When performance teams want to retarget audiences, they typically retarget everyone who's touched a brand's website. But, in our work at Digital Brothers, helping businesses find and attract the right leads, we've found that retargeting everyone actually wastes budget.
That's because "everyone" isn't a real audience. When you group together every single person who's visited your site, it's treating both your most valuable and least valuable visitors identically. In reality, someone who read your advertorial or white paper, watched a video, or started checkout is entirely different from someone who bounced away from the headline after two seconds.
So, how can you more strategically and cost-effectively spend your retargeting budget? We used two strategies in our work with a direct-to-consumer (DTC) hearing health brand looking to sharpen their high-intent retargeting.
Strategy 1: Separate Warm Prospects from One-Time Bouncers
The first step is to stop treating all site visitors as equal, and instead treat engagement as a filter to achieve warm-audience targeting.
Why Blanket Retargeting Leaks Budget
Retargeting both cold and warm prospects at the same premium cost per mille (CPM) means you're overpaying to chase people who've already signaled that they weren't interested, diluting the budget that should be going to the ones who were. It's quiet waste, because the blended numbers in your reporting still look okay — the strong segment carries the weak one on paper. Split them apart, though, and you usually find you were funding a lot of dead weight to reach a small pool of genuinely warm people.
Using Engagement Signals to Score Intent
A better approach is to build audiences of engaged non-converters, using time on site and repeat visit metrics to segment these populations. This is how we concentrate spending on visitors most likely to come back and make a purchase. In other words, for this hearing health brand, we built the funnel based on behavior, not just page views. (In Realize, we used the Attentive Audience feature, which does this automatically.)
The guiding principle is that depth of engagement is the qualifier to decide whether a prospect is worth retargeting. To track soft conversions to feed the AI algorithm, we recommend filling the engagement ladder starting with 25% and 50% form fills, product page views, add-to-cart, or initiate checkout actions. This way, you can start to separate out visitors who engaged in meaningful actions vs. ones who bounced immediately.
A visitor who initiated checkout is a totally different audience from someone who only visited a product page, so each of those visitors should see different offers and creative throughout the retargeting process. The further someone moved down the funnel before dropping off, the more they're worth reaching again, and the more aggressive the offer we put before them. You can also put more budget into reaching these warm audiences.
Strategy 2: Match Creative and Offer to Warm Intent
Once we helped this business establish their engagement funnel, the next step was to tailor offers and creative, based on the above idea that a warm audience deserves different creative than a cold one. Once you know how far a prospect traveled into the funnel, you can stop selling from scratch and instead start from where they left off. A cart abandoner, e.g., doesn't need to be re-educated on the problem you're solving; they just need you to pick up where they left off, with a reason to complete the purchase now. That might look like handling a specific objection, restating the guarantee, nudging based on urgency, or offering a small incentive. For a prospect who engaged with your site but never reached checkout, you might send more reassurance and social proof as part of their decision-making process.
You can also match creative to the awareness stage. For those audience members who are ready to buy, use hard-sell offers. For visitors still weighing their decision, use softer, authority-led creative ads.
Direct-response Creative for Warm Audiences
Avoid the common mistake of showing every warm visitor the same generic "come back" type of ad. Warmth isn't a single temperature, it's a range, and the offers and creative you employ should move along that range as the visitor does.
For already interested users, we recommend a straight offer, which we've found outperforms a discovery hook. For this hearing health company, we found that headlines like these resonated with warm prospects:
- Your Ears Deserve a Proper Upgrade — Not Just Louder
- Top-Notch Hearing… Without the High-Street Price
This is especially true when paired with a direct Shop Now CTA.
Measuring the efficiency gain
After segmenting and retargeting this brand's audiences more strategically, the next step is obvious for performance marketers: gauging the payoff. We found that the top-performing warm and direct-response creative converted far better than the account's blended conversion rate, roughly up to 200% more.
Key Takeaways
Effective retargeting requires understanding your audiences and reading their signals, then putting that information into action. Segment by engagement depth, spend where the intent is, and respect the ceiling that the numbers reflect. Achieving retargeting return on investment (ROI) comes from precision in who you're targeting and directness in what you're trying to accomplish, along with the right message — not simply reach.
When it's working well, retargeting should show up as your highest return on ad spend (ROAS) line in the account. We routinely see this return multiples of what prospecting does, because it's a small, warm pool. Keep the audience tight, tailor the offer based on how far that audience segment moved in the funnel, and don't try to force it to scale as you would with other tactics.
When you stretch retargeting to hit volume, you've started overpaying. Keep it lean, keep it warm, and let prospecting do the growing.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How does retargeting work in Realize, and what does the Taboola Pixel do?
Retargeting in Realize is powered by the Taboola Pixel, which captures site visitors and lets you build targetable (or exclusion) audiences from them. You can build URL-based audiences (people who visited a page or section) or event-based audiences (people who completed an action such as a signup or purchase), with a lookback window up to 540 days. Then, you can re-engage those users across Realize's extensive open-web publisher network. Data from Realize has found that re-engaged users are approximately 70% more likely to convert than first-time visitors.
What is an Attentive Audience in Realize, and how is it different from standard retargeting?
An Attentive Audience, created in Realize, is a segment of users who spent meaningful time on your site (recurring visits, time-on-site, etc.) but haven't yet converted. Realize's algorithm builds these by scoring engagement strength, then auto-builds the segment when one is identified (a qualified Taboola Pixel is required). It's a subset of retargeting focused on your warmest non-converters, rather than everyone who touched the site.
Using guidance gleaned from using this feature, we recommend using more direct, action-focused creative. Because these users convert at higher rates, it's ideal to raise cost-per-click (CPC) bids (often about 2x prospecting bids) or use the Smart Bid feature to win this smaller, high-value pool.
Does retargeting on Realize replace prospecting, or work alongside it?
Retargeting works alongside prospecting. Retargeting and Attentive Audiences both harvest demand you've already paid to create — efficient but finite, and unable to grow the top of funnel on their own. The Realize best practice model is to use Predictive Audiences and Maximize Conversions together to run retargeting for efficiency, while prospecting brings in new users. Then, feed those new converters back into your retargeting and predictive seeds.