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While remarketing was once central to ad strategy, Meta now prioritizes these audiences automatically. Manual remarketing still has its place, but the results aren't what they seem.
While remarketing was once central to ad strategy, Meta now prioritizes these audiences automatically. Manual remarketing still has its place, but the results aren't what they seem.
Okay, let's start from the top, from the very beginning.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is explicitly targeting people who are already connected to your business. Normally, that means website visitors or your customer list, but it also includes things like engagement with your content on Facebook or Instagram.
You're targeting custom audiences of these people because you believe they’re most likely to perform the action you want.
The question isn’t whether it’s valuable to reach these people. The question is: should we still explicitly target them?
Remarketing first became a thing way back in 2012 on Facebook.
That’s when we were first able to target our customer list, which was a huge deal at the time. Suddenly, advertisers had control over who was seeing their ads, and they could target some of the most valuable people.
In 2013, we got FBX, which was the ability to do website remarketing using third-party partners.
Then, in 2014, Facebook (now Meta) allowed advertisers to do website remarketing directly through the main advertising interface, targeting website visitors.
At the time, this was extremely valuable. More importantly, it was very cheap. That’s probably the most critical part.
For me, remarketing was the core of my strategy.
I had large remarketing audiences, which made it even more effective.
I did a little bit of everything:
It was really effective. And honestly, that’s what I was known for for quite some time.
But it took me a while to accept the fact that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this anymore.
Now, things are different.
When audience segments became available, it helped us understand that remarketing is already prioritized by default, even when targeting broadly.
So, it’s already happening.
Also, it’s much more expensive to reach people now, and that’s a critical factor.
Advertisers swear by remarketing because of the amazing surface-level results.
But so many of those results come from view-through conversions. Your ad may have been shown to someone, but they might not have even noticed it before converting.
They were already going to convert because they were visiting your website, receiving your emails, or engaging with your brand elsewhere.
But Meta still takes credit because they were shown the ad.
These are the easiest conversions. If you have to target anyone, of course, you’d target them.
But many of these people would have converted without your ads.
It may look highly profitable on the surface, but it may not actually add much additional profit.
They were already:
These are often small audiences.
If you have a remarketing campaign that appears to be working well, you can’t just keep increasing the budget. That’s different from targeting a broader audience, where you have more room to scale.
You get amazing results for a short period of time, but then it burns out.
You’ve already reached everyone likely to convert.
Some would say to eliminate remarketing entirely because it happens naturally now.
I don’t quite go that far.
If you have a reasonable budget (and that depends on what you’re trying to accomplish), remarketing shouldn’t be your central strategy.
Honestly, even if you’re spending $50–$100 per day, it probably shouldn’t be your main approach.
There’s usually no need for general remarketing anymore -- meaning targeting all website visitors, your email list, etc. -- because Meta is already prioritizing those people.
I just used it recently for high-dollar purchases.
Here’s what I did:
In this case, I got a 27x ROAS.
But there were two major caveats:
About half of those conversions were view-through conversions. They would have happened anyway.
All I was really doing was using an ad to reinforce my email efforts.
If you use remarketing, just know that the results aren’t what they seem.
It can still be beneficial. It can still be helpful to a point.
But surface-level stats don’t tell the whole story.
I encourage you to read more about this topic.
I wrote an article about all the tricks advertisers use -- sometimes knowingly, sometimes not -- to inflate conversion results.
Go to jonloomer.com/tricks to learn how to uncover the truth behind conversion results.
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