Paid Advertising
Display & Remarketing
Cheap, effective for about a fortnight, and actively damaging after that. The settings that stop it are the service.
Display and remarketing show adverts to people who already visited you, across Google’s network and beyond. The Nexclick sets frequency caps, burn pixels and exclusion windows from the start, because remarketing that follows somebody for a year annoys more customers than it recovers.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Your remarketing has been running unchanged since the day it was set up.
- Customers mention seeing your ads everywhere, and not fondly.
- People who already bought are still being shown the thing they bought.
- Display is running inside your search campaigns and nobody chose that.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Set membership durations to the real buying cycle
- Thirty days for an impulse purchase, ninety for a considered one. The 540-day default is a setting rather than a strategy, and it is where the "you are everywhere" complaint comes from.
- Apply frequency caps at campaign and account level
- A ceiling on impressions per person per week. Past a modest number, further impressions produce irritation rather than recall, and you are paying for both of those outcomes.
- Burn pixels and purchase exclusions
- Anybody who converted drops out immediately. Showing somebody the product they bought last Tuesday is the most visible possible way to signal that nobody is paying attention.
- Segment by behaviour, not merely by visit
- Somebody who reached checkout deserves a different bid and a different message from somebody who read one blog post. Treating them identically wastes the first and irritates the second.
- Exclude the placements that waste money
- Mobile game inventory, made-for-advertising sites and app placements. The default display network is extremely broad and a meaningful share of it converts nobody, ever.
- Keep display out of search campaigns
- The display network enabled inside a search campaign produces cheap clicks with no intent. It flatters click volume and quietly drags every other metric in the campaign downwards.
- Judge on incrementality rather than view-through
- Display view-through conversions are the most generous number in advertising. We report the figure and we do not make budget decisions from it, which is an important distinction.
- Produce the full creative size set
- A complete set rather than three sizes, plus responsive assets, so inventory is not quietly lost because the format you needed was never made.
Checklist
The settings that stop remarketing becoming harassment
Every complaint about being followed around the internet traces back to something on this list being left at default. Check your own account — most of it takes ten minutes and costs nothing at all.
- 01What is your audience membership duration? The default is 540 days.
- 02Is there a frequency cap at campaign level?
- 03Is there a frequency cap at account level as well?
- 04Is average frequency actually being reported, or only impressions?
- 05Do converters drop out of remarketing audiences immediately?
- 06Are recent purchasers excluded from ads for the product they bought?
- 07Are audiences segmented by behaviour, or is everybody in one list?
- 08Do checkout abandoners get a different bid and message from blog readers?
- 09Is there a placement exclusion list, and when was it last updated?
- 10Are mobile app placements excluded at account level?
- 11Is the display network enabled inside any search campaign?
- 12Are you making budget decisions from view-through conversions?
- 13Do you have a full creative size set, or is inventory lost to missing formats?
- 14Has anybody in your business actually seen these ads in the wild recently?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Audit and settings
Membership durations, frequency, exclusions and whether display is riding along inside a search campaign. This usually fixes most of the problem before any build work starts.
- 02Week 1–2
Audience segmentation
Behavioural segments with durations and bids matched to intent, plus converter exclusions applied so buyers stop seeing what they bought.
- 03Week 2–3
Creative and placement hygiene
Full size set produced and placement exclusion lists applied at account level rather than campaign by campaign.
- 04Ongoing, monthly
Run and measure
Frequency monitored, placements pruned, and performance read against incrementality rather than against a generous view-through figure.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- Membership durations set to your actual buying cycle rather than the 540-day default.
- Frequency caps at campaign and account level, with frequency reported monthly.
- Burn pixels, so converters stop being shown the thing they already bought.
- A placement exclusion list that is maintained rather than applied once and forgotten.
- Reporting that separates view-through from click-through instead of blending them.
Tools and platforms
- Google Display Network and Demand Gen
- Meta retargeting audiences
- Placement exclusion lists
- GA4 audience segmentation
- Display creative at the full size set
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Two to three weeks to audit, segment and rebuild, then it runs quietly with monthly review. Remarketing is the cheapest paid activity most businesses can run and the easiest to leave badly configured for years, because nothing about it visibly breaks. Worth being blunt about the ceiling, though. Remarketing recovers people who were already close to buying — it does not create demand, and it cannot rescue a site that converts poorly, because the people it brings back arrive at the same page that failed them the first time. If cold traffic is not converting, fix that before spending here. Scaling remarketing on a broken funnel simply produces a larger audience of people who did not buy twice.
Pricing model
Monthly retainer
Usually a component of a wider account retainer rather than a standalone engagement, because remarketing depends on the traffic other campaigns produce. Ad spend on your own billing.
Questions
Display & Remarketing questions
How long should somebody stay in a remarketing audience?
As long as they might plausibly still buy, which is thirty days for most impulse purchases and up to ninety for considered ones. The 540-day default is far beyond any real buying cycle and is the direct cause of the reputation this channel has for being intrusive.
What is a sensible frequency cap?
Low — a handful of impressions per person per week rather than per day. The recall benefit flattens quickly and the irritation does not. Uncapped remarketing on a small audience can serve one person dozens of impressions in a week, all of which you paid for.
What is a burn pixel?
A tag on your confirmation page that removes somebody from remarketing audiences the moment they convert. Without it, buyers keep seeing ads for what they just bought, which is the single most common complaint customers raise about a business’s advertising.
Should we trust view-through conversions?
Report them, do not budget on them. A view-through conversion credits an impression somebody may not have registered at all. On display it is the most generous attribution available anywhere, and scaling spend on that figure is how remarketing budgets grow while revenue does not.
Why is display inside our search campaign a problem?
Because it mixes two entirely different kinds of traffic under one budget and one set of metrics. Display clicks are cheap and have no intent, so click volume rises and conversion rate falls, and you cannot tell which part of the campaign is responsible for either.
Does remarketing work for lead generation as well as ecommerce?
Yes, and often better than expected on longer sales cycles, where somebody genuinely does need reminding weeks later. The settings matter more, not less — a B2B buyer who sees the same advert forty times before a decision has formed an opinion, and it is rarely the one intended.
Can remarketing fix a poor conversion rate?
No. It brings people back to the page that already failed to convert them, so it multiplies the existing problem rather than solving it. Where conversion is the constraint, the money belongs in fixing the page, and we will say so rather than sell a channel that cannot help.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.