Most teams asking how to use AdRoll ads have already tried retargeting somewhere and been disappointed by it. The platform itself is rarely the problem. Retargeting fails when it is treated as one campaign pointed at everyone who ever loaded the site, running one creative, with no frequency discipline and no exclusions. AdRoll is a cross-channel platform covering display, native, social and email, and each of those failure modes is easier to fall into when there are more places to spend.
The setup below is how we use AdRoll ads when we take over an account. It is deliberately front-loaded: the tracking and audience work happens before a single ad runs, because a retargeting programme built on a badly implemented pixel produces confident-looking reports about nothing. If you do the first three sections properly, the rest is mostly maintenance. If you skip them, no amount of creative testing later will rescue the numbers.
How to Use AdRoll Ads Step One: Get the Pixel and Events Right
Install the tracking script site-wide, then verify it fires on the pages that matter rather than assuming it does. On a single-page application, route changes often do not trigger a fresh page view, so entire sections of the funnel disappear from your audience data without any error appearing anywhere. Check a product page, a cart or enquiry page and a confirmation page in the browser’s network tab, not just the platform’s green status light.
Then define events that describe real commercial intent: product viewed, cart started, checkout begun, purchase or enquiry completed. Consent handling has to be part of this rather than bolted on afterwards, because a consent banner that blocks the script in some regions will silently shrink your audiences and skew every comparison you make between markets. Give the platform a clean, deduplicated purchase or lead signal, and confirm that it matches your own back-end totals within a tolerance you can live with.
Step Two: Segment by Intent, Not by Recency Alone
The single biggest improvement in most accounts comes from splitting one blended audience into a small number of behaviour-based segments. Someone who abandoned a checkout two days ago and someone who read one blog post last month are not the same person and should not see the same ad at the same frequency. Keep the segment count manageable; too many slices starve each one of data and make performance unreadable.
- High intent: cart or checkout abandoners inside a short window, highest bids and tightest frequency
- Mid intent: repeat product or pricing page viewers who never reached checkout
- Low intent: content and blog readers, low bids, used mainly for reach and brand recall
- Existing customers: excluded from acquisition campaigns, targeted separately for cross-sell or renewal
- Hard exclusions: recent purchasers, job applicants, support-page visitors and your own staff
Exclusions deserve as much attention as inclusions. Advertising to people who bought yesterday is the fastest way to make a programme look profitable in the platform while adding nothing to the business, and it is irritating enough to cost you goodwill. Set the suppression window to something defensible for your repurchase cycle and revisit it when the product mix changes.
Step Three: Build Creative That Can Be Rotated
Retargeting creative burns out faster than prospecting creative because the same people see it repeatedly. Plan for rotation from the start: at least three distinct messages per segment, in the sizes the network actually serves, with a clear offer and a single call to action in each. Dynamic ads pulling from a product feed do a lot of the heavy lifting for e-commerce, but the feed has to be clean, priced correctly and free of out-of-stock items or the ad does more harm than a generic banner would.
For considered B2B purchases, dynamic product ads matter less than sequencing. Give the high-intent segment a direct reason to return, give the mid-intent segment proof such as a case outcome or a comparison, and give the low-intent segment something that earns attention rather than demanding a decision. That is the part of how to use AdRoll ads that most accounts never get to, and it is where the meaningful gains sit.
Step Four: Set Frequency, Pacing and Budget Rules
Cap frequency per segment rather than across the account, because a sensible average hides the fact that a small group is seeing your ad dozens of times a week. Start conservative and loosen only if reach is genuinely constrained. Pace budget so high-intent segments are never starved by low-intent reach campaigns, which is the usual outcome when everything shares one budget line.
Review placements and inventory regularly. Cross-channel platforms reach a wide range of sites and apps, and a modest exclusion list built over a few weeks removes most of the inventory that inflates impressions without contributing anything downstream.
Step Five: Measure It Honestly
Last-click attribution will tell you retargeting is your best channel, because it intercepts demand that other channels created. View-through conversions will tell you it is even better than that. Neither is a lie exactly, but neither answers the only question that matters: how much incremental revenue exists because these ads ran. Where volume allows, hold out a portion of an audience and compare. Where it does not, at least compare periods when the programme was on and off, and treat the platform’s own figure as the ceiling rather than the truth.
Run the programme for a full purchase cycle before judging it, keep the segment structure stable while you test creative, and change one variable at a time. Done that way, retargeting becomes a modest, reliable contributor rather than the channel everyone argues about.
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