What is remarketing and how does it work?
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a form of online advertising that shows your ads to people who have already visited your website or shown interest in your business. Instead of chasing cold audiences who have never heard of you, you concentrate your budget on visitors who already know what you do. Because that audience is warmer, remarketing ads usually cost less per click and convert more often than ads aimed at strangers.
How remarketing works
Remarketing relies on a small piece of code, usually called a pixel or a tag, placed on your website. When someone visits a page, the code adds them to an audience list. Advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Meta then recognise that person as they browse other websites, watch videos or scroll through social feeds, and show them your ads.
You can also build audiences without a pixel. Google Ads Customer Match and Meta Custom Audiences let you upload a list of customer email addresses, and the platforms match those addresses to signed-in users. That approach matters more as tracking rules tighten, because it runs on data you already own rather than data borrowed from third parties.
The main types of remarketing
- Standard remarketing: ads shown to past visitors across Google's display network and partner sites.
- Dynamic remarketing: ads that show the specific products or pages each visitor looked at, usually with an image and price pulled from your product feed.
- Search remarketing: past visitors see adjusted bids or special ads when they search for your keywords again on Google.
- Social remarketing: audiences built from your website visitors, video viewers or email list, shown ads on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
- Email remarketing: automated follow-up emails triggered by an action, such as abandoning a basket or downloading a guide.
Most businesses get the best results from combining a couple of these rather than running all of them at once. The audience list is often the same; the message and the placement are what change.
What the cookieless change means for you
For years remarketing ran on third-party cookies, small files that let one site follow a visitor across the web. Browsers have been phasing those out, and Google has been rolling out replacements built on first-party data and signed-in users. The practical effect for a small business is straightforward: your own data is now the foundation of remarketing. Email signups, account logins, newsletter subscribers and the behaviour you can see in your own analytics matter more than they used to, because they are the audiences you can reliably reach.
How to use remarketing well
- Show ads that match where the visitor is in the journey. Someone who read a blog post needs a different message from someone who added a product to their basket.
- Set a frequency cap so people see a handful of ads a day at most, rather than following them around the internet.
- Segment your lists. Visitors who spent time on your pricing page are worth more than someone who bounced off the homepage.
- Exclude people who already converted, or your ads keep following customers who have already bought.
- Test the copy and the offer, just as you would with any other campaign.
Relevance drives cost in remarketing just as it does in search ads. An ad that matches the visitor's interest and lands on a page that delivers what it promised will cost less per click, and our guide to Google Ads Quality Score (https://victory.digital/what-is-google-ads-quality-score) explains how that scoring works.
Remarketing is not a substitute for search ads or for reaching new people. It works best as the second touch: the reminder that turns a look into an enquiry, and an enquiry into a sale.
If you would like to add remarketing to your paid search activity, our PPC team plans, builds and manages Google Ads campaigns for businesses across the UK, including audience setup and remarketing. Digital marketing packages start at GBP 849 a month. See the packages at https://victory.digital/pay-per-click
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