Remarketing

Remarketing (also called retargeting) is an advertising technique that re-engages people who have already interacted with your website, app, video channel or a previous ad. Instead of paying to reach brand-new audiences, you direct budget toward users who already know the brand and are statistically closer to a purchase decision. That is why remarketing campaigns usually deliver a higher conversion rate and a lower cost per acquisition than pure prospecting.

How remarketing works

The foundation is a tracking snippet embedded in the site — the Google Ads/Analytics tag in Google's ecosystem, or the Facebook pixel in Meta's. When a user visits, the tag adds them to an audience list based on rules you define, for example:

• everyone who visited in the last 30 days,
• people who added a product to the cart but did not check out,
• users who viewed a specific page or watched a video.

Ad platforms such as Google Ads and Meta Ads then serve ads to those lists across the display network, search results (the RLSA variant) or social feeds.

Remarketing in practice

The most effective scenarios are recovering abandoned carts, upselling to existing customers, re-engaging users who dropped off a form, and keeping a brand top-of-mind through a long B2B buying cycle. The key is to segment lists by intent and to set sensible membership durations and frequency caps so you do not fatigue the audience with the same creative. A working cookie-consent banner is a prerequisite — without it, collecting remarketing data from EU visitors is not permitted.