What is remarketing, and is it different from retargeting?
Same thing, two names. Google calls it remarketing, most marketers say retargeting. It means showing ads to people who already visited your website, watched your videos, or engaged with your social pages, across Google Display, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Instead of paying for a stranger's attention, you are following up with someone who already raised a hand.
Does retargeting work?
When the funnel underneath it works, yes, and the numbers are not subtle. Retargeted display ads average about a 0.7 percent click through rate versus roughly 0.07 percent for standard display, per Invesp, and Contentsquare's 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark shows returning visitors convert at 2.9 percent versus 1.7 percent for new visitors. The honest caveat: remarketing multiplies a working funnel. It cannot fix a weak offer, a slow landing page, or a phone nobody answers.
How much does remarketing cost?
Our retainers start at $3,500 a month, and ad spend is billed direct to your own ad accounts, never marked up. Remarketing media itself is usually the cheapest you will buy, because the audiences are small and warm. For most clients we carve out roughly 10 to 20 percent of the total ad budget for it, with the rest driving new visitors for remarketing to work on. The Growth Check is free, so you see what we see before you pay anything.
Can I set up retargeting myself?
A basic Meta website retargeting campaign, honestly, yes, in an afternoon. What is hard to do alone: the Conversions API, audience segmentation by recency and intent, 5 to 26 fresh creatives a month, set by tier, sequencing so people see a story instead of a rerun, and the discipline to kill losers every 72 hours. If you do go DIY, at minimum set frequency caps and exclude everyone who converts. Those two settings alone will save you real money.
How long until I see results?
Warm audiences move faster than cold ones, so remarketing often shows early movement within a few weeks. We still tell every client the same thing we tell them about every channel: about 90 days for a real signal, six months for compounding results. Anyone promising a verdict in a week is reading noise and calling it data.
Will retargeting annoy my customers or feel creepy?
Badly run, absolutely. Uncapped frequency and one repeating ad is how brands train people to resent them. We cap impressions per person, rotate creative constantly, rest audiences that have gone cold, and remove anyone who converts immediately. Done right, retargeting reads as presence, not pursuit: you simply keep showing up with something new to say while they decide.
I run a treatment center or medical practice. Can I even use retargeting?
Carefully, yes. Google and Meta both restrict how health related advertisers can build and target audiences, and federal regulators have put tracking pixels on healthcare websites under real scrutiny, so this is not a place to guess. We build compliant setups: engagement and site visit audiences rather than anything condition based, deliberate pixel placement, and creative that speaks to the decision maker, often a family member, without referencing anyone's health status. Our founder cofounded Fresh Start Detox and helped build SoCal Mental Health, so this is home turf, not a vertical we read about.
I run a home services or construction company. Does remarketing make sense for big ticket jobs?
It may be the single best fit for it. A kitchen remodel, a reroof, or an HVAC replacement gets researched for weeks, and most homeowners collect two or three bids. Remarketing keeps your finished projects, reviews, and financing options in front of them for that entire window, so when the bids get compared you are the company they feel like they already know. And the exclusion discipline matters here too: the day a contract signs, the ads stop.
Who owns the ad account and the audience lists if we part ways?
You do. The ad accounts are in your name and we are linked as a manager, which you can remove. The audiences and remarketing lists live inside those accounts, so they stay with you. That matters here more than on most channels, because a remarketing list is months of accumulated visitors and it cannot be rebuilt quickly. On payment you own the creative, the written content and the website work produced under the agreement, and you keep ownership of your own accounts and data at all times.
What happens in the first 30 days?
Week one is access and tracking, and confirming your tags actually fire, which is the most common thing we find broken. Week two is audience building and the first creative. Audiences need to reach a minimum size before anything can serve, so week three is usually when ads start showing. Week four is the first optimisation and report. Remarketing is slower to start than search because the audience has to fill first.
Do you run remarketing nationwide, or only locally?
Nationwide. We are based in California and run accounts across the United States. Remarketing is less affected by geography than search, because you are advertising to people who already visited your site, wherever they are. If you serve the whole country, the lists are built that way from the start.
What do you need from me to get started?
Access to your ad accounts or permission to create them in your name, access to your website or whoever manages it so tracking can be installed, and a clear idea of what a visitor is worth to you. Without that last one nobody can judge whether the spend is working.
How is this different from the remarketing my previous agency ran?
Usually one thing: sequencing. Most remarketing is a single ad shown to everyone who visited, at the same frequency, forever. That is what makes it feel like being followed. We separate visitors by what they actually did, change the message as time passes, and cap how often anyone sees it. Same budget, different experience for the person on the other end.
Can you remarket if my traffic is small?
Sometimes not, and we will say so. Every platform has a minimum audience size before it will serve ads. If your site does not get enough visitors to fill a list, remarketing has nothing to work with and the honest answer is to fix traffic first. We would rather tell you that than take a retainer for a channel that cannot run.
How do I know it is working and not just taking credit for people who would have come back anyway?
It is a fair question and the honest answer is that no remarketing report fully escapes it. What we can do is hold out a portion of the audience and compare, and read results against the period before remarketing existed. We will show you both rather than claim every conversion the platform attributes to us.
What happens if I want to leave?
Standard terms are a three month minimum, then month to month with 30 days notice, and no early termination fee. The three months exist because the work needs that long to produce a readable result, not to trap you. You remove our access and the accounts, audiences and creative stay with you.
