What is display retargeting and does it still work?
It still works on warm audiences, but banner blindness punishes lazy creative.
Yes, display retargeting still works, but only on warm audiences and only when you stop running one generic banner at everyone forever. The channel has not stopped working. Most implementations of it are just lazy.
What banner blindness really is
People have learned where ads sit on a page and their eyes route around those areas. That is a real, well documented effect, and it means a banner gets a fraction of a second of attention if it gets any. The response is not more impressions. It is fewer, better targeted, more varied ones.
The four fixes that actually move it
- Segment by what they looked at. Someone who read a pricing page is a different person from someone who bounced off the homepage. Different list, different message. One undifferentiated site visitors audience is the single most common mistake in the channel.
- Cap frequency. Three to five impressions per person per week is plenty. Past that you are buying irritation, and the person who was going to convert already saw it.
- Rotate creative before it burns. Performance decays predictably. Have the next set built before the current set flattens.
- Exclude converters. Suppress anyone who already bought or already filled the form. Advertising to existing customers for a first purchase is spend you can recover this week.
Set the right expectation
Display retargeting is a support channel. It keeps you present while someone decides, it recovers a slice of abandoned sessions, and it makes your other channels look slightly better. It is not a growth engine and it will not fill a pipeline on its own. Any agency selling it as the primary driver of new business is selling you the easy thing to run rather than the thing that works.
Watch view through conversions carefully here. They will always make retargeting look impressive, because you are re serving ads to people who were already going to come back.
Related: What is programmatic display advertising?, How do you track leads and conversions?, Color theory and conversion rate.