What is Remarketing? A Guide to Remarketing Ads

You’ve invested heavily in attracting potential customers to your website or app through search ads, social media and content marketing. But without an effective way to reconnect with those prospects, the investment may not deliver the returns you expect. The reality is that the average website conversion rate across industries is only 2 to 3%, meaning 97 to 98% of visitors leave without converting. Remarketing ads and strategies help businesses recover these missed opportunities by re-engaging visitors who have shown interest but didn't convert—turning misses into meaningful growth.

Leveraging remarketing ads can help keep your brand visible, engage customers personally and maximize returns that fuel the next phase of business growth. Let’s take a closer look.

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Remarketing is a digital marketing strategy where a business sends targeted ads or messages to users who have previously interacted with their website or app. This tactic focuses on re-engaging potential customers who may have left without completing a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Or it can target previous customers to encourage repeat purchases or additional actions. An example of remarketing is when a software company shows ads for a free trial to users who visited their pricing page but didn't sign up, or when a travel booking site displays ads featuring hotels in destinations you previously searched for but didn't book.

Developing a remarketing strategy matters because it allows businesses to target warm prospects who have shown interest in the brand, and therefore, may be more likely to convert than those who have not. Here’s a real-world example of remarketing:

Makeup brand Clarins wanted to foster a direct, conversational relationship with its customer base, while also gathering information about the products they like best, to better focus remarketing efforts. Clarins partnered with WhatsApp marketing solutions provider, WAX, to create a Lipstick Day campaign of personalized messages on WhatsApp targeted to previous customers. This campaign resulted in a 4.5X higher open rate and a 7X higher conversion rate than email.*

*Results are self-reported and not identifiably repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.

Remarketing keeps your brand visible to potential customers as they browse other websites, scroll through social media or use apps. Because people often need time to make purchasing decisions, maintaining this consistent presence is essential.

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Modern remarketing campaigns work by leveraging sophisticated tracking and audience-building that extends beyond traditional cookie-based methods. Today, campaigns use first-party data, behavioral analytics, device fingerprinting, IP targeting and CRM integration to build robust customer profiles.

Think of remarketing as a broader customer engagement strategy focused on re-engaging people who have previously interacted with a brand. The primary goal is to deepen brand relationships and increase product consideration through ongoing, personalized communication.

On the other hand, retargeting is a more conversion-focused subset of remarketing that identifies customers who have shown interest in particular products and uses targeted advertising to incentivize immediate purchases. It often uses third-party websites to place relevant advertising, relying more heavily on paid ad placement.

Businesses can use marketing messages on WhatsApp to enhance their broader remarketing campaigns, as well as, retarget customers who visited their site or used their app and opted-in to brand communications. These messages can focus on bringing back customers who abandoned their cart, renewing an expired subscription, sharing loyalty offers and upselling products and services.

Different types of remarketing ad campaigns enable businesses to reach customers across new demographics, interest groups, and geographic locations. They also allow you to engage customers at different stages of their journey—whether at pre-purchase, purchase, or post-purchase touchpoints:

Businesses can reach customers across the customer journey by integrating conversations into the ad flow, helping drive discovery and demand.

Each business will have its own strategies to improve their ability to reach their customers. Here are a few types of remarketing strategies that can be used holistically:

Display remarketing involves placing visual advertisements across third-party websites, apps, streaming services and other digital platforms to re-engage users who have previously interacted with the brand. These ads appear as banners on websites, full screen videos or images, and rich media ads featuring interactive elements, animations, or even games within mobile apps. Native remarketing falls in this category as well. This approach delivers native ads to users that have read sponsored posts on a business's site during a remarketing campaign.

Email remarketing is a strategy where businesses send targeted emails to individuals who have previously interacted with their website, products or emails, but haven't completed a desired action. It involves using email to re-engage potential customers and move them towards conversion by reminding them of their past activity or by offering relevant content.

Social media remarketing ads are ads displayed on social media platforms to users who have previously engaged with your brand, website, or social media content. These ads can appear either within the social media platform itself or via search engine results pages (SERPs) linked to that platform. On Facebook or Instagram, for example, businesses can even remarket using ads that click to WhatsApp, which re-engage customers with a simple call-to-action to start or continue a conversation on WhatsApp.

Paid search remarketing ads involve targeting people on search engines with ads based on their Google search history. These ads can be found on search engine result pages as Sponsored Results, showing up based on the search terms a user has looked up. Additionally, Remarketing List Search Ads (RLSAs) enable businesses to target users who have previously searched for specific terms or visited their website by showing tailored search ads when users perform related searches again.

