Retargeting, also called remarketing, means advertising to people who already know you: site visitors, people who viewed a product or added it to the cart, past buyers, email subscribers or people who engaged with your social posts.
Most visitors leave a store without buying on their first visit. Retargeting reminds them of what they looked at and gives them a reason to come back, so it often costs less per sale than ads aimed at people who have never heard of you.
It works through a tracking pixel or a server-side connection on your store, which tells the ad platform who visited and what they did, and through customer lists you upload.
- Segment by intent: people who abandoned a cart need a different message from people who saw one page.
- Use proof and answers to objections (reviews, guarantees, delivery times) rather than repeating the first ad.
- Set a time window and watch frequency, so you don't follow people for months.
- Exclude recent buyers, unless you are offering them something new.
Common mistakes: putting most of the budget into retargeting, whose audience shrinks as soon as you stop bringing in new visitors, and giving it credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Browser and device privacy settings also make retargeting audiences smaller than your real traffic.