Remarketing
Remarketing shows ads to people who have already visited your website, used your app or interacted with your brand.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing (also called retargeting) means showing ads to people who have already interacted with your business: visited your website, watched your videos, used your app or are on your customer lists. Because these people already know you, remarketing often achieves a higher conversion rate than prospecting to new audiences.
Where it is used:
- Google Ads: in search (remarketing lists for search ads), YouTube, Demand Gen and the display network. Google now calls these lists “data segments”.
- Microsoft Advertising: remarketing lists based on the UET tag.
- LinkedIn and social platforms: retargeting website visitors, video viewers or people who opened a lead form.
Good practice:
- Segment by behaviour: someone who viewed pricing deserves a different message from someone who read one blog post.
- Exclude recent customers and limit frequency, so ads don’t become annoying.
- Combine website lists with Customer Match and other first-party data.
Remarketing depends on cookies or similar identifiers, so it needs consent in many markets. In the EU, users who decline cookies can’t be added to remarketing lists, and Google requires Consent Mode for EEA traffic. Expect smaller lists in Europe than in markets with different privacy rules, and plan budgets per market accordingly (GDPR).