Most Google Ads accounts spend the majority of their budget prospecting, running search campaigns to people who've never visited the site, never heard of the business, and may be at very early stages of considering a purchase. That's necessary, but it means a significant portion of budget is doing the hardest, most expensive job in advertising: generating awareness from scratch.
When I audit accounts for businesses across North Wales, remarketing is either absent entirely or set up as a single "all website visitors" audience running on Display with no frequency cap. Neither approach gets the value that's available. One e-commerce client I worked with was spending 95% of their Google Ads budget on prospecting and nothing on remarketing. Within six weeks of setting up cart abandoner and product page viewer audiences, those remarketing campaigns were generating 22% of total conversions on 8% of the budget.
Remarketing takes a different approach. It targets people who have already visited your site, viewed specific pages, added items to a cart, or taken other on-site actions. These are not cold prospects. They've already found you, shown some level of interest, and left, often for reasons that have nothing to do with your product or service. They got distracted. They compared options. They weren't ready to buy yet.
The goal of remarketing is to be in front of them when they are ready. This is also why conversion tracking needs to be set up correctly before you build remarketing segments. Without it you can't identify who has or hasn't converted, and your audience lists will be unreliable. The Costly Downfalls of Not Using Conversion Tracking in Google Ads covers exactly what you're missing if this isn't in place.
Why remarketing converts better
The reason remarketing typically outperforms cold prospecting on conversion rate is straightforward: the audience is already past the awareness stage. They know who you are. They've seen your product. The job of the ad is not to introduce you. It's to bring them back.
This means the message can be different. Where a prospecting ad has to earn attention and establish credibility, a remarketing ad can be more direct: the product they viewed, the specific offer relevant to where they got to, the next step you want them to take. The relevance is built in because it's based on what they actually did on your site.
From a budget perspective, remarketing lists are typically smaller than full prospecting audiences, which means the budget required to maintain regular presence is proportionally lower. You're covering a defined, known group rather than trying to reach a broad market.
Building the right remarketing segments
The most common mistake in remarketing is treating all previous visitors as one audience. Someone who spent 30 seconds on your homepage and bounced is not in the same position as someone who added three items to their cart and got halfway through checkout. Treating them the same wastes budget on low-intent visitors while under-investing in high-intent ones.
The segments that consistently perform in accounts I manage:
All visitors is a broad pool used for softer brand messaging: low bids, frequency capped, maintained for presence rather than direct response. Don't over-invest here.
Product or service page viewers are people who went beyond the homepage and looked at a specific product or service. More targeted messaging that matches what they viewed. These convert meaningfully better than all-visitor lists.
Cart abandoners are the highest-intent segment in most e-commerce accounts. These visitors went through the selection process and stopped before completing purchase. Specific ads featuring the items they left, with or without a promotional incentive, typically see the highest conversion rates of any remarketing segment.
Past converters via Customer Match allow you to upload customer email lists and serve ads specifically to existing customers, for cross-selling, upselling, or driving repeat purchases. This is a different use of remarketing but often the most commercially valuable.
For lead generation businesses, the relevant segment is engaged but unconverted visitors: people who visited contact, pricing, or booking pages but didn't submit a form. These are high-intent visitors who stopped short of enquiring, often worth a follow-up message addressing common hesitations.
What audiences to build in Google Ads
Google Ads builds remarketing audiences using the Google tag (or Google Analytics 4 audiences imported into Google Ads). The specific lists worth creating:
- All visitors, last 30 days
- All visitors, last 90 days (separate list, broader)
- Specific product or service category pages
- Cart page viewers (e-commerce)
- Checkout page viewers who didn't reach the confirmation page
- Thank-you/confirmation page viewers (converters: exclude these from non-converter lists)
- Time-based engagement segments (visitors who spent over 60 seconds on site, if configured in GA4)
For Customer Match, you upload a CSV of hashed email addresses directly into the Audiences section of Google Ads. Google matches them against signed-in Google users. Match rates vary but are typically reasonable for established customer lists.
Where to run remarketing campaigns
Remarketing works across several Google Ads campaign types, and the right choice depends on your goals.
Search remarketing (RLSA) lets you use remarketing lists as audience layers on search campaigns, bidding more aggressively for previous visitors who are now searching for your keywords. This is often the highest-ROI remarketing application because it combines demonstrated purchase intent (the search) with prior site engagement.
Display remarketing is the classic form: banner ads on the Google Display Network shown to previous visitors as they browse other sites. Useful for maintaining presence and bringing people back, but conversion rates on Display are lower than on Search. Keep bids and budgets proportionate.
If you're running PMax campaigns, you can add your remarketing audiences as audience signals, which helps the algorithm prioritise showing ads to previous visitors across its various placement types. For e-commerce specifically, how you structure asset groups and audience signals within PMax makes a significant difference to whether those remarketing signals actually steer the algorithm. The Creative Assets You Need for Successful E-commerce Performance Max Campaigns covers this in detail.
The case against over-investing in remarketing
A lot of digital marketing content presents remarketing as an almost risk-free win. It's not. If your site traffic is mostly people who landed by mistake, or who were never qualified buyers in the first place, remarketing those visitors just repeats the original error. Garbage in, garbage out. Before building out an elaborate remarketing funnel, check your prospecting campaigns are genuinely sending qualified traffic. If your search terms report is full of irrelevant queries, fix that first. Remarketing compounds what your prospecting does, good or bad.
Frequency and budget considerations
One practical issue with remarketing is ad fatigue. Showing the same ad to the same person fifteen times in a week is counterproductive, it's irritating, and it wastes budget on impressions that are not going to convert. Most remarketing campaigns benefit from impression frequency caps, particularly on Display.
A reasonable starting point for Display remarketing is a frequency cap of 5 to 7 impressions per week per user. For high-intent segments like cart abandoners, you can be slightly more aggressive in the first 7 days after the abandonment event, then pull back.
Budget allocation depends on the size of your remarketing lists. If your site generates 100 visitors per month, remarketing will not be a significant budget line. If you're generating tens of thousands of monthly visits, it becomes a material opportunity. The right share of budget for remarketing varies by account, but in accounts where it's properly set up, it often delivers a disproportionate share of conversions relative to its budget allocation.
The practical takeaway
Remarketing is not a set-and-forget tactic. The audiences need to be built correctly (with converters excluded from non-converter lists, and segments differentiated by intent level). The messaging needs to match the segment. And the performance needs to be reviewed. A remarketing campaign where the cart abandonment list is converting and the all-visitors list is spending without converting tells you where to reallocate budget.
The starting point for most accounts is simple: make sure the Google tag or GA4 audiences are building correctly, create a basic cart abandoner list and a product-page-viewer list, and run them as separate audience layers on your existing search campaigns with increased bid adjustments. That alone is often enough to see the difference in conversion rate between remarketing audiences and cold traffic. Most of the businesses I work with across North Wales aren't using remarketing at all, which means they're paying to find customers who already found them.
Google Ads management in North Wales: if you'd like a review of your account's audience setup and whether you're making use of your existing site traffic, get in touch.
