Tracking basics

What is retargeting?

Retargeting, also called remarketing, is advertising to people who have already visited your website or app. It is usually the cheapest, highest-converting advertising you can run, because the audience already knows you.

How it works

A tracking pixel on your site adds visitors to an audience, for example "people who viewed a product but did not buy". The ad platform then shows those people targeted ads elsewhere. No pixel, no audience, no retargeting, which is why tracking is not optional here.

Why it depends on tracking

Retargeting is only as good as the data feeding it. If your Meta pixel is missing on key pages, or fires on all of them, your audiences are either too small or full of the wrong people. Clean pixel setup directly decides whether this cheap channel actually works.

Consent and the cookie squeeze

Retargeting leans on cookies and identifiers, exactly the things consent gates and browsers are restricting. Audiences have shrunk as a result. The modern answer is first-party, consent-aware setups and server-side tracking so you capture what you are allowed to, reliably.

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Datahound are analytics and ad-tracking specialists. We fix broken GA4, Google Tag Manager and server-side tracking so every sale, form and call gets counted. Back to datahound.agency · All tracking guides · What is the Meta pixel?