Retargeting

These people are not cold strangers. They already showed interest, so retargeting usually converts better than cold prospecting and is one of the more efficient uses of a small ad budget. It matters most in B2B, where one visit rarely closes a deal. A buyer takes weeks to decide, and a light sequence of reminders keeps the business in mind while they compare options.

• Build the audience from a specific action, such as a visit to the pricing page, not from every visitor.
• Exclude anyone who already booked a call or bought, so spend is not wasted reminding a customer to buy again.
• Match the message to where the person dropped off. A pricing-page visitor needs an answer to a pricing objection, not the homepage pitch.
• Cap how often one person sees the ad. Too many impressions reads as pestering.
• Set a time limit on the audience, because interest fades and stale retargeting wastes budget.
• Collect consent where the law requires it. In the EU and the UK, tracking cookies need a visitor's agreement first.

Retargeting, also called remarketing, shows ads to a specific group: people who have already been in contact with your business. The list is built by a small piece of tracking code on the site, often called a pixel, or by uploading a list of contacts to an advertising platform. Someone reads a pricing page, leaves, and sees a follow-up ad on social media or another site over the following days.

• Retargeting everyone who ever touched the site, which mixes buyers, job seekers and competitors.
• Running the same ad for months.
• Forgetting that the audience is small. A site with little traffic has few people to retarget, so cold traffic must feed it.