How Remarketing Works

Prefer to read? Jump to the video transcript ↓

Remarketing works by capturing a signal of interest, a website visit, a social media engagement, an email signup, and then serving follow-up ads to the people behind those signals. You tag the activity, build an audience from it, and pair that audience with ads that match where the person is in their decision. In this post we wrap up our series on remarketing; you can see from the most recent posts that remarketing is a comprehensive tool that allows many marketing strategies to take shape. Here are the key points to remember.

When people say remarketing they often connect it to site remarketing. This is true, and even if you are not doing any other type of remarketing, it’s important to turn on site remarketing because this can have such an outsized benefit to your marketing campaigns. You can then go a step further and break out audiences by the pages they are seen on your website. A way to make site remarketing more interesting is to breakout targeting to key product or purchase pages that are relevant to your customers, such as remarketing to cart abandons.
Remarketing can be triggered on a number of non site activities such as Facebook Page engagers and people on the email list. Experiment with this type of remarketing if you want to find different types of signals that may help your marketing campaign become more effective. Look for any type of native action in social media channels where people can connect to your brand, so that these people can be reached after their initial engagement to your brand.
Because remarketing has the ability to segment people with such granularity, you can pair up specific consumer segments to specific creative executions. The most common deployment of this tactic is to show product ads to people who recently visited your product pages.

In summary, remarketing can be deployed anytime you have the ability to pixel or track people on an owned property, or a property that you control on social media platforms. That principle hasn’t changed since this series was written, what has changed is the reach. The same audiences now follow people across Meta, Google, TikTok, and even connected TV through demand side platforms, and because remarketing runs on your own first-party signals, it weathered the industry’s privacy shifts better than almost any other tactic. It’s a core building block in the campaigns our programmatic advertising agency runs.

The best marketers are constantly experimenting with the different data signals and consumer journeys that drive a consumer to take action with your business.

Subscribe to our Youtube channel for more marketing tips.

Video Transcript: How Remarketing Works

Stick around for a quick summary of how you can make remarketing work for your business. Welcome to episode number 101 of The Great Reset. My name is Robert Brill and I'm the CEO of BrillMedia.co.

We're an advertising firm that drives sales and leads with the best data targeting and technology available in the marketplace. We're here five days a week talking about marketing and advertising so you can learn how to be a better marketing practitioner. Today we'll wrap up our series on remarketing.

You can see from the most recent videos that we've posted that remarketing is a comprehensive and catch-all phrase that allows many marketing strategies to take place. Here are the key points to remember. When people say remarketing, they often connect it to site remarketing because that was the first type of remarketing that came to shape.

This is true and even if you're not doing anything other than this type of remarketing, it's important to turn on site remarketing because this can have such an outsized benefit to the marketing effectiveness of your campaigns. You can go to a step further and break out audiences by the pages they are seen on your website. A great way to make site remarketing more interesting is to break out targeting to key product or purchase pages that are relevant to your business, such as remarketing to cart abandons so people who have visited a page ultimately didn't buy.

They should be seeing an ad for that product. Remarketing can be triggered on a number of non-site activity platforms such as Facebook page engagers and people on an email list. Experiment with this type of remarketing if you want to find different types of signals that may help your marketing campaign become more effective.

Look for any type of native action in social media channels where people can connect to your brand so that these people can be reached after their initial engagement to your brand. Because remarketing has the ability to segment people with such granularity, we can pair up specific customer segments with specific creative executions. The most common use deployment of this tactic is to show ads to people who recently visited your product pages with the exact product that they recently looked at.

So in summary, remarketing can be deployed anytime you have the ability to pixel or track people on an owned property such as your website or a property that you control such as your social media pages. The best marketers are constantly experimenting with different data signals and consumer journeys that drive a customer to take action with your business. And on the next few episodes, we're going to start a series on consumer journeys.

So stick around for that. If you found this video helpful, please give us a like and let us know that you like what you're doing. Give us a subscribe for more videos like this to help you be a better marketer.

Hit that notification button. The fastest way in is our $497 marketing diagnostic. We interview you about your marketing, your economics, and your clients, then lay out the strategy for becoming the inevitable choice. Click the link below for more information.

Talk to you soon on another episode of The Great Reset.

Frequently asked questions

How does remarketing actually work?

Remarketing works by tracking people who interact with something you own, like your website, your Facebook page, or your email list, and then showing them ads after that first interaction. It can be deployed any time you can place a pixel (a small piece of tracking code) on a property you own, or track activity on a social platform you control. The best marketers keep experimenting with different signals to find the ones that move their customers to act.

What is site remarketing and why does it matter so much?

Site remarketing means showing ads to people who have already visited your website, and it is worth turning on even if you do no other kind of remarketing, because it can have an outsized benefit on your campaigns. You can then go a step further and break out audiences by the pages people visited, like remarketing specifically to people who abandoned a shopping cart.

Can I remarket to people who never visited my website?

Yes. Remarketing can be triggered by non-site activities, such as someone engaging with your Facebook page or being on your email list. Look for any native action on social media where people can connect with your brand; each of those actions is a signal you can use to reach that person again after their first engagement.

Should different remarketing audiences see different ads?

Yes, because remarketing can segment people with real granularity, you can pair specific groups with specific creative. The most common version of this: show product ads to people who recently visited your product pages, so the ad matches what they already showed interest in.

How Remarketing Works