Retargeting

Retargeting is showing ads to people who already interacted with you, visited your site, viewed a product, added to cart, so you are talking to a warm audience instead of strangers.

Almost nobody buys on the first visit. They land, they look, something distracts them, and they leave. Retargeting is how you go back to exactly those people and give them the second nudge, rather than starting over with someone new. You build it from your Custom Audiences and Website Custom Audiences, the lists the pixel quietly assembles of people who did something on your site, and then you run ads only to them. Because they already know who you are, the response tends to look strong and the cost per sale tends to look low.

That warmth is exactly why retargeting is worth doing and exactly why it is so easy to misread. The results flatter it. A big share of the people you retarget were coming back anyway, so the sales that land in the retargeting campaign are partly sales you would have made with no ad at all, which is the whole point of incrementality. It is a genuine lever, but the number it reports is softer than it looks.

Retargeting cannot be your whole engine, because it only fishes in a pond someone already filled. The size of your retargeting audience is set entirely by how many people visited in the first place, so if you lean on it alone, you slowly drain the pond and wonder why results fade. Somebody has to keep filling it with new visitors, and that job is prospecting, not retargeting.

Retargeting closes people who were already in the room; it cannot bring new people into the building.