Google Now Leveraging Its Cookie To Retarget For Adwords Buyers

Many in the space were wondering when Google would get around to offering retargeting. The DoubleClick cookie is the most ubiquitous on the web. You can keep Yahoo, Advertising.com and every other third-party pixel, the DoubleClick cookie is the only game in town. And now Adwords buyers can use it to retarget (ho-hum, remarket) users that have failed to convert on their site. Google offers the following example on how the new feature can be used to “remarket” users:

Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on your tickets page on your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who visits that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In the same way, you can run ads across the Google Content Network to everyone who visits your brand channel on YouTube or who clicks on your YouTube homepage ad (if you have either of those).

It’s going to get interesting in the privacy stakes now. Doubtless the EU will have a fit over this. They’ve already declared war on behavioural targeting, and now that the DoubleClick cookie has been unleashed by Google they will be asking some serious questions. It shouldn’t really matter given that everyone else in the display space is doing some sort of re-targeting - but I’m sure the privacy zealots in Brussels will rage about it nonetheless.

What does this mean for the publisher? I expect CPMs will be higher on remarketed Adwords advertising, but content owners are unlikely to know. Advertisers are getting a good deal here, but I’m curious to know if publishers are being properly compensated for the cookie that the retargeted ad is being served against. Isn’t transparency supposed to be part of this new display evolution?

The segments an advertiser will be able to retarget against will be fairly extensive - and I'm sure the results will probably outperform any European network using retargeting. This move is likely to generate even more revenue for Google.