Ginny Marvin says, “Despite relatively small budget allocations, cross-channel retargeting has become a nearly ubiquitous tactic among marketers. In a new survey by Marin Software, just 12 percent of marketers said they were not currently using retargeting in their mix. Over half those said they plan to start retargeting within the next 12 months. In addition to usage trends, Marin also looked at the effect on performance when retargeting across channels among the 233 marketers surveyed”. CTRs 2X Higher When Retargeting On Facebook And The Web, Than Web Alone Marketing Land  [...]

Jordan Elkind says, ““Free shipping and free returns” has become the proud declaration of many online fashion retailers. These policies have contributed to the explosion of online fashion sales: customers appreciate the convenience and savings associated with flexible shipping and return policies. Unfortunately for retailers, this consumer-friendly approach has an unwelcome side effect, a little-known fashion e-commerce secret: crippling return rates. This issue will be painfully relevant during the upcoming holiday season, when online shopping — and returns — reach peak volume”. 4... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook will roll out its web-wide, cross-platform ad network challenge to the Google Display Network next week. We initially wrote about this last month. Based on the company’s Atlas acquisition from Microsoft, “it promises to help marketers understand which Facebook users have seen, interacted with or acted upon ads that appear both on Facebook’s services and on third-party websites and apps.” The new network will also be a “demand side platform” permitting dynamic bidding for impressions on third party sites. Given... [...]

Martin Beck says, “Pinterest’s advertising plans, further teased late last Friday when the company announced it would update its privacy policy on Oct. 19, became a little clearer today. The social bookmarking site will offer advertisers the ability to target consumers in their database — for instance, from an email list — with ads on Pinterest. The company is also building a tool that will provide advertisers insight into whether clicks from Promoted Pins lead to purchases on businesses’ e-commerce sites. The plans were first reported today by Ad Age, which appears to have dug them... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “A new mobile advertising study, commissioned by xAd and carried out by Nielsen, holds some important and perhaps surprising findings for marketers. Many people have long known that the click-through (CTR) is not a very useful metric for display ads and mobile display ads in particular. This study proves it. At very best CTR may be a directional indicator of consumer awareness and interest. But if CTR is used at all it should not be used by itself. The ad-performance study ran on xAd’s platform and measured 80 campaigns featuring 12 national brands. There were... [...]

Rachel Balik says, “In its earliest days, advertising meant putting up a billboard or taking out an ad in a newspaper. If sales increased, it was generally declared that an advertising campaign was working. Although remedial and inexact, this type of measurement embodied the true purpose of an ad campaign: drive revenue. The downside is there were lots of X factors, and at the end of the day, you couldn’t really be 100% sure that the advertising had caused the uptick (or that poor sales were the result of poor advertising.) As technology advanced, things like Nielsen ratings gave us more... [...]

Martin Beck says, “U.S. adults will spend 21 minutes a day, 6% of their total time with digital media, on Facebook in 2014, but the social network pulls in 10% of U.S. digital advertising spending, according to figures released this week by eMarketer. That over-indexing stands in direct contrast to all other digital media that eMarketer tracks. For instance, daily time spent on digital devices makes up nearly half of major media consumption, yet only 30.5% of total major media ad spending is on digital channels. Video takes up 15.9% of users’ time and gets 11.7% of spending. Online radio... [...]

Martin Beck says, “Pinterest continued the slow process of pinning down its advertising plans today by announcing updates to its privacy policy, effective Oct. 19. Yes, one month from today. “Our plan now,” wrote Pinterest’s Julie Park in a blog post, “is to make Promoted Pins more relevant to Pinners, and help advertisers understand how their ads impact their business. On October 19, 2014, we’ll make a few updates to our Privacy Policy to explain those plans.” The popular social bookmarking has been testing Promoted Pins since last October, but has been accelerating its work... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Online display advertising had a strong showing in the second quarter of 2014. The sector grew 6.2 percent in Q2, outperforming the overall U.S. ad market according to a new report from Kantar Media. Total U.S. advertising expenditures increased just 0.7% in the second quarter of 2014 to $35.6 billion. Kantar points to budget increases by financial, retail and local service marketers as the drivers of online display’s strong performance. For the first six months of the year, online display grew 9.7 percent year-over-year, compared to the overall market which had growth... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “Facebook has released a new app insights analytics tool for developers that helps track an app’s performance and retention by groups. Using the new “Label cohorts” within the updated analytics tool, developers can segment app users to measure factors like revenue or the time spent within the app by different groups. The label cohorts also make it possible for developers to perform A/B tests – trying out various strategies on different groups of app users. Facebook offered a list of ways the label cohorts could be segmented, using examples like “install source”... [...]