Yahoo's Personalized Retargeting Can't Miss

While one of the hottest topics on the Web today, retargeting is hardly a new concept for online marketers. In fact, Yahoo! writes on its advertising blog that it invented search retargeting more than a year ago.

That much is open for debate, but Yahoo's continued push for a return to Web prominence is not. The company's latest attempt to reclaim that position comes with the announcement of a new display advertising product.

With Personalized Retargeting, Yahoo states in the blog post, "We can help you tap the potential of interested consumers who visit your website by retargeting them across the Web with personalized creative. It can help you turn prospects into customers at an even higher rate than standard retargeting - and you'll only pay for clicks or conversions."

Yahoo has two important advantages behind the release of its new product, which is a relatively late entry in the website retargeting space. The first is its recent acquisition of Dapper, a creative technology platform that provides dynamic display ad creation and optimization, and most of the power behind Personalized Retargeting.

In the verticals in which Dapper was successfully competing before its acquisition by Yahoo, such as travel and retail, the new product has performed magnificently in the early going. One travel client has seen a 97-percent overall lift in revenue and a 104-percent increase in conversion rates with Personalized Retargeting. The mission now for Yahoo is to take that success and spread it across numerous other verticals.

That's where Yahoo's second, and biggest, advantage comes in, which is scale. Yahoo still has the largest display network in the U.S. and can give its advertisers the best access on the Web. The second part of the blog announcement was about rebranding Yahoo's ad network and calling it Yahoo! Network Plus, which can reach 86 percent of the consumers on the Internet.

As Yahoo! wrote, "It's a lot easier to target a narrow segment of users at scale when you reach massive numbers of them in the first place."

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo! can do for advertisers now that it's added creative new technology to the longest reach on the Web. Visit Yahoo! to find out more about Personalized Retargeting and the Yahoo! Network Plus ad network.