What Is Retargeting and Why Is It Your Cheapest Way to Get More Sales?

Someone visits your website. They look at your services page, maybe spend 45 seconds reading. Then they close the tab. They're gone.

Most businesses treat that as the end of the story. The visitor didn't enquire, so they're lost. But most people don't enquire on a first visit — they need to see you again before they're ready to act. Retargeting is how you make sure they do.

What Retargeting Actually Is

Retargeting (also called remarketing) is a way of showing ads specifically to people who have already interacted with your business in some way — visited your website, watched one of your videos, clicked your Facebook page, or engaged with your Instagram content.

Instead of showing your ads to a broad audience of strangers and hoping some of them are interested, retargeting lets you focus your budget on people who have already shown they're aware of you. They took some kind of action. They just haven't converted yet.

The ads they see are the nudge that brings them back.

How It Works

The technical side is straightforward. A small piece of code — the Meta Pixel on Facebook and Instagram, or the Google Tag on Google — is installed on your website. This code runs invisibly in the background and records who visits your site and which pages they view.

When those visitors later use Facebook, Instagram, or Google, your retargeting ads can appear in their feed or across the sites they browse. They're not random strangers anymore. They're warm — they already know you exist.

You can also build retargeting audiences without the website pixel at all. People who have watched 50% or more of one of your videos. People who have visited your Facebook or Instagram profile. People who have sent your page a message. All of these are retargetable audiences within Meta, and they're free to build.

Why It Converts Better and Costs Less

Cold traffic — people who have never heard of you — takes time and budget to convert. They need to understand who you are, decide if they trust you, and work out whether what you offer is relevant to them. That process takes multiple touchpoints.

Warm traffic has already done some of that work. They've seen your website. They've watched your content. The trust barrier is lower. The decision is closer. As a result, warm audiences typically convert at a significantly higher rate than cold ones, and the cost per lead or sale is lower.

On well-run accounts, retargeting audiences regularly deliver cost per result two to four times lower than cold traffic campaigns. The people are simply further along in their thinking.

What You Can Retarget

Once your pixel is installed and your audiences start building, you have more options than most businesses realise:

Website visitors. Anyone who has visited your site in the last 30, 60, or 90 days. You can narrow this down further — for example, only people who visited a specific service page, or everyone except people who reached your thank-you page (because they've already enquired).

Video viewers. People who watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 95% of one of your Facebook or Instagram videos. The more they watched, the warmer they are — a 95% viewer is much closer to buying than a 25% viewer.

Page engagers. People who have visited your Facebook page, clicked on one of your posts, or interacted with your content. These are buildable entirely within Meta, no pixel required.

Instagram engagers. People who follow your Instagram or have engaged with your posts or Reels in the last 30 to 365 days.

Each of these is a separate audience with different levels of warmth. How you speak to a 95% video viewer is different to how you speak to someone who spent 20 seconds on your homepage two months ago.

What a Basic Retargeting Setup Looks Like

For a local service business starting out, a simple retargeting setup is more than enough to see results:

One retargeting ad set targeting all website visitors from the last 60 days. One targeting video viewers at 50% or above. The ads themselves don't need to be complex — a clear offer, a direct CTA, and a reminder of what you do is often all it takes when you're talking to a warm audience.

Budget doesn't need to be large. Because these audiences are smaller than cold traffic campaigns, £5 to £10 per day is enough to maintain presence with most local warm audiences. The goal is simply to stay visible to people who already know you until they're ready to act.

The only thing stopping most businesses from doing this is not having the pixel installed. Once it's in place, the audience builds itself in the background — and you can turn on retargeting whenever you're ready.