Introducing Predictive Retention: retargeting for the post-cookie world

Retargeting is mission-critical. It’s a way to re-engage customers who’ve bought your product, landed on your website and need just one more push to buy. Now Google’s announcement on third party cookies has made traditional retargeting redundant.

Programmai offers a chance to retarget customers, without relying on a pixel or cookie. Here’s how.

Targeting with cookies or pixels will soon be impossible.

Google’s announcement that it will not build or use alternative identifiers makes traditional retargeting redundant. For your re-engagement strategy, we believe that’s a good thing.

Most re-engagement strategies rely on retargeting site visitors and segmenting based on intent. If you’re using a CRM to slice and dice your audience, you can target potential customers, loyal customers and first-time customers separately. So far so good.

The problem comes when you hand these audiences over to Facebook and optimise for cost per action (CPA).

Results will probably look successful on the surface. Cost per action (CPA) will decrease and revenue will likely increase, yet incrementality will always be a trade-off. Facebook will target low-hanging fruit first and show ads to people who are likely to buy anyway. After all, Facebook’s goal is to get you spending more in the ad platform.

Only once it’s saturated these people will it begin to widen the net. If your budget is just slightly too low, this reach could be next to nothing. You’re effectively paying Facebook for sales that would have happened anyway.

So what do you do?

Go against the platform’s bidding algorithms

When you go against the platform’s bidding algorithms, you improve your cost per incremental conversion. Use Programmai’s Predictive Audiences to build first-party audiences in a few clicks, sync to the ad platforms and drive more sales cost-effectively.

We’ve covered how to build an audience to acquire new customers here.

Now, let’s look to Retention. 

First, log into Programmai. Once your first-party data is connected, we’ll clean and join each source to then make your data intelligent in transit. You’re then all set up to Activate your Predictive Audience.

Select your objective

Let’s choose Retention.

Choose your targeting set

Go after all customers, repeat customers or first-time customers only. The latter will have higher churn rates, so should be treated differently.

Configure your audience

Programmai will segment your customers into groups of similar Predictive Conversion Scores. You decide the granularity. 

Choose a platform

Sync to the major ad platforms (Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Google) in a few clicks.

Your audience receipt

When you segment customers into groups of conversion probability, you can work against Facebook’s CPA algorithm and focus your budget on users who are on the fence.

These are the people in the middle of your graph, where can truly influence customers’ behaviour – not just win the attribution of a customer already on the way to check out.

If incrementality is your goal, we’ll help you identify people who are most likely to convert. We’ll then recommend you leave them be or spend very little on them. 

The future of Activation is Predictive!

Targeting is going away. Not for us.

Build first-party Predictive Audiences in a few clicks. Truly influence marketing outcomes. Segment customers with complete control.

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