Once consumers show interest in a specific product online, it’s easy to imagine they’re halfway down the purchase funnel. To reel in consumers the rest of the way, marketers are investing more in retargeting efforts. Marketers believe that if a consumer sees an ad for the product a little later in their online session, they may make a purchase. But, marketers may be taking their retargeting efforts a bit too far.

New research from Nanigans reveals that in 88% of cases, consumers say the ad they’re seeing is for a product they’ve purchased. And, 77% of consumers see too many ads from the same companies. This sentiment is echoed by the findings in the latest AudienceSCAN survey produced by AdMall from SalesFuel. In that survey, 38% of U.S. adults said ads that followed them from one site to another were creepy. Here’s what consumers want marketers to do with retargeting ads:

• Stop using them 39.2%
• Realize when consumers are no longer interested 33.7%
• Improve relevance of promoted products 12%
• Personalize the retargeting ads 7.6%
• Improve the creativity/​images used in ads 7.2%

Marketers use retargeting in order to boost the chances of making a sale. A separate Nanigans survey on 100 top marketers found that 53% will boost digital display advertising this year. You know what that means. A good deal of this spending will go to retargeting ads.

At the same time, the majority of marketers aren’t sure their retargeting efforts are yielding a decent ROI. One way to determine their out come is to use lift testing. This process is “a way to calculate the lift in ad performance by comparing differences in outcomes between a group of people shown advertising and a comparable control group that wasn’t shown the ad. This allows companies to know how much business they get when you spend money on advertising relative to how much business you get when you don’t spend money on advertising.”

If your clients would never send ten email messages a day to a customer or prospect, why are they retargeting so often? It may be time to talk with them about how to improve their retargeting efficiency.