> As for "advertisers get higher intent traffic", that simply isn't true. I'm not refuting your intuition 'cause it absolutely sounds right, but in terms of tracking and targeted ads knowing stuff like, "You left product in your checkout cart." is a waaay higher signal of intent.
For simple ecommerce flows, sure. But it isn't just intuition, having bought plenty of programmatic inventory over the years, there are perhaps as many non-online-selling advertisers using programmatic as there are straight "something in your cart" retargeters.
We used to get orders of magnitude higher conversions from websites where we did a direct buy aligned completely with the site's audience. The reason we didn't do more was scale - you can't do direct buys with every site, especially not when you already don't trust your buying agency. If we could, we'd have dropped programmatic entirely.
You also get agencies boosting their retargeting conversion numbers with BS like "view throughs". If your agency is trying to get retargeted view throughs in their hard conversion data, you're being scammed.
(In fact, I "accidentally" left the retargeting pixels switched off in GTM for a month. Made no difference to volumes or conversion rates - the reason they were turned back on? FOMO, plain and simple).
> cause _historically_
I'd argue that there isn't much "history" here to work on. The novelty of ad tracking is still very much there, and brands are still buying (and buying in huge scales, making up for precipitous drops in conversion rates), but when non-ecommerce brands stop being hoodwinked by buying agencies there will be a snap back.
For simple ecommerce flows, sure. But it isn't just intuition, having bought plenty of programmatic inventory over the years, there are perhaps as many non-online-selling advertisers using programmatic as there are straight "something in your cart" retargeters.
We used to get orders of magnitude higher conversions from websites where we did a direct buy aligned completely with the site's audience. The reason we didn't do more was scale - you can't do direct buys with every site, especially not when you already don't trust your buying agency. If we could, we'd have dropped programmatic entirely.
You also get agencies boosting their retargeting conversion numbers with BS like "view throughs". If your agency is trying to get retargeted view throughs in their hard conversion data, you're being scammed.
(In fact, I "accidentally" left the retargeting pixels switched off in GTM for a month. Made no difference to volumes or conversion rates - the reason they were turned back on? FOMO, plain and simple).
> cause _historically_
I'd argue that there isn't much "history" here to work on. The novelty of ad tracking is still very much there, and brands are still buying (and buying in huge scales, making up for precipitous drops in conversion rates), but when non-ecommerce brands stop being hoodwinked by buying agencies there will be a snap back.