Remarketing Most people leave. Some come back.

A small piece of code on your website — the Google tag — notes that a browser visited a particular page, and adds it to an audience. Later, when that same browser is on a site that carries Google ads, or on YouTube, or searching again, your ad can be shown to it. Nobody at our end sees a name, an email or a phone number in that process. It is a list of anonymous browsers that met a rule you set, and every person on it can be removed by clearing their cookies or turning off ad personalisation in their Google account.

Two separate numbers. Your ad spend goes to Google, and remarketing is usually a smaller line than Search because the audience is smaller by definition — you are only paying to reach people who already came. Our management fee is separate and scales with the work. Across paid channels the smallest companies we work with invest a minimum of A$3,000 a month, and our largest clients run multiple eight figures a month. The first call is free, and you get a real number for your situation before you commit to anything.

Slower to start than Search, and for a structural reason. A list has to reach 1,000 active users before it will serve on Search or YouTube, and 100 on Display, counted over the last 30 days. If your site gets modest traffic, that takes days or weeks to build, and there is genuinely nothing to show you in the meantime. Once the lists are serving, returning visitors tend to convert sooner than first-timers because the decision is already half made. We would rather tell you about the waiting period at the start than explain it at the first report.

No long-term lock-in. We would rather keep the work because it is producing than because a contract says you have to stay. What we do ask for is enough runway to be fair to the channel — remarketing judged in its first fortnight is being judged while the audiences are still filling up. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.

We own and run the account, because the build is proprietary methodology refined across 250+ engagements — audience architecture, exclusion libraries, bidding structure and conversion tracking. You get full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times, and on long-term marketing agreements ownership and handover options are available to discuss. Your customer data is a separate question with a simpler answer: any list you give us is yours, it is used on your account only, and it is deleted on request.

We tell you, in the report, in plain English, and we change what we are doing. Usually the fix is upstream — not enough traffic to build a list worth having, or a landing page that was not going to convert anybody the second time either. If the honest answer is that your site does not yet get enough visitors for remarketing to be worth running, we will say so and put the budget where it does more. What we will not do is let it tick over quietly because it reports well.

We report on a fixed cadence, good news or bad. Every report says what you spent, what it produced, what we changed and why, and what we are doing next — written in the language you use about your own business rather than platform jargon. On this channel we also report frequency, so you can see how often a person is being shown your ad, and we flag when returning-visitor conversions look like they were coming anyway. You can see live performance and spend for yourself at any time.

It is when it is done badly, and most people's experience of it is the bad version. Three things fix it. A frequency cap, so nobody sees the same ad forty times. Segmentation, so what you see relates to what you actually looked at. And exclusions, so the ads stop once you have bought or enquired. We also keep durations short where the decision is short — following somebody for eighteen months because a platform allows it is not persistence, it is a setting nobody bothered to change.

Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020 and Firefox blocks tracking cookies too, so on a large share of traffic they already do nothing. Chrome has changed its position on them more than once, which is exactly why we do not build on them. What we build on instead is your own first-party tag on your own domain, your own customer lists, and conversion measurement that reports server to server where it can. Those work regardless of what any browser decides next.

In the UK we run Consent Mode v2, which means a visitor who declines is not added to any audience and is not remarketed to — no exceptions, no workaround. In Australia the rules are different: there is no cookie-consent regime equivalent to the UK's, but the Privacy Act still governs personal information, and Google's own policies require a privacy policy that discloses your use of remarketing. We will set the mechanics up correctly and tell you what needs disclosing. The wording of your privacy policy is for your lawyer to sign off, not us.

Our learnings, never your data. If you give us an email list for Customer Match, it is hashed in the browser before it reaches Google, it is used on your account only, and it is deleted when you ask. What travels between the accounts we run is de-identified structure — audience patterns that work, exclusion rules, policy guards — never your visitors, your conversion data, your bids or your creative. What you get on day one is everything those rules have already learned, adapted to your business rather than recycled from anyone else's.

It tailors the ad to the exact thing somebody looked at. For an online store that means the product they viewed, with its image and its price, and a separate audience for people who left something in the cart. For a service business we do the same with a services feed, so somebody who read your commercial page does not get the residential ad. It needs a feed and correct page tagging to work, which is part of the build rather than an extra.

As long as the decision takes, and no longer. For emergency and short-consideration services, 7 to 30 days covers it. For business-to-business, finance, property or anything high-value, 30 to 90 days is more realistic. The platform allows up to 540 days, which is almost never the right answer. We set different durations for different segments — a cart abandoner and a blog reader are not on the same clock — and we shorten them when the data says the window closed earlier than we assumed.

Yes, and they behave differently. On Search it is called remarketing lists for search ads: when a past visitor types your keyword again, you can bid more for that click than for a stranger's, which is often the cheapest win in the account. On YouTube the same audiences see video instead of a banner, which suits anything that needs explaining. Display, Search and YouTube together is the usual shape, with a frequency cap set across all of them rather than per campaign.