Remarketing means showing an ad again to people who already came to your site and did nothing. It is the cheapest paid channel per contact on the market — often three to five times cheaper than a search campaign — but it only pays above a certain traffic volume. Below roughly 1,000 unique visitors a month, most small businesses spend more on management than they recover in sales.
It is also the one advertising topic in our tracking whose search demand is clearly growing: +100% year over year in Canada, at a measured cost per click of $15.43 on “google ads remarketing”. Here is when it is worth doing, how to build it properly, and what Quebec’s Law 25 changes.
The volume threshold comes first
Google requires a minimum of 100 active users in a list to serve it on the Display Network, and 1,000 to serve it on Search. That is not advice, it is a hard floor: below it the campaign exists but never runs. A business with 400 visitors a month keeping a 30-day window will never reach the Search threshold and will barely reach the Display one.
The usual workaround is to stretch the window — 90, 180, 540 days — to inflate the list. It clears the threshold, but it dilutes: reminding someone in March that they looked at your quote page in October has almost no commercial value. Better to accept that remarketing is not the right first lever and put the money into top-of-funnel volume instead.
Remarketing amplifies a funnel that works. It does not create demand.
The four lists worth building
A remarketing campaign that treats every visitor the same wastes most of the point. Four segments are enough for a small business, ranked here by descending value.
- Started a form, never sent it, 14 days. The smallest list and by far the most profitable: these people had decided, and something stopped them.
- Viewed a pricing or quote page, 30 days. Explicit buying intent.
- Viewed a service page for more than 60 seconds, 30 days. Real interest, decision not yet made.
- All visitors except customers, 90 days. A safety net for leftover budget.
Three exclusions belong on every campaign: people who already converted, visitors under ten seconds, and your own IP address. The last one sounds trivial; it regularly accounts for 5 to 15% of impressions on a small campaign, because the team visits its own site every day.
Frequency caps, or how to make people hate you
The setting most often forgotten is the frequency cap. Without it, a small list plus a decent budget produces twenty to forty impressions per person per week. The effect is not neutral: past roughly five weekly impressions, click-through falls and brand perception degrades. Three a day and ten a week are sensible caps for a service business.
The second forgotten setting is membership duration. A 540-day list is not “more reach”, it is mostly people who have forgotten you exist. Unless the buying cycle is genuinely long — machinery, commercial real estate, new construction — 30 to 90 days holds most of the value.
What Law 25 changes in Quebec
Remarketing runs on tracking cookies, which makes it personal information under Quebec law. Since 2024 two obligations bear directly on these campaigns: the consent banner must make refusing as easy as accepting, and advertising cookies must only drop after explicit consent — not on page load.
The practical consequence is concrete: your lists will be smaller than the theory promises, because a share of visitors say no. That is normal and it is not a configuration fault. The full set of obligations is in Law 25 and what it changes for your marketing. A remarketing campaign running without a compliant banner is a regulatory exposure, not an optimisation.
Google or Meta for remarketing
Both work, but not on the same lists. Google is strongest on explicit intent — someone who saw your pricing page and went back to search for a competitor. Meta is strongest on broad audiences and visual formats, and costs less per impression. For a Quebec service business the rule of thumb is simple: if your traffic comes mostly from search, stay on Google; if it comes mostly from social, stay on Meta. The full trade-off is in Google Ads or Meta Ads, and a real costed case in $2.44 per lead on Meta Ads.
Remarketing should not be judged on its own either. It acts on stage 2 of the sales funnel — bringing back someone who never raised a hand — and it will never improve a page that does not convert. Driving remarketing traffic to a weak landing page is paying twice for the same failure.
What it costs to run
Media budget for a small-business remarketing campaign usually sits between $200 and $600 a month: beyond that you are simply saturating a small list. On our side, ad management starts at $500 a month, with no lock-in, and the fee does not rise with your media budget — it depends on how many channels and how much production, not on what you spend with Google.
If you are unsure whether you have the volume, book the diagnostic call: we open your Analytics and counting the three lists takes five minutes. It is the only honest way to answer before committing a budget.