What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is the practice of serving ads to people who have already interacted with a brand — visited the site, viewed a product, added to cart, or engaged with a post.

It reliably reports the strongest return of any paid audience, which is both true and misleading: these are people already progressing toward a purchase, so a meaningful share of retargeting conversions would have happened without the ad. This is why incrementality testing, rather than platform-reported ROAS, is the honest way to size a retargeting budget. Retargeting pools are also small by construction, so frequency climbs fast and creative fatigue arrives far sooner than on prospecting campaigns — the same asset that lasts a month against a cold audience can be exhausted in a week here. Effective retargeting segments by intent depth and matches the message to it: a cart abandoner needs a reason to finish, while a blog reader needs a reason to consider the product at all. Signal loss from tracking restrictions has shrunk addressable pools since 2021, which has pushed budget toward broader prospecting with strong creative rather than tightly segmented retargeting ladders.