What is remarketing?
Showing ads to people who have already visited your site or engaged with you. Cheaper than reaching strangers, and effective when the message picks up where they left off.
Most people do not buy or enquire the first time they visit a website. Remarketing is showing ads to the people who came, looked and left, to bring them back. Google calls it remarketing; on Facebook and Instagram it is usually called retargeting. It is the same idea.
It works because those people already know who you are, so it tends to cost less and convert better than reaching strangers. It is at its best when the ad picks up where they left off: a reminder of the product they looked at, the service page they read, or an answer to the thing that probably stopped them.
It goes wrong in two ways. Showing the same ad to the same person for weeks is the fastest way to become irritating, so it needs sensible limits on how often and for how long. And it depends on tracking visitors, which in Ireland and across the EU means proper consent before any of it is switched on.
Paid media measured on what it returns, not what it spends.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns built on search terms, creative testing and conversion tracking, not impressions.