Quick answer: Remarketing is the practice of showing ads specifically to people who have already interacted with your business, typically by visiting your website or using your app. Because these audiences already know you, remarketing campaigns convert at much higher rates and at lower costs than acquisition campaigns.
What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing (also called retargeting) is a PPC strategy where you show ads specifically to people who have already visited your website. By placing a tracking tag on your site, Google builds an audience of previous visitors, and you can then target this audience with ads on the Display Network, YouTube, or in Google Search.
Think of it as a follow-up. Someone visited your site, looked at your services page, then left without enquiring. Remarketing puts your brand back in front of them as they browse elsewhere, keeping you top of mind when they are ready to decide.
Why Remarketing Works So Well
Remarketing audiences are your warmest non-converted prospects. They already know you exist. They have shown interest. Conversion rates are typically much higher than cold-audience campaigns.
Types of Remarketing
- Standard remarketing: Show ads to all previous website visitors
- Dynamic remarketing: Show ads featuring the specific products or pages a user viewed, highly relevant for ecommerce
- Customer list remarketing: Upload email addresses to target existing customers or warm leads
- Search remarketing (RLSA): Adjust bids for previous visitors when they search on Google
Frequency Capping
Without frequency caps, remarketing ads can become intrusive, following users too aggressively. Always set a frequency cap to limit how often the same person sees your ads per week.
Remarketing is set up as standard in our PPC service for any client with sufficient website traffic.
How Remarketing Works
You add a tracking pixel to your website (the Google Ads tag, or a Google Tag Manager container that includes it). When someone visits, they are added to a remarketing audience. You can then create campaigns specifically targeting those audiences with relevant ads, often featuring products they viewed or content they read.
Common Remarketing Strategies
- Cart abandonment. Show ads to users who added a product to cart but did not check out, often with a small incentive.
- Page-level remarketing. Show different ads to different visitors based on which pages they viewed (service-specific remarketing).
- Time-based segmentation. Show different ads at 1 day, 7 days, and 30 days post-visit, with messaging that matches the decay of intent.
- Customer match. Upload your customer list to remarket to existing customers for upsell, cross-sell, or reactivation.
- Similar audiences. Let Google find new users who behave like your existing remarketing audience, expanding reach with similar intent quality.
Where Remarketing Runs
Remarketing campaigns can run across the Google Display Network (banner ads on websites), YouTube (video ads), Gmail (Sponsored Promotions), and Search (text ads triggered by remarketing audience layers, called RLSA). Each surface has its own cost and performance profile; most accounts use Display first and add others once that is working.
Frequently Asked Questions
How big does my remarketing audience need to be?
For Display and YouTube, a minimum of 100 active users is required for the audience to be eligible. For Search remarketing (RLSA), the minimum is 1,000 users. Smaller audiences can work but reach is limited by the audience size cap.
How long should remarketing audience membership last?
Default is 30 days; the maximum is 540 days. Choose based on the typical decision cycle. Ecommerce stores often use 7 to 30 days because intent decays quickly. B2B remarketing can use 90 to 180 days because purchase cycles are longer.
Are remarketing ads creepy?
They can be when overdone (the same ad following someone for weeks). Modern best practice: cap frequency at 3 to 5 impressions per user per day, refresh ad creative every two weeks, and exclude users who have already converted. Done well, remarketing feels relevant; done badly, it feels stalkerish.
Is remarketing affected by privacy regulations?
Yes. GDPR in the EU and similar laws require explicit user consent before adding cookies for remarketing. Make sure your cookie consent banner gates the remarketing pixel until consent is given. Sites that fire pixels without consent are exposed to fines and have inflated, useless audience sizes.
Take this further
Remarketing campaigns typically convert 3 to 10 times better than acquisition campaigns at lower CPCs. Any business with steady traffic and no remarketing is leaving easy money on the table.
Ready to apply this to your own site? Book a free discovery call, or explore our PPC packages.