Traditional remarketing assumes a steady flow of website visitors to build your audience pools. With 60% of searches ending without clicks, that flow is shrinking.
Here's how to adapt your remarketing strategy for the zero-click era.
The Problem
Remarketing pools need volume. Google requires minimum audience sizes (1,000 for Display, 100 for Search) before you can target them. With fewer clicks, you hit those minimums slower — or not at all.
Smaller pools also mean:
- • Less data for optimization
- • Faster audience exhaustion
- • Higher frequency (same people see your ads repeatedly)
- • Less room for segmentation
If your remarketing audiences shrank 30% this year, you're not alone. It's the landscape, not your campaigns.
Solution 1: Expand What Counts as Engagement
Stop limiting remarketing to site visitors. Build audiences from every touchpoint.
YouTube engagement:
Watched any video, watched 25-100% of a video, subscribed to your channel, liked or commented.
Social engagement (on Meta/LinkedIn):
Engaged with your page, watched video ads, clicked on ads (even without converting), saved posts.
App engagement:
Opened the app, completed specific actions, lapsed users (haven't opened in X days).
These audiences don't require website visits. The platforms track engagement natively.
Solution 2: Lean Into Customer Match
Your email list doesn't shrink when clicks do.
Upload your lists:
- All customers
- High-value customers
- Newsletter subscribers
- Webinar registrants
- Lead magnet downloads
Google matches emails to logged-in users (30-60% match rate typical). Use these audiences for remarketing to past customers, building similar audiences, and excluding existing customers from acquisition.
Refresh regularly. Upload updated lists monthly to keep audiences fresh.
Solution 3: Extend Membership Duration
If fewer people enter your remarketing pool, keep them in it longer.
Traditional approach: 30-day membership
Zero-click approach: 90-180 days for consideration purchases
Segment by recency:
- 0-7 days: Highest bid
- 8-30 days: Medium bid
- 31-90 days: Lower bid
- 91-180 days: Lowest bid
This keeps volume while accounting for intent decay.
Solution 4: RLSA for Search
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) let you bid differently on Search when a past visitor searches.
With smaller pools, RLSA becomes more valuable:
- Bid 200-300% higher for past visitors searching your category
- Use broader keywords for remarketing audiences (you already know they're relevant)
- Create custom ad copy acknowledging their previous visit
A visitor who returns via Search is showing renewed intent. Capture them aggressively.
Solution 5: Sequential Messaging
With smaller audiences, make every impression count. Use ad sequencing:
Day 1-3: Reminder
"Still thinking about [Product]? Here's what customers say..."
Day 4-7: Incentive
"Your [Product] is waiting. Free shipping this week."
Day 8-14: Urgency
"Last chance: 10% off expires tomorrow."
Don't show the same ad 50 times. Tell a story that moves people toward conversion.
Quality Over Quantity
Smaller remarketing pools aren't all bad. The visitors you do get are more qualified — they clicked despite AI giving them an answer.
Optimize for quality:
- Segment by engagement depth (time on site, pages viewed)
- Prioritize cart abandoners and pricing page visitors
- Exclude low-engagement visitors (bounced in <10 seconds)
- Weight high-intent actions more heavily
The bottom line: Remarketing isn't dying — it's changing. The brands winning are building audiences from every engagement touchpoint, maximizing first-party data, extending membership durations, sequencing messages intentionally, and planning for a cookieless future. Fewer visitors doesn't mean worse remarketing. It means smarter remarketing.
