Retargeting
Showing ads to people who already visited your site or engaged with your content.
Retargeting (also called remarketing) is running paid ads to audiences who have previously interacted with your brand — visited your site, engaged with content, added to cart, or watched a video.
Context
Retargeting typically shows higher reported ROAS than prospecting, which is why platforms push it. It also has the worst incrementality — most retargeted users would have converted anyway, so the ads just steal credit from organic conversion.
Healthy paid programs use retargeting strategically (cart abandonment, demo no-shows) rather than flood users with display retargeting for weeks after a single site visit.
A DTC brand showed 4.2x ROAS on retargeting vs 2.1x on prospecting. Incrementality testing revealed retargeting had ~20% lift (80% of conversions would have happened anyway); prospecting had ~70% lift. The 'worse' channel was actually driving more incremental revenue.
Retargeting fatigue is real. Showing the same creative to the same user 15+ times produces diminishing returns and brand damage. Cap frequency and rotate creative aggressively.
Related terms
Attribution
Assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that contributed.
Incrementality
Measuring how many conversions were actually caused by an ad vs would have happened anyway.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Revenue divided by ad spend — the most reported and most misleading paid metric.
Services that apply this
More Paid Media terms
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The fully-loaded cost of acquiring a new paying customer.
CAC Payback Window
The number of months until a new customer's contribution margin equals the cost to acquire them.
LTV:CAC Ratio
Customer lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost.
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
Total revenue divided by total marketing spend — a blended metric that resists attribution gaming.