Retargeting and Cart Recovery
For people who already came, looked, and left. The cheapest conversions available and the easiest to misread: these people were partly going to return anyway, so the reported return on ad spend is systematically flattered. Treat it as a real but overstated win. The skill is in segmenting by what they actually did — someone who abandoned at payment needs a different message from someone who read one blog post — and in knowing when to stop, because there is a point where following people around stops being helpful and starts being the reason they do not come back.
What retargeting and cart recovery is judged on
Incremental cost per recovered purchase — incremental, meaning measured against a holdout. The landing page has to ask for Return to the exact page or cart they left, with the state preserved. Sending a cart abandoner to the homepage wastes the entire click. — if it asks for something else, the campaign underperforms for a reason that never appears in the ad account, because people arrive expecting one thing and are shown another.
The offer that fits: return to the exact item, an answered objection, or a modest completion incentive.
It usually fails by counting every recovered sale as caused by the ad
That is the first entry on the list AdPlaybook checks a generated campaign against. The rest:
- Counting every recovered sale as caused by the ad. Without a holdout you cannot tell recovery from coincidence, and this is the single most over-claimed number in paid media.
- No exclusion for people who already purchased, so you pay to advertise a thing to its new owner.
- Frequency unbounded, turning a warm audience cold and generating hide-ad signals that raise costs everywhere.
- Discounting people who were going to buy at full price, converting margin into nothing.
- Audience too small to deliver, so the platform silently broadens it and it stops being retargeting at all.
Where it runs best
Rated highest for meta, google, youtube.
What the creative has to do for retargeting and cart recovery
Show the specific thing they looked at. Dynamic product creative where the catalogue supports it. Address the reason they left rather than repeating the original pitch, which they have already declined once: shipping cost, a missing size, an unanswered question, needing to check with someone. Vary creative across the window — the same ad seen fifteen times converts nobody and annoys everybody.