The practice of showing advertisements to people who previously visited a website or interacted with a brand.
A way to reconnect with interested audiences who did not convert during an earlier interaction.
Short and sweet:
The practice of showing advertisements to people who previously visited a website or interacted with a brand.
A way to reconnect with interested audiences who did not convert during an earlier interaction.
See also: Retargeting, Remarketing, Conversion
Ad retargeting is the specific application of retargeting delivered through paid advertising placements, distinguishing it from broader retargeting efforts that might also include tactics like remarketing emails sent outside of a paid ad platform entirely. It relies on a pixel or tag placed on a website to build an audience list of past visitors, which ad platforms then use to serve that same group ads as they browse elsewhere on the web. Because these ads specifically target people already familiar with a brand, ad retargeting campaigns are frequently among the most cost-efficient placements in a paid media budget relative to cold prospecting efforts.
A traveler who spends ten minutes comparing flights on Expedia without booking will likely see an ad retargeting campaign follow them to completely unrelated websites for days afterward.
Furniture retailers like Wayfair rely heavily on this same tactic, showing the exact couch someone viewed rather than a generic promotion, since that specificity tends to drive far more return visits.
Criteo built an entire advertising business around this practice, specializing in following abandoned shopping carts across thousands of publisher websites on behalf of e-commerce clients.
