When Does Remarketing Actually Make Sense?
Remarketing used to be 90% of Jon's budget, but it's mostly unnecessary now. However, there's one very specific business model where remarketing still makes perfect sense. Jon explains this exception and exactly how to set it up without falling into the usual remarketing traps.
If you've been following along with my content, you know how I feel about remarketing. There was a time when it made a whole lot of sense to target people who visited your website, were on your email list, or engaged with your content. Remarketing used to make up about 90% of my ad budget. But in most cases today, it just isn't necessary.
We used remarketing before because Meta needed us to identify the people most likely to convert. Meta doesn't need that anymore. If you run sales campaigns, you can see in audience segments and breakdowns that Meta targets these people automatically. That's why I say remarketing is generally unnecessary. It has issues with scalability, incrementality, and misleading results.
That said, I'm not 100% anti-remarketing. There is a very specific situation where it can be useful.
The Tiered Business Model Example
Let's say you have a low-ticket offer to bring people into your funnel. Maybe it's a $30 webinar or mini-course. The goal isn't to profit from that product but to move people toward a high-ticket offer, maybe $10,000. A lot of work goes into upgrading those low-ticket buyers. You might have a sales team reaching out by phone or text. You may have automated email sequences explaining the benefits of the high-ticket product.
You probably won't run ads directly for the $10,000 offer. It’s difficult to generate enough profitable volume at that price point with cold audiences. It can also lead to higher refunds, which are a cost of business. So instead, you advertise the low-ticket product. You might not be profitable at that stage, but that’s not the point. The goal is to get those upgrades, and that’s where profitability happens.
Where Remarketing Fits In
You track the sales funnel closely. How many low-ticket buyers upgrade? That determines profitability. Your outreach and email sequences are critical. But you can support them with ads.
Here’s the setup:
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Create at least two custom audiences of people who recently purchased your low-ticket product. Use a website custom audience and a customer list audience. Neither is perfect, so combine them.
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Run a campaign with the Awareness objective and choose Maximize Reach as the performance goal. This ensures you reach all of those people, not just a percentage.
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Because your audience may be small, you could face delivery issues. Reach optimization helps minimize that.
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Set a frequency cap that makes sense for your sales cycle. Maybe one or two impressions per day instead of Meta’s two per week default.
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Only target those custom audiences. This is one of the rare times you’ll want to turn Advantage+ Audience off.
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Stick to impactful placements like feeds, reels, and stories. With reach optimization, low-impact placements like the right column will water down delivery.
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Create ads that mimic your sales outreach and email messaging. If you have access to ad sequencing, you can even set the order people see these ads.
Why This Matters
You may struggle to reach people by phone or text. They might ignore your emails, or those messages could end up in spam. Or maybe they’ve seen everything and still aren’t convinced. These ads give you another chance to reinforce the message. Since the audience is small, the costs will be low. But these ads can work alongside your outreach to close the sale.
The Bottom of the Glass
Remarketing isn’t something I recommend in most cases, but here it can be useful. Don’t get fooled by ridiculous return on ad spend numbers that show up in Ads Manager. They’ll be inflated, not scalable, and misleading. That’s not the point.
The point is to give yourself another lever to help convert low-ticket buyers into high-ticket customers. If you have a similar business model, this is worth testing.