Retargeting vs. Remarketing: What's The Difference?

Did you know that nearly 80% of consumers say they only interact with offers that reflect their previous interactions with a business?

This striking figure from a global poll conducted by Marketo highlights that most internet users actually prefer retargeting and remarketing strategies.

They’re highly effective routes to conversion that maximize personalization based on available data, and allow businesses to focus on people who have already shown an interest in them.

In this blog, you’ll discover what these approaches entail. You’ll also learn the difference between remarketing and retargeting, the best use cases for each, and how they function on popular digital channels like Facebook and Google Ads.

In an ideal world, every website visitor would turn into a customer.

Unfortunately this never happens.

Many people leave without buying something, signing up to anything, or providing their contact details. 

But that doesn’t mean that they’re not interested in what you sell or won’t buy from you in the future.

This is where retargeting strategies come in.

Retargeting delivers ads for your business that follow visitors as they continue their journeys through the internet.

Common retargeting ad examples include banner ads, social media ads, or even display ads on third-party websites.

Each of these are tailored to remind users of the products or services they viewed.

It can also be done on Google by attempting to attract internet users to your site based on past search behavior that is related to your industry. This is known as search retargeting or SEO remarketing, a confusion of terminology that we'll cover in more detail later in this article. Crucially, paid ads can actually influence organic SEO results - meaning that retargeting can help other areas of digital marketing.

For now, it’s important to remember that retargeting marketing attempts to get anonymous people who didn’t convert to come back to your website.

And since they’ve already shown an interest in you, they’re the type of internet users that you want to be focusing on.

It’s a highly effective approach.

On average, 26% of retargeted visitors will return to your site, and they’re 70% more likely to convert (Invesp).

Remarketing is also about encouraging internet users to return to your website.

It specifically targets individuals who have shown a real interest in your business.

These are visitors who have provided their email addresses, but they might also have created an account, bought something, or signed up for a service.

Remarketing is done by email.

This allows for real personalization since:

→ they’ve explicitly provided you with their contact information and,

→ you should also be able build the emails around data on what they’ve done on your site.

And because of this, email remarketing is a highly persuasive form of motivation - it's also now particularly easy to do thanks to email automation.

In fact, about 60% make a purchase online after receiving a remarketing email (Constant Contact).

Retargeting and remarketing are two related concepts with key differences that are important to understand. Both aim to reel former visitors back to your website.

The differences come down to the amount of information you have about them and the channels used to reach them.

Retargeting uses ads that appear on social media, search platforms, and other sites. It targets people who left your site without making a purchase or providing contact details. As a result, ads can only be personalized around page views, the contents of abandoned carts, and other behavioral data that you can collect with a web intelligence platform like TWIPLA.

In contrast, remarketing is conducted via email. It targets individuals who didn't make a purchase but did provide their contact details and consent to be contacted. This allows for much deeper personalization in emails, using personally identifiable information along with data on the pages or products they viewed and the contents of their abandoned carts.
 

Confusing Usage of Terminology

It’s also important to note that some platforms use the terms retargeting and remarketing to mean different things:

• Google Ads: Often refers to retargeting efforts as "remarketing." While it primarily uses cookies to track user behavior across the web, it also allows advertisers to use email lists for targeted ads, blurring the line between the two terms.
• Facebook: Uses the term "remarketing" for its Custom Audiences feature, which targets internet users based on uploaded contact lists. At the same time, it refers to behavior-based ads as retargeting. This dual terminology can lead to confusion.
• LinkedIn Ads: Uses the term "matched audiences" to describe retargeting efforts based on user behavior, while it also allows for uploading email lists to create custom audiences for targeted campaigns, similarly mixing the terms.
• Microsoft Advertising: Microsoft refers to its retargeting efforts as "remarketing." It focuses on targeting internet users based on their previous interactions with ads and the site, but the distinction can be lost when discussing email-based marketing.
• AdRoll: This platform often blends the terms as well, using "remarketing" to encompass both behavior-driven ads and email-driven campaigns, leading to potential misunderstandings in its documentation and communications.

When discussing remarketing vs. retargeting, Google Ads often creates some confusion because what they refer to as "remarketing" is actually considered retargeting in most other contexts. This is sometimes referred to as AdWords remarketing vs. retargeting.

Here's how they differ on Google Ads:

• Retargeting on Google Ads uses the Google Display Network or search ads to show ads to users who have previously visited your site but left without converting. This method relies on cookies and tracks users as they browse other sites or perform searches, allowing your ads to appear across the web and in search results to bring them back to your site.

(Though cookies have stirred controversy over personal data collection, businesses can now shift away from this technology and still succeed with cookieless advertising).

• Remarketing on Google Ads as it’s commonly known elsewhere, involves the use of Customer Match. While remarketing generally involves email, with Google’s Customer Match, you upload a list of email addresses you've collected (with consent), and Google matches those addresses to logged-in users across Google platforms (like Search, YouTube, and Gmail). You can then show targeted ads to these users across Google’s ad ecosystem. Although it’s not email-based, it uses data from email sign-ups to deliver ads, functioning similarly to remarketing by targeting users who are already familiar with your brand.