What Is Remarketing? Types, How It Works, and Examples

Remarketing is a digital marketing strategy used to re-engage people who already had some contact with a brand, like someone who visited a website, viewed a product, interacted with content, or started a purchase without finishing it. This renewed contact can happen through ads and also through owned channels, like email.

The strategy is especially useful because not every consumer makes a decision on the first contact. In e-commerce, for example, the average cart abandonment rate reached 70.19% in 2025, according to the Baymard Institute. With remarketing, part of that audience can be re-engaged with messages better suited to where they are in the buying journey.

In this guide, we explain what remarketing is, how it differs from retargeting, how it works behind the scenes, the different types and examples you can apply. By the end, you’ll see how to measure results and how all of this connects to anyone selling a digital product.

What is remarketing and what is it for?

Remarketing means re-introducing your brand to people who already had contact with it but didn’t complete the expected action. The term literally means marketing again: instead of chasing a cold audience, you’re talking to someone who already knows what you offer.

Here’s what remarketing isn’t: blasting ads at just anyone, or spam. It always starts from some previously recorded behavior, like a site visit, a completed sign-up, or a cart left behind. That footprint is what separates remarketing from a generic acquisition campaign.

In practice, its value lies in nurturing trust and the relationship with an audience that has high conversion potential. Someone who already knows what your brand does needs less convincing, so the cost of closing the sale tends to drop. That’s how the specialist Micha Menezes summed up the strategy’s role in a conversation on Hotmart Cast:

“I don’t understand how people don’t do remarketing, because remarketing is our biggest profitability advantage in an evergreen funnel — it converts between 1 and 2% on average at scale. Remarketing is the art of chasing our potential customer everywhere. It’s what makes someone who has an objection break through it and take the action of completing that purchase.”
— Micha Menezes, digital entrepreneur and evergreen funnel specialist

Remarketing vs. retargeting: what’s the difference?

Remarketing and retargeting are terms frequently used as synonyms, though some professionals draw a distinction between them.

In that distinction, retargeting tends to refer mainly to paid ads aimed at people who already interacted with a brand, while remarketing can also cover re-engagement strategies through owned channels, like email.

In practice, that split isn’t a universal rule. Platforms and industry professionals may use “remarketing” to talk about paid media campaigns too.

The common thread is the most important part: re-engaging people who already had some contact with the brand, product, or service.

How does remarketing work? Cookies, pixels and lists

Remarketing works from data about the audience’s previous interactions with the brand, which can be collected and organized in different ways depending on the platform and channel used.

Among the most common resources:

• Cookies: small files stored in the browser that can help sites and platforms recognize visits and interactions;
• Pixels and tags: code used to record events on the site, like page views, cart additions, or purchases, and send that information to the configured platforms;
• Audience lists: groups built from specific criteria, like people who visited a page, started a purchase, or are already customers;
• Owned data: information collected directly by the company, like sign-ups, emails, and customer relationship history, as long as it’s used according to applicable privacy rules.

From this information, you can build audiences and define who will receive a given remarketing campaign. For example, a company can build an audience made up of people who viewed a product page in the last 30 days but didn’t complete the purchase.

For years there was talk about the end of third-party cookies, which left a lot of people uneasy. Worth updating that point: on April 22, 2025, Google announced it will keep third-party cookies in Chrome and won’t build a separate consent prompt, leaving control in the browser’s own privacy settings (Google, Privacy Sandbox, 2025).

In other words, cookie-based remarketing still holds up today!

Even so, the long-term direction is depending more and more on owned data, the so-called first-party data, like your email list and purchase history. Anyone who builds an owned audience base is less exposed to browser and regulatory changes.

What are the types of remarketing?

The main types of remarketing are: display, dynamic, on social media, on search (RLSA), on video, and by email. Each one changes the channel and the message format, but they all start from the same point: someone who already interacted with you.

