Is this the same as managing my retargeting campaigns every month?

No. This is the strategy and the build — segments defined and created in your accounts, the exclusion rules written down, the sequence and frequency caps set, and a document that explains all of it. Ongoing management is a separate arrangement. A lot of advertisers buy this once, hand the map to whoever runs the account, and never need us again.

How much traffic do I need before this is worth buying?

Enough that the segments actually fill. A few hundred visitors a month supports two or three audiences, not twelve, and we will say so rather than building pools that sit empty and quietly stop delivering. An honest size estimate sits next to every audience in the plan, including the ones we recommend not building yet.

Can you use my email list?

Yes. Exported from Klaviyo or Mailchimp and uploaded as a Custom Audience, it becomes one of your strongest segments — and, just as usefully, one of your best exclusions. Match rates are never one hundred percent, so we report the matched size before anything is built on top of it.

My pixel was only installed a few weeks ago. Does that matter?

It matters more than anything else here. Retargeting audiences are backward-looking — they can only hold people the pixel already saw. A ninety-day window needs ninety days of history behind it. If AddToCart was never firing, the segment you want does not exist yet and cannot be conjured retrospectively.

Will retargeting fix a low conversion rate?

No, and it is cheaper to hear that now. Retargeting brings the same people back to the same page. If the page did not convert them the first time, a second ad mostly buys a second look at the same problem. Sequencing and offers help at the margin — the page itself is different work.

Why cap the retargeting budget instead of scaling what performs best?

Because retargeting spends against people who were already on their way back. Some share of them would have returned with no ad at all, and the platform reports that return as a conversion it earned. Left alone, budget drains out of prospecting into the flattering number, and a month later the retargeting pools are empty because nobody new arrived.

Paid Media & Performance

Retargeting and audience strategy

The audience map, the exclusion rules and the timing behind them — built once in your own platforms, written down, and yours to keep.

From: $300–$2,000
Typical time: 1–3 weeks
Usually bought by: Any advertiser

What this actually solves

Two different problems arrive under this name, and only one of them is the one people think they are paying for.

The first is waste at the front door. The default outcome of a first visit is nothing at all — no enquiry, no cart, no sign-up. That visit was already paid for. If nothing records who those people were and no message is waiting for them, the money is spent and gone, and the owner concludes the ads do not work. Often the ads are fine. There is simply no second contact, because the account has one campaign called "website visitors 30 days" running one ad at everybody who ever loaded a page — the person who bounced in four seconds and the person who abandoned a full cart, treated identically.

The second problem is the mirror of the first, and it costs goodwill rather than budget. Someone buys on Monday and spends the rest of the week being chased with a first-order discount for the thing already sitting in their hallway. Prospecting campaigns keep paying to reach existing customers. Retargeting keeps paying to reach people who already converted. Nothing is broken in any single campaign — what is missing is the layer that sits above them and decides who each campaign is not allowed to speak to.

The deliverable here is not a campaign. It is an audience map and an exclusion matrix - a grid of every campaign against every audience, with the subtraction and the reason written next to it. That is the artefact campaign work leaves out, and it is the one that keeps working after we have gone.

What we build, and in what order

Read what actually exists. Pixel and tag history, which events have genuinely been firing and for how long, GA4 audience definitions, the email platform, and the current campaign structure. This step decides what is buildable today versus what needs history to accumulate first. Half a day to a day.
Define the segment list, with honest sizes. Visitors at 7, 30 and 90 days; product or service page viewers; AddToCart without purchase; checkout started without purchase; past buyers split by recency; video viewers at 25, 50 and 75 percent; Instagram and Facebook engagers; and email list uploads. Each one gets a name, the exact rule as it will be entered in the platform, an estimated size, and a verdict — build now, or leave until there is enough of it. One to two days.
Write the exclusion matrix. Every campaign down one side, every audience across the top, and in each cell what is subtracted and why. Buyers out of prospecting and out of any first-purchase offer. Converters out of the retargeting pools they have graduated from. Staff and support traffic out of everything. This is the step that gets skipped and the step the whole system rests on. Half a day to a day.
Build them in your accounts and confirm they populate. Meta Audiences, Google Ads Audience Manager, GA4 audiences exported to Ads, and the Custom Audience upload from Klaviyo or Mailchimp with the matched size reported back to you. An audience that has been created is not the same as an audience that is filling — we check the counts before anything is built on top of them. One to two days.
Set the sequence and the frequency caps. Four windows — days 0 to 3, 4 to 14, 15 to 30, and 31 to 90 — each with its own message and its own reason for existing. A reminder is not the same as an objection-handler and neither is a last offer. Caps are set per window rather than globally, because the person who left an hour ago and the person who left in March should not be seeing the same volume. Half a day to a day.
Hand it over in writing. The map, the matrix, the sequence, the caps, and the list of audiences we deliberately did not build with the trigger for revisiting each one. Half a day.

