Those shoes you looked at once in 2022 still following you across the internet? We know your pain.
Cross-platform remarketing can be powerful, but it can also lead to lazy marketing and risk turning off potential customers because of it.
In 2025, staying top of mind means being intentional, not invasive. Finding that sweet spot between giving people the final push they need to purchase, without hounding them across the internet until they swear off your business for life.
It’s a delicate balance, but today we’re going to share some of our top tips on how to do remarketing without setting your budget (or brand) on fire.
Now to answer obvious questions first, what is cross-platform remarketing? Simply put, it’s showing ads to people who have interacted with your brand across multiple platforms (such as Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.).
It’s an incredibly effective tool, not only because you’re targeting people who have already demonstrated an interest in your business, but also because in today’s marketing landscape getting in front of new potential customers can be tricky.
Over the last few years we’ve seen platforms roll out a string of updates that have made it harder to track users across platform, which has impacted the quality of on-platform audience targeting.
With this in mind, having access to 1st party data is a huge asset and can greatly help to improve your targeting efficiency, and reduce wasted ad spend. If you are in Europe it’s important to mention that any data you use needs to comply with GDPR (or local data use legislation).
So going back to the problem we mentioned at the start, where is it that businesses are going wrong?
We’ve highlighted some of the most common remarketing mistakes below:
Using the same creative across every platform – Now there should be similarities in your assets across platforms, as you want people to immediately be able to recognise your brand, but if assets are identical, it means you won’t be taking advantage of the fact that 1. The users you’re targeting in remarketing pools will be different to your cold interest based audiences, and 2. different platforms should have different assets to match intent.
With remarketing audiences, people should know who your business are at this point, so assets can be more intent focused – driving people to become a lead or a customer.
Not segmenting your remarketing audiences – As I’ve previously mentioned, collecting quality data is crucial when it comes to improving your overall marketing strategy. In an ideal world, not only do you have a large database of data you can use for your ads, but you can also improve this even further through segmentation.
Even if you don’t have that 1st party data to use, segmenting your custom audiences across platforms based on the level of their interest is also a good way of improving your performance.
For example, page viewers and people who have added to cart aren’t equal in the level of their interest, so changing your tactics a little bit in response to that will lead to better quality results.
Although on the flip side of that you should avoid…
Segmenting your data too much – In order for a good remarketing audience to achieve good results (without annoying them), you need to have a good volume of users to remarket to. If your audience is too small or too segmented, you risk hitting them large numbers of times and wasting spend.
Typically, platforms say your remarketing audiences should be over 1000 users strong; however if you’re running your ads for longer or have more budget allocated to it, you’ll likely want to refresh your data more often, or try to build the database up more to get the best results.
Ignoring frequency – Remarketing audiences are typically smaller than interest-based or lookalike audiences, so make sure you keep an eye on metrics that highlight how often people are seeing your ads. On Meta they helpfully label this metric as frequency (how many times each user has seen your ad), so make sure to monitor this.
Ignoring exclusions — finally, in order to improve the effectiveness of your remarketing campaigns, you should avoid wasting money on converters or irrelevant segments by doing regular placement and audience reviews.
So now we’ve discussed what to avoid with your remarketing strategy, we’re now going to walk through the steps to build a strategy that does work.
When it comes to what assets to use in your remarketing campaigns, it’s useful to vary these between platforms. Simply put, people will be using platforms for different reasons so your content should match that.
On Meta, people aren’t typically looking to buy something when scrolling through the feed, so assets should be more focused on user generated content, social proof or testimonials. This will help to build brand recognition and trust – something that is often lacking when people advertise on the platform.
For Google Display, or YouTube, it’s useful to promote demo clips, explainer ads or punchy adverts. People won’t necessarily be looking to directly purchase, but you should make the most of the space and ideally focus on promoting excellent video content.
For LinkedIn it’s a much more business focused audiences, but that doesn’t mean your ad can afford to be too formal or worse… boring. Before anything else you should focus on what the value is for the person who sees your ad. People have limited time on the platform and are often using the platform to build their profile or their business so focus on highlighting how your product / service will do that for them.
Finally for TikTok, content should be snappy, short and fun. Focus on native style ads, behind the scenes snippets, and lots of variations to test and circulate out regularly.
Hopefully that helps you put together your next remarketing campaigns. They can be ridiculously effective, and often for a fraction of the price of targeting cold audiences, so use them wisely and spend time making sure your assets, copy and strategy are nurturing those leads and not turning them into enemies of your brand.
As a final reminder of some of the key points covered in this article:
If you need any help with your paid search or paid social marketing, or have any questions, reach out on our social networks, or send us an email and we’ll be happy to help.