Video remarketing services can take various formats including pre-roll and mid-roll ads on streaming platforms, video display ads embedded on third-party websites and media-rich messages within conversational interfaces to support brand discovery and product education.

Mobile remarketing allows businesses to reconnect with users across different apps or mobile web platforms, reminding them of products or services they’re interested in. This approach helps increase brand visibility, drive conversions and recapture lost leads.

Behavioral remarketing enables businesses to create personalized messaging and product recommendations based on user actions, preferences and browsing context. This approach can be integrated with other remarketing strategies to enhance audience marketing, creating stronger customer relationships and increasing engagement through personalized experiences.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to re-engaging customers or sales prospects. What works best is having a flexible platform that allows you to experiment with different messaging strategies and quickly make changes based on what resonates with your audience. Here are common best practices to consider:

Effective remarketing requires using data and contextual information to craft personalized messages that are relevant to audiences. This approach can transform remarketing into valuable and relevant conversations that customers love to engage with.

Delivering messages when they're most relevant to customers is critical. The ideal timing and frequency depends on your specific audience and business model, requiring careful testing and adjustment to find the right balance. Develop a workflow to strategically time, schedule and deploy remarketing messages in ways that best align with your business goals and customer preferences.

A/B testing compares two or more versions of something to determine which performs better. This allows you to systematically compare different strategies and identify what works best with your audience.

The WhatsApp Business Platform helps you deliver personalized, scalable customer experiences across notifications, promotions, commerce, customer care, verifications, and custom conversational flows—all seamlessly within the WhatsApp ecosystem. It offers a unique remarketing advantage by enabling businesses to monitor campaign performance, strategically schedule messages and tailor communications. This can allow for rapid campaign deployment, testing of various remarketing approaches and real-time adaptation based on customer responses and engagement patterns.

Read more about how to measure campaign effectiveness with the WhatsApp Business Platform.

The best remarketing tools help you reach your target audience effectively, personalize messaging based on customer data, integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows and build lasting customer relationships through meaningful engagement. Let’s take a look at some remarketing tools from Meta and other platforms that help you engage with customers.

Ads Manager is an all-in-one tool for creating ads across Meta technologies like Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. It helps businesses create and manage their ads, adjust budgets and schedules and track how well campaigns are performing towards marketing goals.

The WhatsApp Business API is a platform that enables businesses to re-engage customers on WhatsApp when they have opted-in to hear from your brand. Through a suite of sophisticated APIs and with the help of Meta Business Messaging Partners, businesses can remarket to customers to deliver marketing messages with personalized offers, shopping cart reminders or new product announcements, for example.

Businesses have access to many remarketing tools beyond Meta's platforms to re-engage potential customers across multiple touchpoints and channels. Display remarketing solutions like Criteo and AdRoll help with reaching users who have previously visited your website through ads that display personalized product recommendations and keep your brand top of mind as they use other websites and apps. Search and social platforms including Google, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn provide powerful remarketing capabilities that allow businesses to reconnect with people through search results and social feeds based on past interactions. On email, marketing platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp enable businesses to nurture leads through automated drip campaigns and personalized messaging.

From growing your customer base to driving higher conversions to supporting and nurturing long-term customer relationships, remarketing is a powerful strategy to re-engage with potential customers who leave without purchasing. The WhatsApp Business Platform offers the tools you need to transform traditional remarketing campaigns into meaningful customer conversations.

Looking to scale your customer reach? Connect with your customers anytime, anywhere to deliver unforgettable experiences. Discover WhatsApp Business Platform features.

Remarketing is a digital marketing strategy that targets individuals who have previously interacted with a brand or visited a website but did not complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. The goal of remarketing is to re-engage these potential customers and encourage them to return to the website or complete the desired action, giving businesses a second chance to convert them into valuable customers.

Remarketing is a broader customer engagement strategy focused on re-engaging people who have previously interacted with a brand. Retargeting is a more conversion-focused subset of remarketing that identifies customers who have shown interest in particular products and uses targeted advertising to incentivize immediate purchases.

There are many types of remarketing campaigns businesses can implement. Some of the most commonly used remarketing types include: native, display, email, social media, paid search, video, and mobile remarketing. These are often based upon behavioral targeting identified by specific user actions. Each type serves different purposes and can be used individually or combined as part of a comprehensive remarketing strategy.