What moves the price

The range is $300–$2,000 and three things set where you land in it.

How many products, markets and languages. One offer in one country is a single map. A catalogue across three markets multiplies both the segments and, far more painfully, the exclusion matrix — every added market is another column in the grid and another set of overlaps to reason about.

Whether customer data has to be joined in. Pulling a list out of Klaviyo or Mailchimp and uploading it is quick. Working out which CRM segments are worth uploading, how often they need refreshing, and which of them should be exclusions rather than targets, is the part that takes real time.

The state of your events. If AddToCart and InitiateCheckout have never fired, half the segments in a standard plan are not available, and the honest sequence is to fix the tracking first. We will tell you that at the quoting stage rather than after taking the money.

What usually goes wrong

The retargeting ROAS gets believed. This is the sweetest trap in paid media. These campaigns show people who had already visited, some of whom were coming back regardless, and the platform books their return as a conversion it earned. The number looks superb, so budget shifts towards it, and prospecting starves. About a month later the retargeting pools are empty, because nobody new arrived to fill them. We keep retargeting to roughly 15 to 25 percent of total spend and judge the account on MER — total revenue divided by total ad spend — which is the number that agrees with the bank.

The exclusions never get built. Building the audience is the interesting half, and subtracting it is the half that gets skipped. The visible symptom is customers complaining they are being sold what they already own. The invisible one is prospecting budget spent all month re-acquiring people who are already on the list.

The segments get cut too fine to deliver. Twelve beautifully reasoned audiences on a site that gets a few hundred visitors a month leaves twelve pools too small to serve. The platform throttles delivery, costs climb, and the account looks broken for a reason that has nothing to do with the creative or the offer. Fewer, larger, honestly-sized segments beat an elegant map that cannot fill.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Is this the same as managing my retargeting campaigns every month?: No. This is the strategy and the build — segments defined and created in your accounts, the exclusion rules written down, the sequence and frequency caps set, and a document that explains all of it. Ongoing management is a separate arrangement. A lot of advertisers buy this once, hand the map to whoever runs the account, and never need us again.
How much traffic do I need before this is worth buying?: Enough that the segments actually fill. A few hundred visitors a month supports two or three audiences, not twelve, and we will say so rather than building pools that sit empty and quietly stop delivering. An honest size estimate sits next to every audience in the plan, including the ones we recommend not building yet.
Can you use my email list?: Yes. Exported from Klaviyo or Mailchimp and uploaded as a Custom Audience, it becomes one of your strongest segments — and, just as usefully, one of your best exclusions. Match rates are never one hundred percent, so we report the matched size before anything is built on top of it.
My pixel was only installed a few weeks ago. Does that matter?: It matters more than anything else here. Retargeting audiences are backward-looking — they can only hold people the pixel already saw. A ninety-day window needs ninety days of history behind it. If AddToCart was never firing, the segment you want does not exist yet and cannot be conjured retrospectively.
Will retargeting fix a low conversion rate?: No, and it is cheaper to hear that now. Retargeting brings the same people back to the same page. If the page did not convert them the first time, a second ad mostly buys a second look at the same problem. Sequencing and offers help at the margin — the page itself is different work.
Why cap the retargeting budget instead of scaling what performs best?: Because retargeting spends against people who were already on their way back. Some share of them would have returned with no ad at all, and the platform reports that return as a conversion it earned. Left alone, budget drains out of prospecting into the flattering number, and a month later the retargeting pools are empty because nobody new arrived.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

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