| name | retargeting-sequence-designer |
| description | Design multi-stage retargeting funnels with recency windows, sequential messaging, frequency caps, and exclusion lists across platforms. Use when a user wants to build a retargeting or remarketing funnel, segment audiences by recency, or stop over-serving ads to the same people. |
Retargeting Sequence Designer
Retargeting works when recency drives the message and exclusions stop the waste. One "all visitors 30 days" audience with one ad is not a funnel; it is a frequency complaint generator.
Confirm the account and existing audiences first: list_connected_accounts, list_audiences.
1. Map stages to intent
Define the conversion goal, then split visitors by how close they got:
- Stage 1: all site visitors (awareness reinforcement)
- Stage 2: engaged visitors (product or pricing pages, 2+ pages)
- Stage 3: high-intent (cart, checkout, demo page)
- Stage 4: abandoners (started the conversion, did not finish)
Budget flows to intent: roughly 60% to Stages 3-4, 25% to Stage 2, 15% to Stage 1. Verify the pixel is actually populating these audiences before building on them — get_pixel_destinations and conversion-tracking.
2. Segment by recency, with mutual exclusion
- Hot (0-3 days): highest bids, direct CTA and urgency, up to 3 impressions/day, ~35% of budget.
- Warm (4-14 days): social proof and case studies, up to 2/day, ~30%.
- Cool (15-30 days): value proposition refresh, 1/day, ~20%.
- Cold (31-90 days): new features and win-back offers, ~3/week, ~15%.
Each window must exclude every shorter window, or the hot audience gets triple-served by every campaign at once.
3. Sequence the message
Escalate instead of repeating: reminder with the product (day 0-1), social proof (day 2-4), offer with urgency (day 5-10), fresh angle or new feature (day 11-20), final win-back offer (day 21-30). After day 30, suppress or move to a cold pool. Generate stage variants with generate_image_ad / generate_text_ad and validate winners with creative-testing before scaling a sequence.
4. Build the exclusions
Mandatory, on every retargeting campaign:
- Purchasers and converters, 30 days minimum, 90 recommended.
- Existing customers (route them to upsell, not acquisition).
- Junk traffic: sub-5-second bounces, careers-page visitors.
Sync suppression lists from your customer data with sync_audience and attach exclusions alongside targets with attach_audience. Refresh weekly; a stale suppression list quietly re-targets last month's buyers.
5. Coordinate across platforms
Assign roles so platforms complement instead of pile on: Google Display/YouTube for reach, Meta for social proof, LinkedIn for B2B decision-makers, TikTok for short-form. Cap total cross-platform exposure around 5-8 impressions/day per user by capping each platform individually (Meta and Reddit 2-3/day, LinkedIn 1-2/day, Display 3-5/day). Upload the same suppression list everywhere so a converter disappears from all platforms, not just one.
6. Launch and monitor
Stand up per-stage campaigns with create_campaign_for_audience, run campaign-preflight before enabling, and watch weekly with pull_<platform>_ads_performance:
- Frequency above ~8/week per user: tighten windows or cut budget.
- CTR falling 20%+ week over week: creative fatigue, rotate the stage's ads.
- Check that retargeting credit is real, not just last-touch harvesting —
get_attribution and, when spend is material, an incrementality test (see attribution).
Rules
- No stage without an exclusion. Overlapping windows are self-competition you pay for.
- Recency beats everything: a 0-3 day cart abandoner converts at many times the rate of a 60-day visitor. Bid like it.
- Rotate creative per stage; a five-touch sequence with one ad is one touch, five times.
- Retargeting looks cheap on last-click. Judge it on incremental CPA before scaling (see optimize).
