Remarketing closes loops. It does not open them

What it’s actually for

Some years ago I bought a toilet seat. One toilet seat — a considered purchase, entirely resolved at the point of checkout. Then the remarketing began. An email landed showing me hundreds of toilet seats. Facebook joined in, urging me to buy this toilet seat. And for weeks Amazon kept nudging me to “pick up where you left off” — that is, looking at toilet seats. I had already bought one. Somewhere an algorithm had quietly decided I was Mr Trebus, and the thing I could not stop hoarding was lavatory seats.

The point of the story is not that the targeting was badly built. The point is that scale does not fix bad fundamentals. Between them, those platforms hold more purchase data than anyone in history, and the remarketing still could not tell the difference between someone mid-decision and someone whose decision was sitting, fully installed, in their bathroom. If the fundamentals can fail at that size, they can certainly fail in your account.

Remarketing done properly is the close-the-loop channel. It exists for two moments: the person who was actively comparing and drifted off before deciding, and the customer whose renewal or repurchase window has opened. Both are named audiences. Both have unfinished business with you. The channel’s job is to finish it — not to congratulate someone on a purchase they completed a fortnight ago.

Where it fires

Remarketing → Sizes up (restart the stalled comparison) and Returns (the renewal window).

A named-customer channel.

On the marcomms map, remarketing fires at Sizes up and Returns, in named-customer mode. At Sizes up it re-engages the comparison that stalled: the pricing-page visitor, the abandoned basket, the proposal that went quiet. At Returns it reaches actual customers as their buying cycle comes back around.

The numbers that matter

Activity metrics: impressions, click-through rate, cost per click. The finished report names recovered conversions: comparisons restarted and closed, baskets recovered, renewals landed, at what cost against what they’re worth. Be honest about view-through numbers — a conversion that would have happened anyway is not a recovery, it’s a rounding error taking a bow.

When not to use it

The Amazon pattern: retargeting people with the thing they already bought. Suppression lists exist; use them, or pay to irritate your own customers. Chasing everyone who bounced off the homepage in five seconds — that audience told you something, and it wasn’t “ask me again.” And running it without frequency caps, where the seventeenth impression does nothing for the conversion and plenty for the unsubscribe.

One row of twenty

This is one row of the marcomms map: every channel, every stage, every targeting mode, on one page.

The full system lives on the Methodology page.