If you run an ecommerce business, chances are most visitors do not convert on their first visit. They browse, compare, abandon carts, get distracted, and leave. That is not a failure. It is how online shopping works.
Remarketing and retargeting exist to address this reality by re-engaging people who have already interacted with your brand, whether that is visiting a product page, adding items to a cart, or browsing your site without purchasing. By using audience signals and behavioural data, these strategies allow brands to stay relevant beyond the first visit and bring high-intent shoppers back into the funnel.
While the terms are often used interchangeably, it is more useful to think of them as part of the same ecosystem. Remarketing typically refers to platform-based solutions such as Google Ads, while retargeting describes the broader practice of reaching previous visitors across multiple paid media environments, including programmatic, video, audio and commerce media.
While Google Ads remarketing remains a powerful and important tool, modern ecommerce remarketing now extends well beyond a single platform. The most effective strategies combine Google, commerce formats, dynamic creative, DSPs like The Trade Desk, and privacy-safe first-party data, underpinned by strong audience segmentation and a clear understanding of customer behaviour.
What Do Remarketing and Retargeting Actually Mean?
The terms ‘remarketing’ and ‘retargeting’ are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings in ecommerce marketing.
Remarketing primarily involves collecting customer information to create lists and send targeted emails, with a heavier emphasis on email campaigns as a primary tool for re-engaging past customers. The objective is often to upsell or cross-sell through personalised email outreach. Remarketing usually involves a wider range of techniques and channels, but email remains the core method for reconnecting with previous buyers.
Retargeting, on the other hand, is mostly focused on paid ads and uses shopper data to automatically serve relevant ads on platforms like Google and social media. Retargeting campaigns and retargeting strategies use paid ads, such as retargeting ads, to convert prospects who have interacted with your brand but exited before making a purchase. These strategies leverage user behavior to deliver personalized ads across channels, including display, video, and social platforms.
Both remarketing and retargeting aim to re-engage customers who showed an interest in a company, but remarketing usually involves email outreach.
Understanding Customer’s Behaviour
A deep understanding of your customers’ behaviour is the foundation of effective remarketing campaigns. By leveraging analytics tools like Google Analytics, ecommerce brands can track how website visitors interact with their store – from the first visit through each stage of the sales funnel. This data reveals which products attract the most attention, where users drop off, and which segments are most likely to convert or make repeat purchases.
With these insights, you can develop remarketing strategies that deliver targeted ads to specific customer segments. For example, you might create separate campaigns for users who abandoned carts, those who visited a particular product page, or loyal customers who are likely to buy again. By tailoring your messaging and offers to each group, you can maximise conversions, boost customer loyalty, and encourage repeat purchases. Ultimately, understanding your customers’ behaviour allows you to optimise your remarketing campaigns for higher conversion rates and a more profitable ecommerce store.
Google Remarketing Still Matters, But It Is No Longer Enough
Google remains a cornerstone of ecommerce remarketing because of its scale and intent signals. Setting up a Google Ads account and organising your campaigns using ad groups is essential for effective remarketing. Remarketing tools, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics, help manage and optimise ecommerce retargeting campaigns by enabling the creation of remarketing lists, behavioural targeting, and performance analysis.
Through Google Ads, brands can retarget users via:
- Display ads across the Google Display Network
- YouTube video remarketing
- Search remarketing lists
- Google Shopping and Performance Max
- Dynamic remarketing using product feeds
Tracking pixels are essential for remarketing, as they collect data on user behavior and enable businesses to serve targeted ads to the right audience.
Dynamic remarketing in particular is highly effective for ecommerce. It serves ads tailored specifically to a single user based on their previous interactions with products, allowing advertisers to show users the exact products they viewed, added to cart, or abandoned, using automated creative pulled directly from a product feed.
Remarketing strategies can also leverage search ads and Google search by using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) to target users who have previously interacted with your site, increasing personalisation and engagement. Frequency capping, which limits impressions per user per week, is important to avoid ad fatigue and improve campaign effectiveness. Overall, remarketing works by re-engaging past visitors and can significantly improve conversion rates for ecommerce businesses.
