Remarketing (retargeting)
Remarketing serves ads to people who previously visited your site or engaged with your brand — the warmest cold audience available, and the most commonly over-credited.
Remarketing’s reported efficiency is structurally flattering: it targets people already close to converting, so attribution hands it wins it often did not cause. Holdout tests on retargeting routinely find a large share of its conversions would have happened anyway.
It still earns a place — cart abandonment, considered purchases, cross-sell — sized modestly and judged on incremental lift rather than platform ROAS. When retargeting is the biggest budget line, the account is usually harvesting, not growing.
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