Traditional display ads on average have dismal click through rates – somewhere in the .09% range. Instead of doing media buys for display advertising based on the demographic information that sites give, why not take advantage of all those people who have visited your site over the last 540 days? These people are at least one step closer to being familiar with your brand than someone who has never seen your site before and is being broadly targeted with gender, house hold income or other demographic indicators which may or may not be totally accurate.
Take a look at the opportunity in the drawings below:
This is the size of recent site abondoners and purchasers who have been to the site in the last 14 days.
Zoom out 12 weeks and you can see how many more potential customers could be targeted.
Zoom out all the way to 540 days and it makes the size of the 14 day window look tiny. Instead of trying to drum up more new customers with irrelevant display ad buys, target these people who once were interested and are already familiar with your site.