Showing ads specifically to people who already visited your website or engaged with your brand, to bring them back and finish what they started.
Retargeting (sometimes called remarketing) is the marketing equivalent of a gentle follow-up. Most people who land on your website leave without buying or filling in a form — they get distracted, compare options, or simply forget. Retargeting lets you show those same people your ads later, while they scroll social media or browse other sites, to nudge them back.
It works because you're talking to "warm" people who already know your name, rather than complete strangers. That familiarity usually makes retargeting one of the cheapest and most profitable parts of an ad budget.
A boutique online furniture shop gets 10,000 visitors a month, but only 200 buy on their first visit. They set up a retargeting campaign that shows the exact sofa each visitor looked at, with free-delivery messaging, for the next 14 days. With a budget of just €800, they bring back 140 shoppers who buy an average order of €620 — roughly €87,000 in sales. The campaign earns far more than broad "find new customers" ads at a fraction of the cost.
Retargeting recovers sales you've already paid to attract. You spent money getting that visitor to your site once; retargeting makes sure that money isn't wasted when they leave. The trick is to retarget the right people. If you tell the ad platform which past visitors actually became valuable customers, it can spend more on bringing back high-value prospects and less on tyre-kickers — squeezing more profit from the same budget.
Lookalike audiences · Click ID · First-party data · Conversion value · ROAS
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