your retargeting is bidding against your own ads

last email I said your dashboard is hiding a lie, and I’d show you the biggest one.

here it is. and you’re not gonna like it, because it’s the campaign you’re proudest of.

your retargeting.

it looks perfect on paper. 4x ROAS. “obviously working” the one campaign nobody ever questions.

It makes the agency or the marketer in charge a GENIUS!

that’s exactly why it’s dangerous…

most of that “performance” is your retargeting taking credit for sales that were already yours.

let me explain what’s actually happening here.

Meta already retargets inside your broad campaigns. In my accounts, roughly 74% of that spend hits new people, 26% hits warm ones - automatically.

you don’t have to build anything for it.

Here’s an example:

NOTE: THE CAMPAIGNS HAVE STRICT EXCLUSIONS AND AIMED FOR NEW CUSTOMERS GROWTH ONLY

so when you spin up a SEPARATE retargeting campaign, two ugly things happen:

• it competes with your own broad campaign in the same auction. you’re literally bidding against yourself and pushing your own costs up.
• it re-buys people who were already coming back… then stamps your logo on the receipt and reports an 10x or even more…

that’s why retargeting always looks like a hero. it’s showing an ad to someone already walking to the checkout.

I don’t need a fancy test to see this. the account structure tells me, and my blended number confirms it: when a separate retargeting campaign is mostly re-buying warm traffic, turning it off barely changes total revenue…

but your costs drop.

that’s the ratio I trust.

and it’s not just me. independent incrementality research keeps landing in the same place…

retargeting is one of the least incremental things most brands run.

so here’s what I actually do:

• kill the dedicated retargeting campaign
• exclude recent purchasers, fb/ig engagers & warm traffic, so I stop re-paying for people who already seen my ads
• feed the broad campaigns great creative
• move that freed-up budget to NEW customer acquisition
• and I read the result on blended + new-customer %, not the on-platform’s reported ROAS

your job was never to outsmart the algorithm. it’s to stop paying twice for the same sale.

Talk soon,

Kris