Retargeting
Retargeting is ads shown to people who already know you. They visited your site, watched a video, left something in a cart, or bought before. Remarketing is the same idea: Google usually says remarketing, and Meta (Facebook and Instagram ads) usually says retargeting.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
What retargeting is
Retargeting rebuilds an audience out of behaviour you already recorded. Page views, add to carts, lead form opens, video watch time, and purchase history all become targetable pools, usually as a custom audience on Meta (a list of people who already interacted with you, on Facebook and Instagram) or a remarketing list in Google Ads.
Product-level versions run on a feed (a file of product data: titles, prices, photos), which is where dynamic product ads come in: the person sees the exact item they looked at instead of a generic brand banner.
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The drink brand advertises on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube. Someone watches a 15-second ad, taps through, reads the ingredients, and leaves. Meta adds that person to a 14-day website audience. The next ads they see are retargeting, not prospecting (ads to people who have never engaged).
Why retargeting matters
Most people do not buy on the first visit. Retargeting is the cheapest way to finish a job that prospecting (ads to people who have never engaged with you) started, and it carries the offer, the shipping promise, or the review that closes the gap.
Retargeting also matters because it is the most over-credited line in paid media. Signal loss shrank the pools, but attribution still hands retargeting the sale it was always going to get.
How to read retargeting results
A 12x return on cart abandoners is not 12x of new profit. Ask what those people would have done anyway. Holdout tests and incrementality work (turn the ads off for a matched group and see whether total sales move) are the honest read, not the platform column.
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. 10,000 people visit the drink brand's website. The drink brand spends $8,000 showing those people ads for 14 days. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) credits 400 purchases. At a $40 average order, that is $16,000 in attributed revenue, a 2x return ($16,000 of credited sales divided by $8,000 of retargeting spend). Then the drink brand asks how many of those 400 purchases would have happened without the reminder. The drink brand holds out 20% of the visitor list (2,000 of the 10,000 visitors) and never retargets them. That 2,000-person holdout still buys at a similar rate. A large share of the 2x return was people who were coming back anyway.
Watch frequency (how many times the same person sees the ad) and window length. A 180-day list served daily turns into a nuisance, and a shorter window with a real offer usually beats a longer one with a reminder. The drink brand also excludes anyone who bought in the last 30 days, so a customer does not see the bottle they just paid for.
Common retargeting mistakes
- Scaling retargeting budget past the size of the audience feeding it.
- Leaving recent buyers in the pool so they see the item they just paid for.
- Treating the reported return as incremental profit with no holdout to check it.
Lemonado
How Lemonado helps with retargeting
Retargeting is the easiest line to overrate. Lemonado puts it next to prospecting spend and total revenue, so you can see whether it added sales or re-billed sales you already had.