but much of this traffic isn’t good. Focus part of this budget to re-engage your website’s visitors with retargeting. At a very high level – it makes sense.

Full disclosure: I work for ReTargeter.com (http://www.retargeter.com/). We’ve worked with real estate companies before: McGuire Real Estate, Princeton Real Estate, HomeGain, RealProSystems, Trulia. ReTargeter was founded in 2009 by Arjun Dev Arora — former head of business development at Yahoo! Real Estate.