Retargeting shows ads to people who have already interacted with you: visited a page, watched a video, opened an email, or appear on a customer list you uploaded. The audience is small and warm, which is why the click and conversion rates look flattering next to cold campaigns. It is a recovery channel, not a demand channel.
Briefly explained
- Ads aimed at people who already came to you once.
- Best suited to decisions that take days, not minutes.
- Cheap relative to the value of the job it recovers.
- Capped badly, it reads as surveillance rather than a reminder.
How are the audiences built?
The sources, in descending order of how far you can rely on them:
- Your own customer list, uploaded and matched. The most durable, and the least affected by browser changes. See first-party data.
- Site visitors, collected by a tag. Smaller and shorter-lived than they used to be.
- Engagement on a platform — video views, profile visits, form opens. Held by the platform rather than by you.
What can it realistically do?
Recover decisions that are still open.
The natural fit is the quote that has not been accepted yet. Someone weighing a large purchase thinks for days or weeks, talks it over with somebody else, and compares two or three prices. Staying visible during that window costs very little against the value of the work.
What it cannot do is create demand. Nobody books a job they were not already considering because an ad followed them around.
How do you run it without irritating people?
- Cap the frequency, so the same person sees it a handful of times, not dozens.
- Keep membership short. Two weeks suits most considered purchases.
- Exclude anyone who already booked. Being chased after paying is the fastest way to look careless.
- Segment by what they looked at, so the ad matches the job rather than the brand.
- Keep the budget modest. It is a supporting channel. Treating it as a main one inflates its apparent performance.
Why does it look better than it is?
Because this audience arrived pre-qualified by their own earlier visit. A share of these people would have come back anyway, and the platform counts them as recovered.
Read it with that in mind. The honest question is not what it converted, but what it converted that the rest of your marketing would have lost.
What do the terms mean?
- Audience: The list of people the ads can reach.
- Membership duration: The length of time a visit keeps somebody in the audience.
- Frequency cap: A ceiling on how many times the same person is shown it.
- Exclusion audience: A list the campaign must not show to, usually existing customers.
- View-through conversion: Credit claimed for someone who saw the ad without clicking. Treat it with suspicion.
Owner questions
