A while ago, we assessed the 3 major ways to make re-targeting work for you. At the time, search re-targeting was primarily offered by Yahoo! David Zinman, vice president and general manager for display advertising at Yahoo! noted that customers enjoy higher Conversion rates and lower Cost Per Acquisition.

He gave the example of Value City Furniture – they saw $168 cost per acquisition fall to $29, and .93 percent conversion rates that rise to 6.93 percent within one month.

One of the things which is not well documented is whether the search re-targeting feature will still be available as Yahoo! search capabilities are folded into Bing AdCenter. I would assume it won’t since bing has not expressed any interest for it (neither has Google).

But this does not mean the industry is giving -up. In fact multiple vendors such as Criteo, BlueKai and Chango offer some type of search retargeting tools. I met with Chango a few weeks back and was quite impressed by their capabilities.

This is their sales pitch: ”Chango™ works with Media Planners and Search Marketers to deliver new customers by targeting dynamic display ads to users based on their recent search activity on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and more”.

What does this mean?

In essence, Chango tied-up with multiple data centers which provide their search queries to them. Those data providers can be smaller ad networks, large web publishers, comparison sites and search toolbars.

Chango then lets brand advertisers, agencies or Search Engine shops serve ads related to those user’s queries. The users have previously indicated an intent and more likely to interact with those ads.

The latest and brightest in search re-targeting

What’s particularly exciting about Chango is their ability to manage the end-to-end process. As opposed to let’s say BluKai, Chango manage both data collection and ad serving through real-time bidding. They currently work with ad exchanges such as Double Click, OpenX and AdMeld.

If  you have experienced with display ads, you probably recognize the benefits of more targeted ads. Search-re targeting goes beyond broad demographics data and on-site behavioral targeting that many agencies use to buy media. This is a great improvement.