It's something I'm also dabbling in at the moment - have you checked out G's remarketing option?

Looks pretty interesting:

[google.com...]

I can imagine this being huge or a total flop. I really have no idea how it would pan out in the real world. Has anyone tried this?

Adwords makes it pretty straight forward to get up and running. I've done several campaigns and monitored the results.

There can be a huge difference in return from my sites vs yours just because of the way you setup remarketing. The general consensus when I started setting up my list was to collect people who abandoned their shopping carts. Many other companies go much further and target simply viewing a product and remarket to that list.

List I created.
- Customers from adwords that bounced
- Customers that created carts
- Customers that created orders but didn't enter payment info

Based on that info I had three pretty targeted groups who genuinely showed interested in what we sell. The kicker to get them to come back we used a 10% coupon code in the animated ad. We had the margin to do it. Lots don't, but what most people are doing is shopping around I have found. The code is very enticing, and people love to use coupon codes.

Was it worth doing? Yes... Was it a HUGE addition to our marketing effort? No. While we got a good amount of orders directly traceable to remarketing it wasn't a game changer. Now the interesting piece is what google calls "view through conversions" Those conversions that happen but the user doesn't click the ad. Essentially the ad was shown to them at some point after they visited the site and left, however, they came back and finished purchasing. This number of conversions was very large. I can't say if "seeing" our ad was enough to bring them back and close the sale or not?

we used a 10% coupon code in the animated ad

Be aware that there are user groups online who share information with other shoppers when they spot something like that.

Overuse of coupons trains shoppers to assume that the normal retail price is a ripoff.

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A remarketing campaign will likely be just a small piece of your overall promotion, but they can be nicely productive.

For one merchant whose stats I've seen, their remarketing campaigns accounted for about 1% of their total AdWords cost, but generated about 3% of the sales from AdWords. That merchant did not use coupons, they just ran a few extra of their ordinary banners in front of users who had abandoned their shopping carts.

One of the big secrets of successful remarketing is to keep a light hand about it. Set tight limits on how often your remarketing ads appear, so you don't make the user feel stalked.

Also, if you over-show your ads, the clickthrough rate will go down and that will push your costs up.

Interesting stuff. Sounds like icing on the cake. :)

Was it worth doing? Yes... Was it a HUGE addition to our marketing effort? No. While we got a good amount of orders directly traceable to remarketing it wasn't a game changer. Now the interesting piece is what google calls "view through conversions" Those conversions that happen but the user doesn't click the ad. Essentially the ad was shown to them at some point after they visited the site and left, however, they came back and finished purchasing. This number of conversions was very large. I can't say if "seeing" our ad was enough to bring them back and close the sale or not?

Would you say it's a huge addition to your marketing effort if you include the "view through conversions"?