Re-targeting: a second chance to make a first impression

Was on YouTube today listening to some Jimmy Cliff - who is awesome -when I noticed this ad for "Women for Women" - see screenshot below, the ad is to the right of the video. It looks like I was re-targeted.

I visited womenforwomen.org the other day and it seems they tagged me with a "re-targeting" (or re-marketing) pixel when I landed on their homepage - below the ad is a picture of the source code from their page that shows the code they used from Google to tag me.

What the code does is allow an organization to serve up an ad to a person who already visited their site but did not commit to the desired action, such as donate. The tag is a "cookie" assigned to my computer. When I go on to other Google sites like YouTube, those sites recognize and "read" my cookie - they "see" the site I visited and that I did not donate - and serve me the ad.

Is this a good tactic?

Depends on the rational behind it. Women for Women choose to tag their homepage which means that anyone who landed there will get an ad later - perhaps they want to expose their ad to a large audience and hope the mass equals large conversions.

An alternative might be to tag the "donate" page instead because it will tag people who have demonstrated interest by getting to that page - the mass of people will be lower but the conversion rate of those who see the ad later will be higher.