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Is Remarketing Worth It? What a Remarketing Agency Should Set Up, and When to Switch It Off
When remarketing pays and when it doesn't, what a good remarketing agency sets up, Google's policy limits in Australia and New Zealand, and four results from real campaigns, including one we switched off.
3 November 20263 min readEdited by Michael Wilkins
Direct answer
Remarketing is worth it when enough of the right people visit your site, your buyers take time to decide, and the audiences are built on what visitors did rather than on everyone who landed. It is rarely worth much when traffic is thin, decisions are made in one visit, or the audience includes customers, job seekers and people who already converted. A good remarketing agency builds audiences by intent and recency, excludes the people who should not see your ads, caps how often anyone sees them, and judges the work on qualified leads and sales in your CRM. It also tests whether remarketing adds anything, and switches it off when it does not.
What remarketing is
Remarketing, also called retargeting, shows ads to people who have already visited your site or are on your customer lists. It runs on Google search, display and YouTube, and on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Its job is to bring back people who showed interest but did not enquire.
That last point is also its weakness. Many of the people you remarket to were coming back anyway, so remarketing is easy to give credit it did not earn.
When remarketing pays
- Your buyers take time. Home loans, education, B2B software and insurance are researched over weeks. A reminder at the right moment matters.
- The audience is built on intent. Someone who started a quote is worth more than someone who read one article.
- You have enough visitors. Remarketing can only reach people who have already come. Few visitors means a small audience, and more budget only shows the same people the same ad more often.
For Charles Darwin University, a six-week intake campaign split retargeting into a high-intent track built from recent site visitors and a lower-intent track for wider re-engagement. The high-intent track converted 66 of 573 clicks, an 11.52% click-to-conversion rate, at A$125.53 per conversion.
For Teachers Mutual Bank, retargeting carried visitor recapture across the long home-loan consideration window. It delivered 85 home loan conversions at A$528 CPA, alongside search and Facebook in the same attributed system.
For Clinic to Cloud, customer match remarketing seeded from existing prospect data gave Google Ads a second job, re-engaging warm prospects, while Facebook remarketing handled mid-funnel pull-through.
When it doesn't, and what to do then
For a specialist strata insurer, the remarketing layer showed no measurable contribution. We paused it, with display, inside eight weeks and moved the budget to search, where the economics were working.
Remarketing is not compulsory either. For a trade credit insurance brokerage, the campaign ran on Google Search alone, with no display, social or remarketing, and returned A$5.34 for every dollar invested in its first year.
If remarketing is not adding qualified leads you would not otherwise have had, switch it off. A good agency will tell you that before you ask.
What a good remarketing agency sets up
- Audiences by intent and recency. Quote starters, pricing-page readers and recent visitors, each with its own message and time window.
- Exclusions. Existing customers, people who already converted, and visitors to your careers pages.
- Frequency caps. A limit on how often each person sees your ads, so they stay relevant rather than following people for months.
- Creative by stage. Someone who started a quote needs a different message from someone who read a guide.
- Customer match. Your own prospect lists, uploaded to Google and Meta where your consent and privacy obligations allow it.
- Honest measurement. Qualified leads and sales in your CRM, not view-through conversions, and a test that holds some of the audience back to show what remarketing adds.
The rules in Australia and New Zealand
Google does not allow advertiser-built audiences for sensitive interest categories, including health, negative financial status, gambling, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and relationship hardships (Google's personalised advertising policy). Businesses in those categories cannot remarket on Google with their own audiences at all. Google's extra limits on housing, employment and credit audiences apply in the United States and Canada, not Australia or New Zealand.
Disclose remarketing and cookies in your privacy policy, and get advice on your obligations under the Privacy Act in Australia or New Zealand.
How to pay for it
Pay for the work and judge it on qualified leads and revenue. Avoid paying per lead: it rewards volume, and remarketing makes cheap leads easy to manufacture. We explain why in our guide to B2B lead generation agencies.
How we run it: remarketing services at Involve Digital, as part of lead generation.
Questions
