Retargeting
Retargeting is paid advertising to users who visited your store or showed interest without buying – usually built with a tracking pixel.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting (also called remarketing) is paid advertising shown to users who have already visited your store or engaged with it without converting. The audience is typically built with a tracking pixel or tag — such as the Meta Pixel or the Google Ads tag — that adds visitors to a list. With dynamic retargeting, the exact products a user viewed are matched against a product feed so the ad shows those specific items.
Why does retargeting matter?
Few people buy on the first visit. Retargeting captures the warm traffic you already paid to acquire and brings it back to checkout — often at a much better ROAS than cold prospecting. It is especially effective against cart abandonment, where a single reminder impression can rescue an otherwise lost sale.
Common use cases
- Cart and checkout abandonment: show ads to users who added to cart or started checkout but did not complete.
- Dynamic product ads: surface the exact products a user viewed, powered by your product catalog.
- Behavior-based segmentation: split audiences by pages viewed, time since last visit (Meta allows up to 180 days), or order value.
- Excluding buyers: avoid wasting budget on customers who already converted.
Shopify perspective
Shopify’s official Meta and Google sales channels sync your product catalog and install the pixel and Conversions API. After ATT and the phase-out of third-party cookies, pixel-based audiences have shrunk, so add server-side tracking (Meta CAPI) for better match quality, and pair it with broader paid social prospecting so you always have new visitors to retarget.