What is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?
Same idea, different lists. What matters is who you exclude and how often you show.
In practice they mean the same thing: showing ads to people who already interacted with you. Google historically said remarketing, most of the rest of the industry says retargeting, and platforms use both inconsistently. The distinction that actually matters is list quality, exclusions and frequency.
Build lists from intent, not from traffic
An "all site visitors" list is the lazy default and it is full of people who bounced off a blog post. Build lists that mean something:
- Visitors to a specific service page, who signalled what they want.
- People who reached a pricing or contact page and did not convert.
- Video viewers who watched a meaningful share, on YouTube or Meta.
- Uploaded customer and lead lists, for winback and cross sell.
- Cart or form abandoners, where applicable.
Different lists deserve different messages. Someone who read one article needs an introduction. Someone who abandoned a quote request needs a reason to finish.
Exclusions are where most accounts lose money
Exclude people who already converted, existing clients, current employees, and anyone who is not marketable. Showing "get a free quote" ads to a client who signed last week is a small, steady embarrassment that also wastes budget. If your CRM is connected, these lists should be driven from it rather than maintained by hand. For our HubSpot clients we keep a single suppression list fed by one master workflow, so vendors, employees, do not contact records and unsubscribes are excluded everywhere at once.
Cap frequency before people start resenting you
Retargeting is the easiest place to annoy the people most likely to buy. Set frequency caps, set membership durations that match your sales cycle rather than defaulting to the maximum, and burn people off the list once they convert. A 30 day window is plenty for most service purchases. A 540 day window on a two week decision is just following people around.
One platform note
Meta and Google build audiences differently and will report different sizes for what looks like the same list. Do not try to reconcile the numbers. Judge each platform on the leads it produced.
Related: How do you track leads and conversions from paid campaigns?, Can HubSpot be used to manage social media?, How to Maximize Your Meta Campaigns, and our PPC advertising page.