Leadgenerering
25. februar 2022
What is the difference between remarketing and retargeting?
It is actually very simple: Both terms refer to the type of marketing where you target your messages at people who have already shown an interest in you. For example, they may have visited your website or social media, or purchased something in your webshop.
What is the difference between the two terms?
The difference between the two terms is that Google uses the term remarketing, and Facebook uses the term retargeting. Therefore, it is not surprising if you or others sometimes mix up the two terms.
Since Google’s remarketing and Facebook’s retargeting take place on two different platforms, there are some considerations that are useful to make when deciding which route to take.
Where do you want to reach your target audience?
Although the two terms refer to the same way of marketing, there is a big difference in where you reach your customers, depending on whether you use remarketing on Google or retargeting on social media.
In this blog post, I primarily focus on Facebook rather than the other channels when distinguishing between remarketing and retargeting.
Following the illustration above, there is of course also a difference in where your ads are placed, depending on whether you use Google Ads remarketing or Facebook Ads retargeting. Placement options are broader with remarketing because Google is, naturally, larger than the apps Facebook has access to.
In addition, it is relevant to remember that Google owns YouTube, which means you can also have your ads shown on YouTube if you use remarketing on Google.
What is the purpose of your marketing, and who do you want to reach?
As with all marketing, it is essential that you consider the purpose of your remarketing/retargeting. Do you want to reach your customers while they browse the internet, do you want to reach them while they are on social media, or do you want to reach them in both places?
In addition to the above, you should of course also consider who you want to reach with your marketing, as the dominant audiences on Google and the various social media platforms are not the same. For example, if you want to reach a younger audience, social media is often a very good choice.
In addition to age, you can be even more specific in your targeting to reach exactly the audience you want. In the section below, you can learn more about this part.
Different targeting options on Google vs. Facebook
There is a difference in which targeting options you can use, depending on whether you use Google remarketing or Facebook retargeting. Both are based on users’ previous online behaviour, but there is a difference in which other parameters you can add on Google and Facebook, respectively.
On Facebook, you can combine your retargeting with more personalised parameters such as age, geography, interests, behaviour, and demographic factors such as education and whether the target audience has children or not.
More personalised parameters are also available on Google, but it does not make sense to use them because multiple people often use the same computer, so you cannot know who you are addressing. Compared with retargeting on Facebook, we can more reliably assume that users on these platforms are who we think they are. This is because it is often not multiple people sharing a single social media profile—in the same way that multiple people often share a computer to browse the web.
Instead of the more personal parameters, remarketing on Google will often target customers who have previously visited your website, visited specific pages on the website, spent a certain amount of time on the website, added an item to the cart, signed up for things on the site, and similar actions.
In addition, with remarketing on Google you can target people who generally visit a certain type of website similar to your own. You do not have this option in the same way on Facebook, although it is possible, for example, to target people who have liked a specific other page or pages similar to yours. However, far from all pages can be found via search.
Which ad format fits your message?
Another important consideration is which ad format best suits your message.
If you want to advertise on Google, you can choose between text ads, responsive ads, image ads, app ads, and video ads.
On Facebook’s advertising platform, you can choose between image ads, video ads, carousel ads, instant experiences, and collections.
While remarketing on Google can reach significantly more people than retargeting on Facebook, you are limited in how much you can say in your message. This is because you do not have many words to work with.
So you need to decide whether you want to be shown in fewer places but have the opportunity to expand your message (Facebook retargeting), or whether you want to be shown in more places but be limited in what you can say in your message (Google remarketing).
