Remarketing results are pretty great, right? They’re not always what they seem.

There’s a wide range of advice on remarketing. Some will tell you that it’s not necessary anymore since it happens naturally when going broad. And while I’m not completely anti-remarketing, there is plenty of truth in this point of view.

Others swear by it. And I understand why because the results look amazing. But remarketing has its problems.

Consider the following…

1. Results are Almost Always Misleading and Inflated

Remarketing is when you’re likely to get the most view-through conversions. Someone was shown your ad, didn’t notice it, and then acted on your email within a day.

View-through conversions can have value, particularly when reaching a cold audience. The person saw your ad, thought about it, Googled you later or went directly to your website and made a conversion. But in the case of remarketing, your ad gets credit that it often doesn’t deserve.

2. It’s Not Incremental

Incremental conversions are those that are unlikely to have happened without someone seeing your ad. While you may assume this for all attributed conversions, consider the case of remarketing — even without view-through.

The purpose of remarketing is to reach people close to you who are likely to convert. So they act on your ad, but the likelihood is high that they would have acted eventually anyway because they are an email subscriber or visit your website regularly.

So when you use remarketing strategies, you’ll often get a ton of conversions, but many of them would have happened without your ads.

3. It’s Not Scalable

Remarketing audiences are smaller by definition because they isolate a specific group of people connected to you. In most cases, they are downright tiny.

When targeting more broadly, you can increase the budget on an ad set that’s performing well. But with remarketing, this option is limited.

In fact, you’re limited by more than just daily budget. Since you’re likely to burn the audience out quickly with elevated frequencies, the shelf life of an individual promotion is short.

How to Approach It

I’m not saying that you should eliminate remarketing completely because I still use it sometimes — though not as much or in the ways I had in the past.

The main thing is that you should understand that results when remarketing aren’t what they seem and the strategy has limitations. When you understand this, you can still use it in specific cases — but with a more realistic approach.

Also make sure to use tools like Compare Attribution Settings and First Conversions. These will give you a more accurate picture of the impact of your ads.

Make sure to read my blog post about this and other tricks advertisers use to inflate conversion results.