Win back the 96% of visitors who left without converting.

The terms are used interchangeably by most agencies, including us. Technically, retargeting usually refers to pixel-based advertising (showing display or social ads to past website visitors), while remarketing originally referred to re-engaging past customers via email. In practice, Google calls its pixel-based ad product "remarketing" and the industry uses both terms to mean the same thing — showing ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand.

When someone visits your website, a small piece of code (a pixel or tag) places an anonymous cookie in their browser or records their device ID. When that person later visits another website — a news site, a YouTube video, an app in the Google Display Network, or scrolls through Facebook — our ads can be shown to them specifically. The visitor never knows how it works; they simply see your brand again at the right moment.

Retargeting budgets scale with your website traffic — you can only retarget people who have visited. For most SMEs seeing 1,000–5,000 visitors per month, a retargeting spend of £300–£800/month across Google and Meta generates meaningful results. Higher-traffic ecommerce sites typically allocate 20–30% of their total paid media budget to retargeting. We advise on the right starting figure in your free strategy call.

We typically recommend retargeting windows of 30–90 days for most products and services. For high-consideration purchases (B2B software, financial products, property) we extend this to 180 days. Ecommerce cart abandonment campaigns perform best within the first 24–72 hours, so we weight spend heavily in that window. Audiences are refreshed continuously as new visitors are added and old ones removed.

Only if done badly. Intrusive retargeting — the same banner following someone for weeks with no variation — does damage brand perception. Our approach uses frequency capping (typically 3–5 impressions per day per user), creative rotation to prevent fatigue, and audience exclusions (removing converters immediately). Done well, retargeting feels like a timely reminder rather than a pursuit.

Platform minimums apply: Google requires at least 100 users in an audience to serve display ads; Meta requires 1,000. If your traffic is below these thresholds, we focus on building audience size first — through lookalike expansion or broader prospecting — before activating retargeting. For newer sites, we can also use customer list uploads (email-based matching) to start retargeting immediately.

iOS 14 and browser cookie restrictions have reduced the size of pixel-based audiences, but retargeting remains highly effective. We use server-side tracking (Conversions API for Meta, enhanced conversions for Google) to recover signal lost from browser restrictions, first-party data strategies using your CRM and email lists, and contextual targeting as a complement to behavioural data. We also set up consent mode correctly so you remain UK GDPR compliant while maximising trackable audience size.

Attribution overlap is a genuine problem — a customer might click a Search ad and a retargeting ad before converting, with both platforms claiming the sale. We solve this by setting appropriate attribution windows per platform (shorter for retargeting than for prospecting), using view-through and click-through conversions separately, and cross-referencing platform data against your actual revenue. Our monthly reports are explicit about how conversions are attributed and where overlap may exist.