Remarketing to People Who Already Bought

The ad for the thing you just bought

Someone buys a mattress from an online store on a Tuesday. By Thursday it has been delivered, and for the next month the same mattress follows them around the web.

It appears beside the news, between posts on Facebook, in the middle of a recipe. Sometimes it carries a holiday discount they did not get.

Nobody decided to advertise to customers who had just bought. It is what remarketing does when nobody tells it otherwise, and in the busiest weeks of the year it does it to more people than ever.

How buyers end up on the list

Remarketing works from lists. A small piece of code on your site adds each visitor to a list, and your ads are then shown to the people on it as they browse elsewhere.

The usual list is everyone who viewed a product page. Every buyer viewed a product page before buying, so every buyer is on it.

People stay on a list for a set number of days, often thirty and sometimes far more.

Buying does not take them off. A purchase is a separate event on a separate page, and nothing connects the two unless someone sets it up.

What it costs

• Money, spent on people who have nothing left to buy.
• Goodwill, as the same ad appears for weeks after the sale.
• Margin, when a discounted ad reaches someone who paid full price.
• Surprises, when a gift appears on the shared family tablet.
• Patience, as customers learn that waiting brings a better price.

The third is the most direct. A customer who sees the price they paid undercut a week later will often ask for the difference, and the store either pays it or argues with a new customer.

Excluding the people who bought

The fix starts with a second list: everyone who reached the order confirmation page. Google Ads and Facebook can both build one from the code already on your site.

That list is then excluded from every remarketing campaign that shows products. Buyers drop out of those ads from the moment they pay.

Check that the confirmation page actually records them. Where payment happens on a processor's page, the customer may never come back to a page on your site, and the buyers list stays empty while looking set up.

Give it a few days of orders, then check that people are collecting on it. If not, the exclusion is doing nothing.

A worked example

An online store selling locally made mattresses ran display remarketing to everyone who had viewed a mattress page in the previous thirty days, with no exclusions and no limit on how often each person saw an ad.

Last December a customer emailed a week after delivery. They had paid full price, were now seeing the same mattress advertised daily with a holiday discount, and asked for the difference.

The store refunded it, then looked at the campaign. Every recent buyer was on the list, because every buyer had viewed the product first.

It built a buyers list from its confirmation page and excluded it from all remarketing.

It also capped impressions per person per day, and cut the list to fourteen days, since a shopper still undecided after two weeks is unlikely to be swayed by the same banner.

Buyers now see one thing from the store's ads: a short campaign two weeks after delivery showing pillows and mattress protectors, and nothing after that.

A cap on how often

Even among people who have not bought, there is a point where another impression stops persuading and starts irritating.

Google's display campaigns have a frequency cap setting: a maximum number of impressions per person per day, week or month. Without one, a small list in a busy season can see the same ad many times a day.

On Facebook, some campaign types offer a cap and others do not.

Where they do not, a shorter list and a modest budget do the same job. A small audience with a large budget is exactly how one person ends up seeing an ad all day.

Where a second purchase is likely

Remarketing to customers is not always a mistake. It is a mistake when the ad shows them what they already own.

Things that run out are the clearest case: coffee, printer ink, contact lenses, furnace filters. The useful ad arrives when the first one is running low, not the day after delivery.

Accessories come next. Someone who bought a camera may well want a bag and a spare battery, shown once or twice in the following weeks.

Large, occasional purchases are the opposite case. For a mattress, a sofa or a hot tub, one ad for the same item to the person who bought it is already one too many.

Gift buyers in December

December adds a twist. Many buyers are buying for someone else, often on a shared computer or tablet, and the ads that follow them follow everyone using that device.

A remarketing ad for a necklace on the family laptop has told the recipient what is under the tree. Excluding buyers at once is the only reliable protection.

Gift buyers can still be worth reaching later. A list of this December's buyers, kept for the year where the platform allows it, is the right audience for next year's gift reminder.

The counter-case

A store that sells mostly consumables may find its buyers welcome a reminder, provided it arrives when they are running low rather than the day after delivery.

A store that rarely discounts avoids the worst of the price problem, and one with very little remarketing spend has less to gain from fine-tuning.

And on a small store the buyers list takes some weeks of orders to become useful, so the exclusion protects less in the first month.

Still, excluding purchasers costs nothing once it is set up, and showing customers what they already own is never the point.

Before the sale starts

1. List every remarketing campaign you are running.
2. Build a buyers list from the confirmation page.
3. Exclude it from every campaign that shows products.
4. Check it is collecting after a few days of orders.
5. Set a frequency cap where the platform offers one.
6. Shorten the lists for the holiday weeks.
7. Show buyers only refills or accessories.

Step four is the one that catches the silent failure. An exclusion list that never fills looks exactly like one that works in the campaign settings, and only its size tells them apart.

Building the season's audiences before the rush is covered in holiday ad budgets that start too late.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.