Remarketing Vs. Retargeting
Remarketing and retargeting are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct differences in how they re-engage potential customers. Both marketing tactics aim to bring back people who have previously interacted with your business, but they do so in different ways.
Retargeting primarily uses paid ads to reach people who have recently visited your website or engaged with your brand online. It works by tracking users through cookies or pixels and then displaying targeted ads to them as they browse other websites, social media platforms, or search engines.
Remarketing, on the other hand, typically involves email marketing to reconnect with past customers or website visitors. It often uses lists of existing contacts—such as people who signed up for a newsletter, abandoned a shopping cart, or made a previous purchase—to send personalized follow-up emails.
While email is the primary use of remarketing, it can also be done using paid ads. Popular advertising platforms like Google and Facebook allow you to upload a list of specific users to remarket with ads.
Advertising platforms don’t make a clear distinction between the two terms. This helps increase the confusion and assumption that the two concepts are identical.
Which Is Better, Remarketing or Retargeting?
Given their similarities, you may wonder whether retargeting or remarketing is more effective for your business.
Like many things, the answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
Remarketing campaigns will likely be your ideal choice if you seek ways to engage and spark interest from an old audience.
If you want to capitalize on the fresh attention of a new user who views your site for the first time, you can create a retargeting campaign to bring them back to your site.
Most businesses can benefit from both retargeting and remarketing. In fact, the two play rather nicely together. You can use display ads and other types of retargeting to engage users at the top of the marketing funnel.
You can use email remarketing campaigns to target people at the bottom of the funnel.
What Is Remarketing And How It Works?
Remarketing is a strategy that reconnects with past visitors and customers to keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage repeat engagement. It helps nurture leads, build brand awareness, and maximize each customer’s lifetime value.
Getting started with remarketing is simple. As your business attracts website visitors, social media interactions, and customers, you can create a list of these people and use it for targeted marketing campaigns.
Once you’ve built your list, you can use various platforms to reach your audience. Some of the most effective remarketing channels include:
- Facebook Ads – You can upload email lists or phone numbers to run remarketing ads on Facebook and Instagram, allowing you to reconnect with users where they already spend time.
- Google Ads – Google’s remarketing campaigns let you reach your audience across millions of websites in the Google Display Network, as well as Google Search and YouTube.
- Email Marketing – One of the most common forms of remarketing, email campaigns target past customers and subscribers with relevant offers, reminders, and updates.
There are several ways to structure a remarketing campaign, depending on your goals:
- Broad Remarketing Campaigns – These target your entire audience, such as showing a display ad to all past website visitors promoting a new product.
- Time-Based Campaigns – You can engage customers at strategic times, such as sending a reminder email a few weeks after a purchase to encourage reorders.
- Granular Targeting – This approach tailors campaigns based on user behavior, like showing ads for a specific product category to visitors who browsed that section of your site.
The different types of campaigns you can use in your strategy include:
1. Email Remarketing
This involves targeting previous customers and subscribers through email campaigns. Businesses use email marketing software to send relevant messages based on customer behavior, such as:
- Showcasing new products or exclusive offers.
- Reminding users about abandoned carts.
- Encouraging subscription renewals or repeat purchases.
2. Display Remarketing
With display remarketing, your ads appear on various websites within an advertising network, like Google Display Network. These ads can be:
- Static Ads – Same ad shown to all users.
- Dynamic Ads – Personalized ads based on what the user previously viewed or purchased.
3. Video Remarketing
If your brand uses video marketing (e.g., YouTube), you can run video remarketing campaigns that target viewers who have interacted with your content but haven’t taken action.
What Is Retargeting And How It Works?
Retargeting is a marketing tactic for finding people who have interacted with your business and showing them digital advertisements to bring them back to your site.
These ads are shown to different parts of your audience based on past behavior on your site such as the pages they view.
To track the user behavior on your website, retargeting relies on tracking pixels. These small pieces of code are added to the backend of your site. They enable it to place cookies on visitors’ browsers.
Each visitor gets an anonymous ID that the ad network uses to track their behavior. With the cookies, the ad server is able to access the visitor’s ID and automatically add it to your remarketing lists.
If someone views a page or likes your post, you can quickly add them to a retargeting campaign to see if you can encourage further engagement.
Retargeting ads normally use a cost-per-click (CPC) payment model. However, some use cost-per-impression (CPM) and cost-per-acquisition models as well.
Retargeting is an effective marketing strategy as it allows you to capitalize on your audience’s interest quickly and at scale.
Here are some of the ways you can use retargeting:
- Recovering abandoned carts: When someone leaves your site with products still in their cart you can use a retargeting ad to remind them to complete their order.
- Revisiting a specific page: When someone views a product or service page, you can create retargeting ads encouraging them to explore it further.
- Search retargeting: With this type of retargeting, you can target customers based on the keyword searches they conduct when using search engines such as Google.
- Account-based retargeting: Account-based retargeting is a strategy for acquiring new accounts by showing ads to decision-makers within your prospects’ companies.
With various ad platforms, you can filter users by position to ensure that your ads are only going to those with the authority to close the deal.
LinkedIn is one of the most popular platforms to deploy an account-based retargeting strategy.
You can use a wide variety of ad types for retargeting. This includes a mix of static and dynamic formats, as well as text and visual ads.
All of these ad types will fall into one of two categories depending on how the audience for the retargeting campaign is collected.
Pixel-based retargeting ads
This is the most common type of retargeting ad. Pixel-based ads are those that use the cookies I mentioned to gather the users to include in your campaigns.
With them, you can retarget visitors without gathering their contact information.
Pixel-based ads can be triggered instantly and automatically after someone performs an action on your site.
The ad server will track their behavior, and if their actions match the specifications of your retargeting campaign, they will be immediately added as part of the audience and eligible to receive ads when they visit the respective web properties.
List-based retargeting ads
This is a less common type of retargeting and more along the lines of a remarketing methodology.
With list-based ads, you upload a list of target audience members to your ad platform. The network then identifies the people who match the contact information you provided and shows them your ads.
While this type of ad can be highly personalized, it is far less timely. Instead of having users automatically added to a campaign, you need to take the time to upload the list.
Not once, but each time you want to expand an audience or add a new one.