On ad platforms, like Google’s display network or Meta’s apps, you can show the right message based on the user’s profile. If your brand offers what that person was looking for, paid advertising reminds them of the benefits of doing business with you. It’s the foundation of remarketing within paid traffic campaigns.

In e-commerce, the focus is recovering people who already went through a purchase step: signed up, didn’t complete the order, or already bought before. Messages by email, mobile, or WhatsApp help remind the person about that product.

Email remarketing works well with cart reminders, a coupon for the next order, and news updates, always segmented by profile. If you don’t have an active list yet, it’s worth understanding how a good email marketing strategy works to build that owned channel.

How does remarketing work on Google Ads and Meta Ads?

Google Ads and Meta Ads let you build campaigns aimed at audiences that already had contact with a business, though each platform has its own tools, criteria, and ways of building those audiences.

On Google Ads, you can work with segments built from previous interactions, like site visitors or app users, plus use owned customer data when the platform’s requirements are met.

On Meta’s platforms, you can build Custom Audiences from sources like your site, app, customer list, and interactions with the company’s accounts and content. That way, a brand can, for example, build a campaign aimed at people who visited its site or interacted with its profile.

In both cases, the possibilities depend on each platform’s current settings and rules. So before building a remarketing campaign, check which audience sources and targeting options are available.

Remarketing examples

The most common remarketing examples start from an action that stopped halfway. Almost always, the person showed interest and stalled somewhere along the way.

• Abandoned cart: someone adds a product and leaves. They later get an email reminding them of the item, sometimes with a coupon.
• Product page visitor: viewed the course, didn’t buy, and starts seeing ads for that course on other sites and networks.
• Anyone who downloaded a free resource: enters an email sequence that gradually introduces the paid product.
• Past customer: anyone who already bought gets offered a complementary product, the classic next step in the journey.

This effort makes sense because a lot of cart abandonment isn’t a lack of interest. Baymard points out that 43% of people abandon their cart because they were just browsing, with no immediate intent to buy (Baymard, 2025). That’s exactly the lukewarm audience remarketing wins back later.

How do you build a remarketing campaign? Step by step

To build a remarketing campaign, you register the audience, segment it, and create the right message for each stage. The basic path has six steps.

• Install the necessary tags: set up the tools used to record visits and key actions on your site;
• Build audiences by behavior: separate, for example, people who visited a page, started checkout, abandoned their cart, or already bought;
• Exclude anyone who shouldn’t get the campaign: depending on the goal, remove people who already completed the desired action to avoid unnecessary impact;
• Choose your channels: define where the audience will be re-engaged, like Google, social media, or email;
• Create messages for each stage: adapt arguments, offers, and creative assets to the audience’s previous behavior;
• Set frequency and time window: decide how long that audience will be targeted and track frequency to avoid overexposure;
• Measure and adjust: track results and run tests to find out which audiences, messages, and channels perform best.

On frequency and creative variation, Micha Menezes himself shared how his operation evolved:

“Remarketing used to be very focused on guarantees, bonuses, and certificates. We realized that the more we raise the potential customer’s awareness level in remarketing, the more revenue we capture. So instead of running 5 remarketing campaigns at a frequency of 3, today our frequency is 10 to 12, but with 40 to 45 creative assets, with different stimuli between video and image. Anyone who visited my page, for at least 30 days, I’ll keep chasing with different stimuli until they make the purchase decision.”
— Micha Menezes, evergreen funnel specialist

How do you measure remarketing results?

To measure remarketing, track engagement and conversion metrics. Engagement metrics show that the person reacted to your stimulus; conversion metrics show whether that turned into a sale.

The main engagement indicators are click-through rate, email open rate, and page visits, because they reveal an action the customer took themselves when they encountered your brand. Conversion metrics show up in conversion rate and cost per acquisition. You can integrate marketing and sales tracking, regardless of the type of traffic invested, to get a clearer view of progress toward your goals.

To track these numbers, you can use anything from spreadsheets, like Excel and Google Sheets, to marketing and sales management software. AI helps speed up reading the data and pulling out useful insights for decision-making.

