So you book a vacation, take the vacation, get back home, and continue to see online ads for the destination you just flew back from. We can all dream, but you won’t be taking that trip again anytime soon, right? So what’s the deal with vacation ads popping up after your return?
Lapses like this happen because marketers are so used to relying on Google ads that they don’t take the time to validate whether the content itself is efficient or relevant for the consumer. To remedy this flaw, marketers should be taking the time to isolate their data and analyze it accordingly.
Without any segmentation or analysis of someone’s data, there’s a lack of synergy between the characteristics of the person you’re trying to advertise to and the ad in question. If someone’s been consistently looking up hotels, plane tickets, and things to do in a given location and then they suddenly stop, they’ve either a) taken the trip, b) decided to no longer take the trip, or c) booked it and made all their decisions already. In all three cases, there’s no longer a need to advertise vacation packages to that person. But because of web algorithms, they’ll continue seeing the ads anyway, which turn out to be wasted opportunities. This is just one of many examples where marketers are still spending blindly on popular campaigns without paying attention to whether they will work or not.
Why is it that my online searches are continuously used to advertise products to me that I may no longer need, or perhaps just looked up out of curiosity with no intention to buy? How can we fix this problem? It might seem impossibly complicated from the outside, but the answer is quite simple: communicate with your customers where it counts.
This is because online ads aren’t necessarily the problem -- it’s the inaccurate ones that we dislike most. According to a 2016 article by VIEO Design, 91% of people say current ads are more intrusive than they were 2-3 years ago, and 79% feel as if they’re being tracked online by retargeted ads (which means, you guessed it: ads based on their recent internet search histories).
If that many people express discomfort with advertising, it’s clear that something is being done wrong. If marketers had a way to ethically collect more information from us, they’d be able to sell us the products we’re actually interested in. This is one of Eye-In Media’s primary goals. Our product is designed specifically to collect information from customers in a way that they’re comfortable with -- they are in no way obliged to provide anything they don’t want to. We want to make ads make sense again.
