Retargeting

What it means

Retargeting shows ads to people who have already visited your site or taken a specific action - viewed a product, added it to the basket, opened the price list. The audience is built from your own data, not from inferred interests.

That is why it usually performs better than campaigns to cold audiences: it speaks to people who have already shown interest. It brings in nobody new, though - that is another part of the campaign’s job.

An audience can be built two ways: by tracking site visits through a pixel and cookies, or from a contact list the company uploads to the ad platform. The second does not depend on cookie consent, but it works with customers’ personal data and so needs a legal basis of its own.

How it works in practice

It works best with a tight segment and a time window: an abandoned basket within days, a viewed product within a week, a price-list visitor within a month. A broad "all visitors" audience is usually wasted budget.

Measure conversion and incremental revenue, not CTR. Some of those conversions would have happened anyway, so what counts is the uplift, not the gross figure attributed to the channel.

For B2B services retargeting is set up with exclusions: anyone who is already a client or has just sent an enquiry does not see the ads. The budget then goes on people who looked at the price list or the calculator and did not get in touch, not on clients already paying for the service.

What to watch out for

Tracking visitors needs a legal basis and notice under GDPR and the cookie rules - consent must be genuine and withdrawable. Cap the frequency too: the same ad for the tenth time damages the brand as surely as a badly targeted newsletter.

Invoices for advertising from foreign platforms arrive without Slovak VAT, and the VAT payer has to account for it under the reverse charge. Paying by card without downloading the invoice from the ad account leaves a document missing from the books and a VAT problem later.