Is Your Retargeting Actually Adding Anything?

Retargeting almost always reports excellent numbers, and is the channel most likely to be taking credit for conversions that would have happened anyway.

The usual list is strategic. The faults that waste the most are mechanical: unverified tracking, invisible phone calls, and audience expansion quietly undoing the campaign.

A cap limits how often one person sees your ad. For a local trade it matters more than for a national brand, your audience is small enough to absorb the whole budget.

Retargeting feels intrusive when the ad reveals what the platform knows. For a trade that line is closer, because the subject is a problem inside someone’s home.

Before tuning frequency or creative, check your audience size. For many local contractors it is a few dozen people, and nearly every retargeting problem follows from that.

Seasonal retargeting is usually explained as advertising in season. The version that pays builds the audience at the peak and spends it in the shoulder months.

HVAC is the trade retargeting suits best: households defer replacements rather than decline them, so they are still deciding months later.

Every article on this opens with the platform’s three billion users. For a plumber that number describes an audience you will never reach and cannot use.