Retargeting
Retargeting means showing ads again to people who have already been in contact with a brand: they visited its website, used its app, saw an ad or walked into a store.
It is the classic tactic for winning back people who almost bought: the abandoned basket, the product page they viewed, the video watched halfway. It is organised in stages, with different messages depending on how close each person came to converting, and with a frequency cap so that it does not become intrusive.
For years it depended on third-party cookies, and as they decline it relies more and more on first-party data and each platform’s own identifiers. It can also start from the physical world: reaching people on mobile after they have been to a concert, a cinema or a store, while the memory is still fresh.
