Retargeting (also called remarketing) means showing ads to people who have already come across your brand: they visited your website, added a product to their basket, watched a video or sent you a message. Instead of trying to win over strangers, you remind people who were one step away from a decision.
Why does retargeting convert so well?
Because it reaches a warm audience. Customers rarely buy on first contact: they compare, put it off and come back later. Retargeting brings them back sooner. In e-commerce, the classic example is an abandoned basket ad; for services, it’s a reminder of your offer shown to people who read a service page but didn’t send an enquiry. In Meta Ads campaigns, we run retargeting as a separate layer of the funnel, with its own budget and creative, because the ROAS of this layer is often several times higher than that of campaigns aimed at cold traffic.
How do you avoid overdoing it?
Without limits, retargeting becomes intrusive: the same ad follows people around for weeks. Keep an eye on frequency, exclude people who have already bought, and adjust what you say to the stage they’re at. Someone who abandoned their basket should see a different message from someone who only opened your homepage. All of this depends on accurate tracking: the Meta Pixel plus the Conversions API.
Related terms: lookalike audience, Meta Pixel, conversion.
