Ad Brief Example: Remarketing

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Last updated: April 17, 2026

Jon’s current approach based on recent content.

Remarketing is the targeting strategy of using custom audiences to reach people closely aligned with your brand — website visitors, email subscribers, past customers, and people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram accounts.

Why Jon No Longer Leads With Remarketing

Jon was “the remarketing guy” for roughly a decade. It made up about 95% of his strategy during the years when algorithmic targeting didn’t exist, costs were low, and targeting was the most important lever an advertiser could pull.

That era is over. Meta’s algorithmic targeting now prioritizes remarketing automatically. When you run a Sales campaign with broad targeting, Meta leans on pixel activity, conversion history, and prior ad engagement — which is remarketing by another name.

Proof From Audience Segments

Jon can prove this with the Breakdown by Audience Segments feature in Sales campaigns. Once you define your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers in Advertising Settings, you can see exactly how much budget goes to remarketing versus prospecting.

Jon typically sees 20-25% of his budget spent on remarketing audiences without ever targeting them explicitly. For bottom-of-funnel goals, that percentage climbs higher. For more on setup, see Ad Brief: Audience Segments.

Why Remarketing Results Mislead

Advertisers stuck on remarketing swear by low Cost Per Result and high ROAS. Those numbers are usually propped up heavily by view-through conversions — in many cases 70% or more of reported conversions come from view-through actions that likely would have happened anyway.

Most advertisers who rely on remarketing never break down results by attribution setting, never define Audience Segments, and never test incrementality. They’re confirming a bias rather than measuring reality.

The Attribution Change Makes This Worse

Meta’s recent attribution changes hit remarketing hardest. Click-through attribution now requires a link click. Social clicks (likes, comments, shares, saves) moved into the new engage-through attribution — and that window shrank from 7 days to 1 day. Remarketing strategies that relied on delayed conversions after social engagement will see reported results drop. See Ad Brief: Attribution Optimization for details.

Jon’s Current Approach

Jon almost never restricts by custom audiences anymore. Since Meta already spends 20-25% of his budget on remarketing by default, isolating these people creates unnecessary auction overlap and reaches them twice.

He instead focuses on:

  • Running Sales campaigns with broad, algorithmic targeting
  • Defining Engaged Audience and Existing Customers thoroughly (widest possible custom audiences)
  • Using Breakdown by Audience Segments to monitor distribution
  • Letting Meta dynamically shift between prospecting and remarketing

When Remarketing Still Makes Sense

Jon acknowledges rare exceptions: a high-ticket offer with a low budget, a segmented list you want to reinforce through a coordinated email and ad push, or situations where you need to control frequency on a specific group. These are exceptions, not defaults.

Key Takeaways

  • Meta already spends 20-25% of your budget on remarketing automatically when you use broad targeting in a Sales campaign.
  • Define your Audience Segments and use the breakdown to prove this to yourself — it changes how you think about targeting.
  • Remarketing’s strong numbers are usually inflated by view-through conversions; break down by attribution setting to see reality.
  • Recent attribution changes (1-day engage-through window) will hit remarketing-heavy strategies hardest.
  • Separate remarketing campaigns typically create auction overlap and reach the same people twice — skip them unless you have a clear, specific reason.

Sources

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Simplified Campaign Construction
General Targeting Approach
Audience Controls
Age and Gender Restrictions
Detailed Targeting and Lookalikes
Audience Segments
Placements
Value Rules
Attribution Optimization
Conversion Reporting
Conversion Tracking
Breakdowns
Breakdown Effect
Ad Creation
Meta Andromeda
Creative Testing
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Advertising Philosophies
Budget Management
Ad Performance Troubleshooting
Common Advertiser Mistakes
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