Paid Search
Remarketing
Remarketing, also called retargeting, is the practice of showing ads to people who have already visited your site or interacted with your brand but did not convert.
Because these users already know you, remarketing campaigns often deliver strong returns at lower cost. For example, showing a reminder ad to someone who abandoned a cart can recover the sale. It works across search, display, and social channels.
List construction does more for results than creative usually does. Segmenting by depth of engagement, so cart abandoners are separated from people who read one page, allows different messages and different bids for genuinely different intent. Recency matters as much: someone who visited yesterday behaves differently from someone who visited six weeks ago, and a single undifferentiated list averages them together. Exclusions matter as much. Existing customers and recent converters should be removed unless there is a specific reason to reach them, since paying to advertise to people who already bought is a common and invisible waste.
Example
A furniture store shows ads only to cart abandoners from the last 14 days, capped at 5 views per person, excluding buyers. The ad shows the exact chair left behind. Conversion rate: 6.8% against 0.9% for cold prospecting, at a third of the CPC. The audience is small, a few hundred people, but every one of them had already chosen the product.
Frequently asked questions
- Does remarketing actually work?
- It works well for considered purchases with long decision cycles, and poorly for impulse products where the decision has already been made. The biggest gains usually come from excluding recent converters and capping frequency, not from broadening reach.
- How has privacy affected remarketing?
- Significantly. Safari's cookie limits, iOS restrictions and ad blockers shrink browser-based audience lists. Server-side tracking and first-party customer data now do much of the work that third-party cookies used to, which is why audience lists shrink without it.
Related terms
Working on Remarketing? See how our remarketing can help.
Explore remarketing