However, relying solely on Google limits reach, creative control and channel diversification. Audiences do not live exclusively inside Google’s ecosystem, and neither should your remarketing strategy.
Expanding Remarketing Through Google Shopping and Commerce Media
Google Shopping has evolved from a lower-funnel product listing tool into a powerful remarketing and performance driver. Remarketing lists can be created based on users visiting specific web pages, such as product pages or the checkout page, enabling more personalised campaigns. You can also include app visitors in your remarketing lists to target users who have interacted with your mobile app.
By layering audience signals on Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, ecommerce brands can prioritise spend toward users with demonstrated intent, while still accessing scale through automated inventory and formats. Online retailers and online stores can use commerce media and other websites to expand their remarketing reach. Segmenting shoppers by behavior allows for tailored messages that resonate more effectively with potential customers. Using dynamic content in ads increases relevance and engagement, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions. Mobile-first design is crucial for remarketing links, ensuring easy navigation and checkout options. Facebook Ads allows businesses to target consumers with remarketing ads by uploading a remarketing list or installing the Facebook Pixel on their website.
Beyond Google, commerce media is becoming a major part of modern remarketing. Retailer platforms, marketplaces and data partnerships allow brands to retarget shoppers closer to the point of purchase, often with stronger commercial signals than traditional display.
For ecommerce brands, this opens up opportunities to reconnect with users not just based on site visits, but based on category browsing, product affinity and purchase behaviour across broader retail ecosystems.
Programmatic Retargeting with DSPs Like The Trade Desk
One of the biggest shifts in ecommerce remarketing has been the rise of DSP-led strategies.
Programmatic retargeting strategies and retargeting campaigns now use paid ads – including video ads, sequential ads, and retargeting ads – to re-engage users across multiple platforms. Ecommerce retargeting leverages dynamic ads and personalised experiences to improve conversion rates and drive more sales. Sequential messaging typically starts with brand awareness ads, followed by product-focused ads, and ends with a promotional offer. Guided journeys across platforms are essential for effective remarketing, as customers rarely buy on the first re-exposure. Using dynamic content in ads increases relevance and engagement, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions.
Platforms like The Trade Desk allow brands to activate first-party audiences across premium inventory, including:
- High-quality display and native environments
- Online video and connected TV
- Digital audio and podcasts
- Publisher direct and curated marketplaces
DSPs provide greater transparency, control and flexibility than walled-garden platforms. They allow advertisers to unify remarketing audiences, control frequency across channels, and apply consistent messaging across the customer journey.
Importantly, DSP-based retargeting is increasingly privacy-safe. It relies on first-party data, contextual signals and publisher partnerships rather than third-party cookies alone.
Cart Abandonment Remarketing
Cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for ecommerce brands. Cart abandonment remarketing campaigns are designed to recover lost sales by targeting shoppers who left items in their carts without completing the purchase. Using dynamic remarketing ads, you can automatically display the exact products a customer left behind, along with personalised messages or special incentives to encourage them to return and finish checking out.
Platforms like Google Ads make it easy to set up and manage these campaigns, ensuring your remarketing ads reach potential customers across devices and channels. By reminding shoppers of their interest and making it easy to pick up where they left off, cart abandonment remarketing helps reduce lost sales, increase revenue, and build stronger relationships with your audience. For ecommerce brands, this strategy is essential for turning missed opportunities into completed transactions.
Dynamic Remarketing and Creative Optimisation Changes the Game
Creative is often the weakest link in remarketing campaigns. Showing the same banner repeatedly can quickly lead to ad fatigue, overwhelming users and reducing campaign effectiveness. To prevent this, it’s important to set frequency caps on remarketing ads, which helps limit how often users see the same ad and reduces the risk of annoyance.
Dynamic Creative Optimisation, or DCO, solves this by tailoring creative in real time based on user behaviour, product interest, location, device and context. Dynamic remarketing serves ads tailored specifically to a single user based on their previous interactions with products, making the ads more relevant and engaging.
