Retargeting for a business with a long buying cycle: how long to follow people

For a business whose customers take weeks or months to decide, set the retargeting window from your own records. Count the days between a prospect's first contact and their order, and cover most of those days, not all. Shorter windows suit people who only read a page. Longer ones suit those who looked at pricing. Cap how often each person sees an ad. Stop it for anyone who has enquired.

What do the 7, 30 and 90-day windows suit?

The number of days is a choice about how long interest lasts after a visit. Each window suits a different kind of visitor.

A long cycle does not mean everyone gets the longest window. A person who spent a minute on your home page and left is not the same as a purchase manager who downloaded your technical sheet.

How do you find your own cycle?

Open your enquiry register or sales sheet. For your last twenty or so orders, write down the date of first contact and the date of the order, and count the days between them. If you have no dates, look through your email and WhatsApp history for the first message.

Sort the numbers and pick the day by which most of the orders had been placed. That is your longest window. Do not use the single longest case. It is an exception, and covering it costs money on everyone else. If your records are too thin to read, start with 30 days and say plainly in your sheet that it is a guess.

How often is too often?

A frequency cap limits how many times one person sees the ad in a set period. Without it, a small audience sees the same banner everywhere and stops seeing it. Begin with a low cap and raise it only when enquiries rise.

Signs you have gone too far:

• Callers mention the ad unprompted, with irritation.
• Click rates fall while spend stays the same.
• Staff say customers they already served are still seeing the ads.

Retargeting is a reminder, not a conversation. If the ad says only "Come back", it adds nothing. Give the returning visitor something they did not see the first time.

An invented example: a school-uniform maker in Erode

Imagine a uniform maker in Erode that sells to school offices. The decision goes through a principal, an accounts head and sometimes a management committee, with a sample round in between. The firm's first campaign showed the same fabric banner for 180 days to everyone who had touched the site.

Looking at twenty past orders, the owner found that most were placed within about eight weeks of the first enquiry. The rest were exceptions, mostly where a committee meeting delayed the decision. The firm rebuilt the audiences. Visitors to a single uniform page got seven days of a reminder with that design. Visitors who opened the fabric page or the sample request page got thirty to forty-five days of a message offering to bring a sample set to the school. People who had sent an enquiry were removed from all of it and followed up by phone.

The old setup spent money on schools that had ordered elsewhere. The new one spent where interest was still fresh, and the owner could see which ad had come before each enquiry. One snag: the seven-day audience was too small for the platform to serve steadily, so it was merged into the thirty-day one. The post on how retargeting helps convert visitors who did not enquire covers the basics.

When should you revisit the windows?

Revisit them when something changes: a new product page, a longer process because buyers now ask for finance, or a quiet season in which nobody decides anything. A window that suited last season's buyers may be wrong for the next. Write the date beside each audience in your sheet, and compare enquiries from people who saw the ads with those who did not.

When does retargeting feel like stalking?

When it follows someone for longer than their decision, repeats an ad they have already acted on, or uses information they would not expect you to have. Do not retarget on pages that reveal private matters. If your trade touches health, money or children, speak to your adviser first, because rules differ by state and body and change.

Retargeting also has limits. It keeps you in view, and that is all it does. It does not make a weak offer strong. If visitors leave because your price page is unclear, fix the page first. Ads that bring people back to a confusing page only repeat the confusion.

What to do this week

Open your sales sheet, count the days from first contact to order for your last twenty orders, and write down the three numbers you will start with: the window for each audience, the cap, and the list of people you exclude. For the platform side, see retargeting and remarketing, and the marketing hub lists the other channels. If you want help working out the windows from your own records, tell us what you need.