What is Retargeting?

Retargeting (or remarketing) is showing ads to people who already interacted with your brand — visited the site, viewed a product, added to cart, or engaged with your content — to bring them back to convert.

The mechanics

It works because warm audiences already know the product; the ad just needs to remove the last objection or remind them to finish checkout. Typical layers include product viewers, add-to-carts, and past engagers, each with messaging matched to how far they got. Since privacy changes shrank tracked audiences, retargeting pools are smaller and platforms increasingly fold remarketing into automated campaign types.

Signals that matter

• Good: retargeting ads that answer objections (shipping, guarantees, social proof) instead of repeating the cold-traffic pitch
• Bad: the same single ad shown to warm audiences for weeks, driving frequency up and response down
• Bad: retargeting taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway, inflating its apparent efficiency

Putting it to work

Retargeting audiences see your ads repeatedly, so they burn out on a single creative fast — you need objection-handling, testimonial-style, and offer-reminder variants in rotation. Generating those variations in one batch inside Claude with Polaris makes refreshing the warm layer a routine task instead of a production project. See the full ecommerce ads glossary, or put it into practice with the Polaris AI UGC ad generator.