A practical detail: e-commerce reports show that recovery emails sent within the first hour convert much better than ones sent after 24 hours, so speed matters.

Advantages and precautions of remarketing (privacy)

Remarketing brings clear conversion advantages, but it calls for care with frequency and privacy. It’s worth weighing both sides before you scale it up.

Main advantages:

• Recovers a qualified audience that already showed interest in your offer.
• Tends to convert at a lower cost than attracting a brand-new audience from scratch.
• Reinforces brand recall and allows personalized messages by stage of the journey.

Main precautions:

• Too high a frequency tires out the audience and can trigger rejection of the brand.
• Privacy and data protection: remarketing campaigns need to respect data protection laws applicable in each region. That includes assessing the proper legal basis, giving clear information about data use, and respecting data subjects’ rights.
• Growing reliance on owned data, as third-party tracking gets more limited in other browsers.

Transparency about data collection and use also helps preserve audience trust. That’s why privacy policies, proper cookie management, and opt-out mechanisms, where applicable, need to be part of the strategy — following digital market best practices.

Remarketing for anyone selling a digital product

For anyone selling a digital product, remarketing solves a concrete problem: most people don’t buy on their first visit. Winning back someone who already showed interest tends to cost less than attracting a brand-new audience.

With cart abandonment sitting around 70% (Baymard, 2025), every visitor who leaves without buying is an open sale, not necessarily a lost one. The question is having a simple way to talk to that person again.

That’s where Hotmart comes in, an all-in-one platform for digital product creators. On Hotmart’s Checkout, Sales Recovery automatically acts on abandoned carts and incomplete purchases, with pop-ups and email follow-ups. Part of remarketing’s logic already comes built into the tool you use to sell.

If you want to turn your knowledge into a digital product and have a checkout that already handles recovery for you, you can create your own digital product and get started with a free sign-up on Hotmart, with no monthly fee and nothing to pay before you sell.

Conclusion: why use remarketing in your strategy?

Understanding what remarketing is matters because not everyone who shows interest is ready to buy on the first contact. The strategy lets you keep the conversation going with audiences that already visited a page, interacted with the brand, started a purchase, or are part of your base.

Throughout this guide, we saw that remarketing can be done through different channels and formats, from ads to re-engagement emails. To put the strategy into practice, it’s important to segment audiences based on their behavior, adapt your messages, respect privacy rules, and track your results.

More than simply showing the same offer over and over, good remarketing considers what stage of the journey each person is in and what message makes sense at that moment. Start with well-defined audiences, track metrics like conversion and cost per acquisition, and adjust your campaigns based on the results.

Frequently asked questions about remarketing

Here are the most common questions from people looking for information about remarketing.

Are remarketing and retargeting the same thing?

Not exactly, though a lot of people use them as synonyms. Retargeting tends to mean paid ads that follow the user around the web. Remarketing is broader and also includes re-engagement through owned channels, like email.

Does remarketing work without third-party cookies?

Yes. In April 2025, Google decided to keep third-party cookies in Chrome. On top of that, remarketing based on owned data, like your email list, doesn’t depend on third-party cookies at all.

How long should I keep targeting a customer with remarketing?

It depends on the buying cycle, but 30-day windows are common. The bigger concern is frequency: several different stimuli work better than the same ad repeated to exhaustion.

Does remarketing work for beginners with a small budget?

Yes, anyone just starting out can begin with email, using their own list, before investing in paid media. It’s a way to apply the strategy at low cost while learning what works with your audience.

Is remarketing the same thing as cart recovery?

Cart recovery is one application of remarketing, not the whole concept. It focuses specifically on people who left items in their cart, while remarketing covers any re-engagement with someone who already interacted with the brand.

What’s the difference between remarketing and paid traffic?

Remarketing is a strategy that can use paid traffic, but the two concepts aren’t synonyms. Paid traffic is about attracting visitors through ads, while remarketing aims to re-engage people who already had contact with the brand. Remarketing can also use owned channels, like email.

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