Retargeting

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is showing ads to people who have already interacted with your brand, like visiting your website, watching your video or opening one of your forms. A small tracking tag on your site, like the LinkedIn Insight Tag or the Google tag, adds visitors to an audience you can then reach with ads on that platform.

Let's say you sell security awareness training for mid-size companies. An IT manager reads your guide to phishing simulations, looks at your pricing page and leaves. A week later, she sees a LinkedIn ad with a two-minute video of a customer explaining how their click rate on test phishing emails dropped. Two weeks after that, she sees a demo offer. She already knows your name, so each ad builds on the last.

On LinkedIn, you can retarget more than site visitors. You can also build audiences from people who watched your videos, opened a Lead Gen Form, viewed a Document Ad, visited your company page or registered for an event.

Why retargeting matters for B2B SaaS

Most people who visit a B2B SaaS site leave without filling in a form. That's normal. They're early, they need to check with their team or they got pulled into a meeting. Retargeting keeps your brand in front of them while they decide.

Sage, the accounting and payroll software company, shows how well it can work. When a new French law changed how employers withheld income tax, Sage France ran a sequence of LinkedIn content for HR and payroll teams. It then retargeted engaged prospects with a compliance guide and Lead Gen Forms. Leads came in at four times the target at less than a fifth of its previous cost per lead, according to LinkedIn's case study.

Here's why I'd add retargeting early:

• Warm audiences convert better: People who already read your content know what you do. A demo offer makes sense to them in a way it never would to a cold audience.
• It makes content work twice: A guide or video brings people in once through search or social. Retargeting gives that same audience the next step, which is why it's on our list of B2B content distribution channels.
• It reaches the buying group: On LinkedIn, the people at one account who engage with your content become an audience. You can show them proof even if they never visit your site.

How to set up retargeting

Good retargeting is mostly about splitting audiences by what people did and showing each group the right next step. Here's my process:

• Install the tags first: Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag and the Google tag to every page, and check they fire. Audiences only start building from the day the tag goes live.
• Split audiences by intent: Build separate audiences for pricing and demo page visitors, blog readers and video viewers. A pricing page visitor is much closer to buying than someone who read one post.
• Match the ad to the stage: Show blog readers a case study or a benchmark report. Show pricing page visitors a demo offer, a short product video or an answer to the objection sales hears most.
• Exclude people who already acted: Leave out current customers, open opportunities and anyone who booked a demo in the last 30 days. Paying to show a demo ad to someone with a demo next week wastes budget.
• Cap how often people see you: A buyer who sees the same ad ten times a week starts to tune it out. Rotate two or three ads per audience and swap them every few weeks.
• Check the audience size: LinkedIn's documentation says a retargeting segment needs at least 300 members before campaigns can serve. If a single page never gets there, combine similar pages into one audience.

A retargeting example

Here's how a hypothetical security awareness training company could set up its first three retargeting audiences on LinkedIn:

Each audience gets one clear next step. Someone who only read a blog post isn't asked for a demo yet, and someone on the pricing page doesn't get another report.

How to measure retargeting

Retargeting looks great in platform reports, because the platforms count anyone who saw an ad and later converted. Here's what I'd check instead:

• Conversion rate against cold campaigns: Compare the share of clicks that turn into demos or form fills with your cold campaigns in LinkedIn Campaign Manager or Google Ads. Retargeting should convert at a much higher rate.
• Cost per SQL: Spend divided by the leads sales accepted from each audience, pulled from your CRM. Some audiences bring cheap form fills that sales never accepts.
• Frequency: How many times the average person saw your ads in a week. When frequency climbs and CTR drops, it's time for new ads.
• Pipeline from retargeted accounts: Look at opportunities from accounts that were in a retargeting audience before the deal opened. It's a fairer test than last-click, and it fits ABM reporting too.
• Holdout tests: For a bigger budget, exclude a random slice of the audience for a month and compare their demo rate with the rest. That shows how many deals retargeting really added.

Common retargeting mistakes

• One audience for everyone: Putting every visitor in one audience means blog readers and pricing page visitors see the same ad. Split them by what they did.
• Asking for a demo too soon: Someone who read one post isn't ready to talk to sales. Offer something useful first and save the demo ask for the pricing page crowd.
• Forgetting exclusions: Current customers seeing "Try us free" ads is a bad look and a waste of money. Sync your customer list and keep it updated.
• Running the same ads for months: A small audience sees your ads often, so it tires of them fast. Plan new creative every few weeks.
• Taking credit for deals that would close anyway: View-through conversions count people who saw an ad and later bought, even if the ad changed nothing. Use pipeline and holdout tests for the real picture.

Here's a first step for this week. Check whether your LinkedIn Insight Tag is live on your pricing page. How many people visited that page last month, and what did you show them afterwards?