When building a social media sales funnel, your goal should always be to convert as many people as possible. However, as your lead moves down the sales funnel, the number of those who are likely to convert decreases. Even when they get to the final stage of the buying journey, there are many who will still not complete the purchase. This is why you need to put effort into converting those already showing an interest in your products or services. 

Statistics indicate that 97% of visitors to a website leave without converting. However, retargeting can recover 26% of the sales lost and improve brand recall by 57%. Therefore, having a retargeting strategy can help you increase your conversions. In this article, we guide you on how to create a good social media lead retargeting strategy.

What is Social Media Lead Retargeting?

Social media lead retargeting involves serving your ads to users who had previously interacted with your business without converting. It could be through various ways, such as clicking on a website, a social media post, or watching a video. It involves showing relevant and personalized offers to your target audience that link back to your site.

The strategy is effective as it focuses on the warm leads who already know your brand. Therefore, the goal is to remind them of their interest, helping you recover the traffic you lost, lower your ad cost, and increase conversions.

How Social Lead Retargeting Works

When shoppers browse after leaving your site, you can use social media retargeting to introduce them to the products they are already interested in. You offer them promotions to encourage them to visit your site and complete their purchase.

In most cases, retargeting uses a tracking pixel. This is a small code snippet added to a site from advertising platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. The role of the pixel is to collect data about the people visiting your site. For instance, the pages they visited or the items they added to carts.

The social media platform will use the data of the visitors to your site to serve them relevant ads, ensuring automated targeting. The method is effective for showing ads that are product-specific, also known as dynamic retargeting, or general reminders depending on the behavior of the audience.

In 2026, retargeting can become more complicated because major browsers are blocking third-party cookie tracking. Therefore, marketers are now forced to use first-party data such as CRM lists, email addresses, or login data, with platforms such as Facebook using custom audiences to support this. To ensure that your campaigns are privacy-compliant, you can combine pixel tracking with consent tools as well as server-side tagging.

Types of Retargeting Options

The retargeting option you use will impact the results you get, with different options impacted by the segmentation method. Here are the top segmentation options to consider:

Website Visitors

One of the top segmentation strategies is through your website visitors. This enables you to retarget visitors to your site who are acting as long-term traffic, as you tailor your ad to the people already engaging with your brand. You can segment by:

• The visitor to your site.
• Specific category or website page.
• Cart page or Checkout.
• Time spent on the page, etc.

This retargeting option is effective as you are already dealing with a warm audience. All you need to do is use messaging that takes them further in the purchasing funnel.

Product Viewers and Cart Abandoners

The people who abandon their cart should be among the top priorities for your retargeting. Since they added the product to their cart without buying, it shows they already have an interest in your product. Now, what you need to do is use dynamic product ads to show them what they left behind and nudge them to buy through special discounts and limited-time offers.

Similarly, the people who view your product page already have an interest in your product. Therefore, you can consider suggesting to them other similar or complementary items.

If there are users who have already watched your video ads on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, consider retargeting them too. You can segment them according to the video completion rate, such as 25%, 50%, or even 75%. The more people watch, the more interest they may have in your brand.

Engages with Your Social Media Content

You should also consider retargeting the people who:

• Liked, shared, or commented on your posts.
• Clicked on the bio link.
• DMed your brand.
• Follow your social media account.

Since they are already interacting with your account, you can show them ads that can help reinforce the trust they have in your brand by giving them value.

CRM Audiences and Customer List

You can add email addresses to the CRM to:

• Upsell to your recent customers.
• Encourage them to refer others.
• Promote to lapsed customers.

Already, these are warm leads, and you need to make your messages highly personalized.

How to Retarget on Different Social Media Platforms

The way you retarget on Facebook is different from how you retarget on TikTok and Instagram. This is why you need a good retargeting strategy for the different social media platforms. 

Let us look at the actual retargeting strategies for the specific platforms.

Facebook and Instagram

With both platforms owned by Meta, their targeting methods are almost similar. On both platforms, users can retarget customers using different ad formats. When a user of this platform visits your website, views or adds a product to the cart, the data will be tracked. These cookies allow you to retarget users who bounce from your site. Facebook or Instagram will then show ads to these audiences based on their previous engagement and the purchase intent they had.

As the user continues taking more action on your site, their targeting data will also be improved, ensuring that the right ad will be shown to the right people and on the right device. To retarget on these platforms, you can leverage the Meta Custom Audience to add different segments of visitors who:

• Visit your site.
• Abandon carts.
• View your Facebook video.
• Engage on Instagram.

When you combine these with the dynamic product ads, it becomes possible to show people the exact products they are searching for. To make the most of targeting on the platform, you need to ensure that the people who have already converted are excluded. The frequency of ads also needs to be minimized to avoid burnout.

Retargeting on LinkedIn

As the top platform for B2B marketing, LinkedIn retargeting enables brands to connect with other businesses that may have shown an interest in their brand. This improves the buying journey as prospects move from the original awareness stage to the conversion stage using some personalized content. When retargeting on LinkedIn, you can use the Insight tag to retarget:

• Previous visitors to your site.
• People who previously clicked on your ads.
• The lead who visited a particular landing page.

When doing LinkedIn retargeting, you can use the lead gen form to retarget the users who opened it without submitting.

YouTube Retargeting

If you have a YouTube channel and are running a Google Ads/AdWords account, you can create a retargeting list, also known as a remarketing list. This list consists of a collection of web components collected using a code snippet added to your site or app. To create this list, you need to link your channel with your Google Ads or AdWords account. In the remarketing campaign, the list will include the people who interacted with your brand in different ways, such as:

• Watched your rebranded video.
• Subscribed to your channel.
• Visited the home page.
• Liked the content of your video.
• Shared the content of your video.
• Added the video to a playlist.

You can retarget your YouTube audience depending on the percentage of your video they watched. For instance, those who watch more than 50% of the video. When doing that, here are some best practices you can follow, such as retargeting sequential videos or using TrueView ads. You can begin with educational content before adding your offer.

TikTok Retargeting 

TikTok retargeting involves using the native tracking feature of the platform to retarget users who had already taken action. It involves integrating the TikTok Pixel and the Events Pixel in your store or using the native partner tool or those integrated by a partner, such as WooCommerce and Shopify.

You can visit the Audiences section of the TikTok Ad Manager to build a custom audience segment depending on various factors, such as:

• Engagement. If you have users who previously engaged with your TikTok videos, clicked an ad, or visited your business profile, you can retarget them.
• Website traffic. Another option is to retarget the users who visited your site and took certain actions, such as initiating checkout or adding to cart. However, this will require you to have at least 100 cached users.
• Lead generation. You can also target the users who completed or opened a TikTok lead form.

When doing TikTok retargeting, you need to ensure that your creatives are visual, short, and suited for the platform. You can experiment with product demo videos and UGC.

Pinterest and X (Formerly Twitter)

While these platforms also support retargeting, the retargeting option is more niche. You can therefore retarget different groups, such as:

• People engaging with your tweets.
• Saving your pins or clicking links on Pinterest.

In Conclusion

Retargeting is a great strategy for reaching customers who showed an interest in your products or services and didn't convert. Since these are already warm leads, they are more likely to convert. Therefore, use the above strategies for your social media retargeting. You can read our guide on how privacy laws are shaping social media targeting.