retargeting

Retargeting

Serving ads to people who have previously visited your website, app, or content — using cookies, pixels, or device IDs to identify and re-reach them with relevant messaging. Also called remarketing (Google's term).

When you'd see it: E-commerce (showing the exact products someone browsed but didn't buy), SaaS (following up with visitors who hit the pricing page without signing up), and B2B (serving ads to known ideal customer profiles who visited your site). The experience of being 'followed around the internet' by an ad after visiting a site is retargeting.

Why it matters: Retargeting converts people already familiar with your brand — they self-selected by visiting your site, so they're more qualified than cold audiences. ROAS on retargeting campaigns is typically 3-5× higher than cold prospecting. The downside: ad fatigue (repeated impressions become annoying) and the question of incrementality — would these people have converted anyway without the retargeting ad?

Common mistakes: Retargeting everyone who visited any page with the same ad. A user who hit the homepage for 2 seconds and a user who spent 15 minutes on the pricing page and watched a demo video are very different prospects — segment by depth of engagement, recency, and page visited. Also: over-frequency (showing the same person the same ad 20 times per week) which drives brand fatigue faster than conversions.

Related last-touch attribution, impression, ROAS, CTR, paid media