Keywords & Targeting
Remarketing (Retargeting)
Remarketing is advertising to people who have already interacted with your business, such as site visitors, product viewers, cart abandoners, or past customers, using lists built from tracking and first-party data.
In practice
Remarketing is usually the cheapest conversion source in any account because the audience already knows you. Dynamic remarketing on Google and dynamic product ads on Meta show the exact products someone viewed; standard remarketing shows a message matched to how far they got.
The controls that separate good remarketing from annoying remarketing are segmentation, frequency, and exclusion. Segment by recency and depth: a seven-day cart abandoner and a 180-day homepage visitor should not see the same ad or the same bid. Cap frequency so nobody sees you twenty times a week. Exclude converters from acquisition-stage lists so you stop paying to re-sell what they already bought.
Remarketing on health, finance, and other sensitive categories is restricted by platform policy, and audience features in regulated regions depend on consent mode being implemented. Where remarketing is off the table, search and customer match usually still are not.
Why it matters
It converts the demand you already paid to create, at a fraction of the cost of finding new demand.
See it in a real accountConcealment Express: dynamic remarketing for cart abandoners in an account with $9.5M in revenue
RELATED TERMS
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are Meta targeting segments built from your own data, including customer lists, website visitors, app users, video viewers, and people who engaged with your Page or Instagram profile.
Customer Match
Customer Match is a Google Ads feature that lets you upload hashed first-party customer data (emails, phone numbers, addresses) to build audiences for targeting, exclusion, bid adjustment, and as signals for automated campaigns.
Consent Mode
Consent mode is a Google framework that adjusts how Google tags behave based on the user's consent choices, sending cookieless pings when consent is denied so Google can model conversions that are not directly observed.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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