Imagine this:
You’re finally taking that dream trip to the Norwegian wilderness, and you’re steadily collecting the right hiking gear.
It’s expensive.
You decide to splurge on that one pair of high-quality, water-resistant hiking boots you’ve been eyeing.
A week goes by.
One day, when you’re browsing the web, you get served an ad that you recognize immediately. It’s your hiking boots – but at 30% off.
Is the ad relevant? Yes.
Is this a positive, helpful experience as a buyer? Absolutely not.
This is a common problem running in the background of most paid media programmes. Your personalisation engine recognises and retargets visitors who showed interest in a certain product – but it doesn’t take into account whether the product was already bought.
This not only means you’ve wasted your ad spend. In worst case (like the scenario above), you’ve annoyed an otherwise satisfied customer.
It happens online all the time – and even more frequently if your customers shop in your physical store and you’re unable to connect the data.