Retargeting

Retargeting is an advertising strategy where you show ads specifically to people who have already interacted with your business – for example by visiting your website or landing page, watching a video or starting a form. The goal is to bring back prospects who haven't converted yet.

How retargeting works

1. A tracking pixel or the Conversion API reports visits and events to the ad platform.
2. The platform builds an audience from them, e.g. ‘visitors of the pricing page in the last 30 days’.
3. You show dedicated ads to that audience, often with a specific offer, testimonials or a reminder.

In-platform interactions work too: people who opened a Meta lead form but didn't submit it, or who watched 75% of a video.

Example

A real estate agent gets 5,000 visitors per month on a home valuation landing page, and 150 request a valuation (a 3% conversion rate). With a retargeting campaign aimed at the remaining visitors from the last 30 days, the agent spends $800 and wins 40 more leads – a cost per lead of $20, well below the $45 of the prospecting campaign.

Retargeting in lead generation

Retargeting campaigns often look especially good in platform reports because they reach people who are about to decide anyway. Whether they really bring in additional deals only becomes clear when you follow leads to the deal in your CRM and compare them with the campaigns those people originally came from.

With LeadMetrics you can compare this using first click and last click: Which campaign brought in the contact first, and which one closed it last? You see the results per campaign in dashboards.

Common mistakes

• Not excluding customers: People who already bought shouldn't keep seeing sales ads.
• Audiences too small: With only a few hundred people, frequency climbs fast and the ads get annoying.
• Overrating retargeting: Last-click numbers often make retargeting look more important than its real contribution.
• Overestimating your data: Without consent and due to browser restrictions, many visitors never make it into the audience.