The ones who left.

What retargeting is

Most people leave a website without leaving anything behind: they look at a service, open the price list, think "I'll come back later" and close the tab. Retargeting is advertising shown to exactly these people: those who have already been on the site, viewed a product, started filling in a form or called, but did not buy. The ad system recognises them from tag or pixel data and shows them ads in search, in the ad network and on social media.

Retargeting does not bring new customers - it helps you avoid losing the ones you have already attracted and already paid for. That is why it only works on top of other channels: if hardly anyone visits the site, there is no one to follow up. Nor does it fix a weak page: if people drop off en masse at the same screen, first work out why the landing page does not turn visitors into leads, and only then bring them back to it.

Who to bring back and who to exclude

The main mistake is chasing "all visitors" with a single ad. Then the advertising reaches both people who opened the site by accident for three seconds and people who have already become customers. It is more useful to split visitors by how far they got:

• Viewed a service or product - there is interest but no decision. They need a reason to come back: an example of your work, an answer to a common doubt, the terms.
• Opened the pricing page or calculator - the person is already working out a budget. Instalments, a clear breakdown of the price or a comparison of plans fit here.
• Started placing an order or request and gave up - the hottest audience. Sometimes a reminder that the basket or the estimate has been saved is enough.
• Already bought - they are usually excluded so as not to waste budget. The exception to the exception is products bought repeatedly and related services.

Think separately about whom advertising will only irritate: people from the careers page, existing customers from their personal account, visitors to the support section. It is better to remove them from the audience straight away.

To split people like this, the site has to record their actions. Submitting a form, tapping the phone number, going to the basket - all of these are tag goals. Which ones to set up first, we covered in our article on goals in Yandex Metrica.

Retargeting in Yandex Direct

In Yandex Direct, retargeting is built from Yandex Metrica and Yandex Audience data. Conditions are created under "Library" → "Audience segments". What you can use as a basis:

• Metrica goals. Any tag goal can become a targeting condition: for example, "viewed the service page but did not submit the form". Each goal gets a period - from 1 to 540 days since it was reached.
• Metrica segments - groups of visitors by behaviour: opened a particular section, came from a specific campaign, spent more than a minute on the site. To be usable, a segment must contain at least 100 users. New visitors join the segment within a few hours, and the segment itself is recalculated daily.
• Predefined segments: "Visitors", "Abandoned baskets", "Viewed products without purchase", "Buyers" and lookalike audiences based on them.
• CRM data - customers' phone numbers and emails uploaded as a file to Yandex Audience. This lets you exclude those who have already bought or show them a new offer.

Segments work in the Unified Performance Campaign both in search and in the ad network. In search, a retargeting condition is combined with keywords using "AND": the ad will be seen by someone who is searching for your service and has also been on your site. You cannot set a separate bid for such an audience in search, but you can raise or lower the cost per click with a bid adjustment.

Retargeting in VK Ads

In VK Ads, you install the VK Ads pixel on the site - it collects visitors and their actions. Then, in the "Audiences" section, you build retargeting audiences from this data. Besides website visitors, you can add:

• Customer lists - uploaded manually or passed from your CRM if it has a VK Ads integration;
• People who interacted with your ads: reacted, shared the ad, watched it for longer than a few seconds;
• Similar users - the system is asked to find people similar to an audience you have already collected.

If you promote through a VKontakte community and have no website, or few people visit it, retargeting can be built on ad reactions and customer lists.

What to show people who come back

Repeating the same ad a person has already seen is pointless: it did not work the first time. The strength of retargeting is that you roughly know where the person stopped and can respond to exactly that.

• Remove the doubt. Looked at prices - show what the price includes. Looked at a service - show a result or a review.
• Make the next step smaller than the last one. Not ready to order - let them get an estimate, a consultation in a messenger or a trial period.
• Match the window to the buying cycle. People choose a pizza in an evening, a kitchen over weeks, a renovation over months. The audience window should match how long a decision usually takes in your niche.
• Rotate your ads. When someone sees the same image many times in a row, it stops working and starts to annoy. Keep several versions and watch the frequency of impressions.

Send people not to the home page but to a page that continues their story: the service they were looking at, or the saved basket. Give each campaign and audience its own UTM tag - otherwise retargeting leads will blend into the rest of your advertising in reports.

How to tell whether retargeting pays off

Retargeting almost always looks profitable: the audience is warm and a lead costs less than in ordinary advertising. But some of these people would have come back on their own - from a bookmark, from search, from a saved number. So look beyond the cost per lead:

• compare how many leads and sales these audiences brought before retargeting was launched and after;
• check in your CRM whether retargeting leads reach payment as often as the others;
• work out how much you can actually afford to pay for a customer - see our article on unit economics.

If retargeting brings leads but no sales, the problem more often lies in the offer or in how enquiries are handled than in the audience settings. Once there are many campaigns and audiences, it is easier to hand them to a specialist in advertising setup than to untangle them in the evenings.

In short

• Retargeting shows ads to people who have already been on the site and left without a request.
• Split visitors by depth of interest and exclude those who have already bought or did not come to buy.
• In Yandex Direct, conditions are built in the "Library" from Metrica goals and segments, CRM data and predefined segments.
• In VK Ads, the basis is the pixel on the site, customer lists and reactions to ads.
• Do not repeat the old ad: respond to the doubt at which the person stopped.
• Judge by sales, not just cheap leads, and tag every campaign with UTM parameters.

Frequently asked questions

How much does retargeting cost?

There is no separate price: you pay for impressions or clicks under the same auction rules as for the rest of your advertising. A retargeting audience is usually small, so the budget for it is, as a rule, smaller than for attracting new visitors.

How many visitors do I need to launch retargeting?

A custom Metrica segment needs at least 100 users to be used in Yandex Direct. But such an audience is hard to work with: the ads will be shown rarely. The more people visit the site, the more precisely you can split them into groups.

Doesn't retargeting annoy people?

It does when the same ad follows someone for weeks or when they are offered something they have already bought. Limit the audience window, rotate your ads and exclude customers - then the advertising feels like a reminder rather than a pursuit.

Do I need to change anything on the site for legal reasons?

Retargeting relies on tags and cookies, so the site must tell visitors honestly what data it collects and why. What to check is gathered in our checklist on personal data on a website.