What is Retargeting?
Showing ads to people who already interacted with your brand, such as site visitors, video viewers, or cart abandoners, to bring them back to convert. Because the audience is already warm, retargeting almost always posts a higher ROAS than cold prospecting, but it is capped by how much warm traffic the top of the funnel produces. It is the bottom-of-funnel complement to prospecting, not a replacement for it.
Retargeting (also called remarketing) segments warm audiences by intent depth, with the warmest segments (add-to-cart and checkout abandoners) typically getting the most aggressive ads and offers, then broader pools like all site visitors or recent video viewers behind them. Its strong ROAS can be misleading: retargeting often harvests purchases that would have happened anyway and is structurally limited by audience size, so a brand cannot scale revenue on it alone. Healthy growth depends on prospecting (cold reach via lookalikes or broad targeting) to keep refilling the warm pool that retargeting then closes. Two ongoing constraints shape modern retargeting: signal loss from privacy changes and iOS tracking limits has shrunk and degraded retargeting audiences, and platform automation now folds much of this logic into single broad campaigns rather than separate manual remarketing layers. The creative still matters at every stage. Cold prospecting needs a scroll-stopping hook to create intent, while retargeting can lean on specific objection-handling, reviews, and offers to convert viewers who already know the product.
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