AdWords Remarketing, - Sexy, Scary or Scam?

Remarketing is a fairly well established sales strategy but Google’s recently launched AdWords variation poses some interesting questions.

How it works...
You can now add a tag to any of your site pages that will track visitors. Once those visitors leave your site and continue to browse the internet, Google’s remarketing tool allows you to “follow” them around with custom ads placed on any of their content network sites.

Sexy?
Let’s say Jane Jones visits your holiday site and looks at the “holidays to Cuba” page but they don’t book there and then and instead decide to do some more research on other sites. Providing those sites are part of the content network, you can now place custom ads that will follow Jane around. You could choose to add a discount to your remarketed ad copy.. “10% off all Holidays to Cuba”
Let’s say you run an online retail site selling games hardware and software. Joe Bloggs visits your site and purchases an Xbox 360. Let’s also assume that Joe then goes on to visit other Xbox related sites to research games, accessories etc. AdWords now allows you to place ads on content network sites that will only be shown to people who have purchased an Xbox from you. In Joe’s case you can “remarket” him by selling him games.

Scary?
Internet users find this stuff a little creepy! The ads that run alongside Gmail for example have caused all sorts of issues and raised (albeit irrational) concerns over privacy). Getting an email to tell you your Aunt Betty has passed away is disconcerting enough without Google slapping an ad for “Funeral Directors” alongside it. The perception is that Google is reading your email in order to place targeted ads which are of course, a misconception. I don’t suppose for a minute that Google is going to personalise these ads to say “Hey Joe, remember that Playboy site you were looking at .... We’re back!” but the thought that ads are following us around the web is unsettling.

Scam?
OK, scam is a harsh word but it has occurred to me that if Joe came to my site from a pay per click ad, Google will be getting paid twice to advertise to the same user.