Retargeting (remarketing)
Ads aimed only at people who already visited you. The reason that product keeps following you around the internet.
See it
What it is
Retargeting shows ads only to people who already did something: visited a page, watched 50% of a video, added to cart, started a trial. A tracking pixel or a customer list drops them into an audience, and the campaign buys impressions against that audience instead of against strangers. Google's name for it is remarketing; the mechanics are the same.
It works because the audience is warm, so click-through and conversion rates run far above cold prospecting, and the creative can be short and specific ('still thinking about the blue one?'). Reach for it on the highest-intent drop-off points first: cart abandoners, pricing page visitors, trial signups who never activated.
Gotcha: without a frequency cap and a burn pixel (an exclusion rule that removes people the moment they convert), you will spend real money advertising a product to people who already bought it, twelve times a day, until they hate you. Also budget for shrinkage: cookie expiry, iOS tracking prompts, and ad blockers mean your retargeting pool is smaller and shorter-lived than the platform first suggests.
Ask AI for it
Set up a retargeting campaign plan for an ecommerce site. Define four pixel-based audiences by intent: all visitors (30 day window), product page viewers (14 day), add-to-cart non-purchasers (7 day), and past purchasers (180 day). For each, write the audience rule, a frequency cap, one ad angle, and one line of copy. Exclude converters from every acquisition audience with a burn rule, and split budget so the highest-intent audience gets the most spend per person, not the most total spend. Output as a table.