For ecommerce brands, DCO allows:
- Product-level personalisation at scale
- Messaging changes based on funnel stage
- Creative rotation without manual builds
- Better performance without higher media costs
When paired with DSPs and strong data signals, DCO turns remarketing from a blunt instrument into a precision tool.
Smarter Audience Segmentation Drives Better Results
Effective remarketing is not about chasing everyone who ever visited your site. It is about prioritisation.
High-performing ecommerce strategies typically segment audiences based on specific behaviours and intent, allowing brands to target shoppers and targets customers more effectively. Audience segmentation helps identify groups such as:
- Product viewers
- Cart abandoners
- Past purchasers
- High-value customers
- Lapsed customers
Engaging past customers and re-engaging past customers are key goals of remarketing, especially for driving repeat customers and increasing retention. Each group should receive different messaging, creative and frequency. Someone who abandoned a cart yesterday should not see the same ad as someone who purchased six months ago.
Segmentation also allows brands to exclude audiences intelligently, protecting spend and improving customer experience. Additionally, remarketing strategies can help businesses upsell or cross-sell to existing customers, increasing customer lifetime value and maximising customer lifetime.
Remarketing and Social Media
Social media platforms have become essential channels for running effective remarketing campaigns. With tools like Facebook and Instagram’s custom audiences and dynamic ads, ecommerce brands can target users who have previously interacted with their website – whether they abandoned carts, browsed specific products, or engaged with content. These platforms allow you to deliver remarketing ads in a visually engaging, highly targeted way, reaching customers where they spend much of their time online.
Integrating social media remarketing into your digital marketing strategy enables you to create a seamless experience across channels. By showing relevant ads to users who have already shown interest, you can re-engage them in a relaxed, receptive environment, increasing the chances of conversion. Social media remarketing is especially powerful for reminding customers about abandoned carts or promoting products they’ve viewed, helping to drive both immediate sales and long-term loyalty.
Remarketing and Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for ecommerce remarketing, especially when it comes to re-engaging customers who have already interacted with your brand. Personalised remarketing emails can be triggered by specific actions, such as cart abandonment or browsing certain products, allowing you to deliver timely reminders and tailored offers directly to the customer’s inbox.
By using automation tools, you can set up campaigns that respond instantly to customer behaviour – sending a follow-up email when a cart is abandoned, or recommending related products after a purchase. These personalised remarketing emails not only help recover abandoned carts but also encourage repeat purchases and foster customer loyalty. When integrated with your broader remarketing strategy, email marketing provides a direct, personal touch that can significantly boost conversions and keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience.
Managing Frequency and Fatigue Across Platforms
One of the biggest risks with modern remarketing is overexposure.
As brands expand across Google, social platforms and DSPs, frequency can quickly spiral if it is not managed holistically. Seeing the same product ad ten times a day does not increase conversion. It damages perception.
Using platforms that allow cross-channel frequency management is increasingly important, particularly as ecommerce brands invest more heavily in programmatic and video environments.
Remarketing and Retargeting in a Privacy-First World
As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies fade, remarketing strategies must evolve.
The strongest ecommerce remarketing programs are now built on:
- First-party data
- Consent-based tracking
- Server-side measurement
- Contextual and predictive signals
This shift does not weaken remarketing. It makes it smarter, more sustainable and more defensible long term.
The Bottom Line
Google remarketing remains a valuable tool for ecommerce brands, but it should no longer operate in isolation.
Modern remarketing is multi-platform, data-led and creative-driven. It combines Google, Shopping, DSPs, DCO and commerce media to re-engage high-intent audiences wherever they consume content.
When executed properly, remarketing does not feel repetitive or intrusive. It feels relevant, timely and useful.
If you are looking to expand or refine your ecommerce remarketing strategy beyond Google Ads, or want help building a privacy-safe, performance-driven retargeting framework, Bench Media can help. Contact our team to explore what modern remarketing should look like for your business.
