Remarketing (retargeting)
What is remarketing (retargeting)?
Remarketing, also called retargeting, is advertising to people who have already been on your site or engaged with your profiles. The lists are built by a tag on the site, and each one carries a time window — visitors to a product page in the last thirty days, say. Google calls it remarketing and Meta calls it retargeting; in the European Union the lists depend on cookie consent.
Example
A shop gets 12,000 visitors a month. Nine hundred reach the basket and 260 buy. That leaves 640 people who chose a product and did not pay. Advertising to those 640 only, at €6 per thousand impressions and eight impressions each, costs around €31 a month.
If 5% come back and order at an average of €70, that is 32 orders, or €2,240 of revenue. On its own the figure misleads: some of those people would have returned anyway, and the platform would still have claimed them. So the real test is different — pause remarketing for two weeks, or hold back part of the audience, and watch what happens to total orders.
Why it matters for a business
Remarketing is the cheapest way to talk to people who already know who you are, and the fastest way to wear out your welcome. A frequency cap and an exclusion list for buyers are not refinements to add later: nobody wants an ad for something they have already paid for.
In the European Union the lists are only built where marketing cookies are consented to, and browsers keep shortening how long that data survives. Meta holds website visitors for 180 days, and since 2026 purchase audiences for up to two years; Google allows considerably longer, though an old list rarely performs. And no audience fixes a weak page — when people drop out at the basket, the work belongs to conversion rate optimisation, not to more impressions.
What to ask
- Which lists exist, and how are they split: product viewed, basket abandoned, past customer?
- Are people who already bought excluded?
- How often does one person see the ad in a week?
- How is the contribution measured — with a held-back audience, or only from the platform’s report?
- What do they see: the same ad again, or a reason to come back?
We set the lists, the windows and the messages alongside the rest of the work in Google Ads.