What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is paid advertising shown to people who have already interacted with you, such as visiting your website, watching a video ad or opening a lead form, so you stay in front of buyers who showed interest but didn’t act.

At a glance

• It’s also called remarketing. The audience is built from people’s past interactions, not from a list of job titles.
• Website retargeting relies on a tag or pixel on your site, such as the LinkedIn Insight Tag, that recognizes visitors later on the ad platform.
• Most platforms need a minimum audience before ads run. On LinkedIn it’s 300 matched member accounts.
• Audiences expire. LinkedIn keeps website visitors in a segment for 30 to 180 days, depending on the window you choose.

How retargeting works

You place the platform’s tag on your website. When someone visits a page, the tag drops a cookie, and the platform matches that browser to a member account. You then build an audience, for example everyone who viewed the pricing page in the last 90 days, and show that audience a specific ad.

LinkedIn lets you build retargeting audiences from more than site visits:

• Website visits: a specific page or the whole site, through the Insight Tag.
• Video ads: people who watched 25%, 50%, 75% or 97% of a video.
• Lead Gen Forms: people who opened a form, or opened it and submitted.
• Document, image and conversation ads: people who engaged or clicked.
• Company Page and Events: page viewers, registrants and attendees.

For ad engagement, the lookback window runs from 30 to 365 days. Once an audience reaches 300 matched member accounts it can be used in a campaign.

A retargeting example

Example (illustrative): a company selling dispatch software runs a short video ad to fleet owners. Anyone who watches at least half of it joins a retargeting audience. Over the next 30 days, that audience sees a customer story ad, then a demo offer. People who visited the pricing page get a third ad that answers the most common pricing question.

Common retargeting mistakes

• One audience for every visitor. A job seeker on your careers page and a buyer on your pricing page shouldn’t see the same ad. Build audiences by page and action.
• Audiences too small to run. Narrow segments often sit below the 300 minimum. Use a longer lookback or combine sources.
• No frequency limit. The same ad shown for months to the same small audience wears out fast.
• Tagging the wrong pages. LinkedIn says the Insight Tag shouldn’t go on pages that collect or contain sensitive data, such as consumer health or financial account pages.
• Keeping engagement in the ad account. If nobody sees which target accounts engaged, sales can’t act on it.

How retargeting shows up in a revenue system

Ad engagement is one more signal about which accounts are paying attention. Our sales pods work account lists inside partners’ own tools, and engagement from paid channels can help decide which accounts get a call first.

Terms that sit next to retargeting

Retargeting often runs alongside lookalike audiences, which find new people who resemble the ones who engaged. In B2B it’s usually part of account-based marketing and demand generation, and it’s judged on cost per lead and cost per click. Engagement from the ads can feed intent data and lead scoring.