Definition
Retargeting (remarketing) is advertising aimed at people who've already interacted with you: visited the site, viewed a product, or added to cart without buying.
Also called: Retargeting, RemarketingTest the message before scaling the budget.
Everyday colour.
One variable per comparison makes the learning easier to interpret.
01Define what the customer should understand or want.
High ROAS, but watch the incrementality
Retargeting almost always looks fantastic in attribution, because it reaches people who were already on their way to buying. But that's exactly why a large share of those sales aren't incremental: the customer would have bought anyway. The attributed ROAS overstates the real effect.
That doesn't make retargeting worthless. It catches people at the right moment and can lift conversion rate. But the budget should be steered with an eye on incrementality: test with a holdout, and don't let a pretty retargeting ROAS pull money away from the prospecting that creates the demand in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
Is retargeting incremental?
Only partly. A share of the customers retargeting reaches would have converted anyway. That's why retargeting's attributed ROAS overstates the real, incremental effect, something a holdout test reveals.
How much of the budget should go to retargeting?
Rarely the majority. Retargeting harvests demand; prospecting creates it. Cut too far into prospecting to chase a pretty retargeting ROAS, and the pipeline of new customers dries up.
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About the author
Nicklas Segatz Mortensen
Growth hacker and fractional CMO with 10+ years' experience and hundreds of millions in managed ad spend behind him. Background from larger Danish and international scale-ups, and from the agency world.
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