Advertising and promotion · Large-scale randomized field experiment with retargeted banner advertising after website visits; treatment varied advertising exposure over time and outcomes were return visits, including time-since-visit and week-to-week complementarity.
When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising
Anja Lambrecht, Catherine Tucker (2013). When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising. Journal of Marketing Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243718813987
Plain-English take
Switching on retargeting caused 14.6% more users to return within four weeks; effects decayed with time since the initial visit, 33% of first-week effect occurred on day one, and week-two advertising worked better after week-one exposure.
How much weight to give this
4/5 Field or experimental evidence with bounded scope
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Large-scale randomized field experiment with retargeted banner advertising after website visits; treatment varied advertising exposure over time and outcomes were return visits, including time-since-visit and week-to-week complementarity.
Users of an online home-improvement retailer’s website.
Review the paper for comparison conditions and analysis.
Publisher record checked; detailed methods were not verified.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the publisher page.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What does when does retargeting work? information specificity in online advertising show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?
Design
Large-scale randomized field experiment with retargeted banner advertising after website visits; treatment varied advertising exposure over time and outcomes were return visits, including time-since-visit and week-to-week complementarity.
Sample and setting
Users of an online home-improvement retailer’s website.
Reported result
What the study found
Switching on retargeting caused 14.6% more users to return within four weeks; effects decayed with time since the initial visit, 33% of first-week effect occurred on day one, and week-two advertising worked better after week-one exposure.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Conservative inference: the evidence is from one home-improvement seller and return visits rather than a broad set of purchase outcomes, so generalization to other products and conversion metrics is uncertain. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.
Possible founder application
Use this study as a bounded example related to when does retargeting work? information specificity in online advertising; evaluate whether its customers, intervention and outcome match your own context.
Evidence access
Publisher page; full-text availability varies and was not established.
Study metadata and reported results were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; detailed full-text methods were not reviewed.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.