Common Remarketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Where remarketing campaigns went wrong in 2013, from creepy over-frequency to sloppy list segmentation, and how to fix each one.
Remarketing had a reputation problem by early 2013. Done well it recovered lost sales cheaply; done badly it earned the nickname “stalker ads” in the tech press and made brands look intrusive instead of helpful. Most of the bad reputation traced back to a small set of repeated mistakes.
Showing the same ad to everyone
The most common setup mistake was a single remarketing list covering every site visitor, shown one generic ad regardless of what that visitor did. Someone who read a blog post and someone who abandoned a full cart got treated identically. Segmenting by behavior, product viewers, cart abandoners, past customers, took an extra hour of setup and reliably outperformed the one-list approach.
Forgetting to exclude buyers
Continuing to show someone an ad for a product they already purchased is the fastest way to make remarketing feel broken rather than smart. It also wastes budget chasing a conversion that already happened. Excluding recent purchasers from the relevant list should be one of the first rules set up, not an afterthought fixed after complaints.
No frequency cap
Letting an ad follow someone across the entire web for weeks after a single visit is where the “stalker” complaints came from. A sensible frequency cap, and a list duration that expires after a reasonable window, kept the format useful without becoming the thing people installed ad blockers to avoid.
Sending everyone to the homepage
A remarketing ad that leads back to the generic homepage instead of the specific product or cart the visitor left behind loses most of the advantage remarketing offers. Dynamic remarketing, which several platforms rolled out through 2013, let advertisers show and link to the exact item someone viewed. Not using it, when it was available, left performance on the table.
Ignoring mobile and app behavior
As more shopping research moved to mobile through 2013, remarketing setups that only tracked desktop browser visits missed a growing share of the funnel. Businesses with an app saw real value in extending remarketing logic to app behavior rather than treating web and app as separate, disconnected audiences.
Treating remarketing as a “set it and forget it” channel
Lists that never get refreshed and creative that never gets rotated fatigue fast. The audience seeing your remarketing ads is, by definition, the audience most familiar with your brand already, so stale, repetitive creative gets tuned out faster there than almost anywhere else in a media plan.
The fix is mostly discipline
None of these mistakes require sophisticated technology to avoid. They require someone checking the account regularly: verifying exclusions are working, capping frequency sensibly, keeping creative fresh and segmenting lists by actual behavior rather than lumping every visitor together. Remarketing rewards that kind of ongoing attention more than almost any other paid channel.
More on Paid Advertising, the 2013 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
