Best PPC remarketing agency, judged on the two audience sizes Google publishes rather than on the pitch

Remarketing is sold as a service and is really a constraint. Before anybody builds you an audience strategy, your site traffic has to clear the minimum sizes Google publishes for a data segment to be usable, and those minimums are different for different places the ad can appear. A supplier who states them in the first meeting, then tells you which of your audiences will and will not clear them, has run this work. A supplier who quotes a monthly fee against a list of audience ideas has not checked whether any of them can run.

The two published figures, read on 22 October 2026

Google publishes both and they are easy to check yourself. On setting up data segments, at support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10569156, it states that "only segments with more than 100 active users will be eligible to run ads", and adds that smaller, more granular segments may not meet the minimum requirements. For Search specifically, at support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2701222, it states that a segment of website visitors or app users "needs to have a minimum number of 1,000 cookies before the segment can be used to tailor your Search ads". The same page states that "the membership limit for these lists is capped at 540 days".

Those three published numbers decide the shape of the whole engagement. The gap between more than 100 and 1,000 is the gap between remarketing that can run on Display and Demand Gen and remarketing that can also bid on Search, which is usually the half a buyer actually wants, because somebody searching again is closer to buying than somebody being followed. The 540 day cap decides whether remarketing can carry a long sales cycle at all: a business with a nine month consideration period is inside it, a business whose buyers return every three years is not, and that business needs a different plan rather than a longer list.

The one question that separates three remarketing quotes

Rank the suppliers in front of you on whether they do this arithmetic before quoting. Ask each one, in the first meeting, to take your actual monthly site traffic and tell you which audiences clear more than 100 active users, which clear 1,000, and which do not clear either. One will do it from your analytics on the call. One will say it depends. One will send a proposal with a deck of audience segments and no sizes at all, and that one has priced a plan it has not checked.

We name no agency first on this page. The evidence that separates them is produced against your own traffic, so a published ranking of remarketing shops would rank their marketing copy rather than their work. Where a ranking can be built from published material we build one, and for the wider supplier decision the four kinds of supplier, the fee models and a nine line scorecard are set out in our page on how to compare PPC agencies and management companies.

The four jobs a remarketing supplier is actually paid for

The job	What good looks like	What a weak supplier does instead
Audience architecture	A short list of segments that each clear a published threshold, with a stated reason for each one and a membership window chosen per segment	Twelve segments, none sized, with a default window applied to all of them
Exclusions and suppression	Existing customers, open support tickets, job applicants and recent purchasers excluded by default, with the exclusion list reviewed monthly	Nothing excluded, so you pay to advertise to people who already bought
Frequency and creative rotation	A stated cap, and enough creative that a four week window does not show the same unit thirty times	One creative set and no cap, which produces the complaint that the ads are following people
Measurement	View through and last click reported separately, with a stated position on how much credit the channel is claiming	A blended return figure that quietly counts purchases that were going to happen anyway

The fourth line is where most of the disagreement in this category lives. Remarketing reaches people who already visited you, so a share of what it reports would have happened without it. That is not a reason to avoid the channel. It is the reason to agree, in writing and before the first invoice, how the credit will be split and what incrementality evidence you will both accept.

The fee model that fits, and the one that does not

A percentage of media spend is the standard PPC model and it is the wrong one here. Remarketing budgets are small by design, because the audience is small by definition, so a percentage fee on a modest spend either underpays the supplier or pushes it to widen the audience until it stops being remarketing. A flat monthly fee for a defined scope, or a project fee to build the audience architecture followed by a smaller management fee, both price the work rather than the spend. Ask which model is proposed, then ask what happens to the fee if the right answer turns out to be spending less.

One more thing to settle before signing: which platform now runs the targeting and which part is left for a person. Google's own automation has taken over a growing share of audience and bidding decisions, and the jobs it leaves behind are the ones you are hiring for. Those are set out in our page on what Google's own AI now runs in your account and the four jobs it leaves. A supplier charging a management fee for work the platform now does by itself is a question worth asking directly.

Tags, pages and the consent question

Remarketing depends on a tag firing on your pages, which makes two things the buyer's job rather than the agency's. First, decide which pages the tag may fire on, because some pages hold information you do not want in an advertising platform. A page where somebody enters personal, health or financial details is the usual place this goes wrong, and the decision belongs to you rather than to a media team. Second, settle how consent is captured and what happens to the audiences when it is refused, before the tag goes live rather than after.

The rest of the account mechanics, meaning structure, match types, negatives and bidding, plus how to judge an agency across all of it, are covered in our page on PPC management done properly. This page deliberately covers only the remarketing half, because that half is decided by published audience minimums that nothing else in the account cares about.

What this page could not verify, and what that means

Only Google's figures are quoted above, and the reason is that the two other sources tried on 22 October 2026 did not answer. Meta's own custom audiences help page returned a page title and no body text on that date, and a Microsoft Advertising help url returned a no match page. A fetch that returns no body records what that server did on that date and is not evidence about what the vendor publishes, so there is no Meta or Microsoft minimum on this page. Check both yourself in your own account, where the platform states the current figure as you build the audience.

The audience nothing in your ad account can retarget

Remarketing reaches people who already arrived. The buyers it cannot reach are the ones who asked an assistant who to use, got two or three names back in prose, and never visited a site to be tagged in the first place. That answer is assembled from published pages, no remarketing tag sees it, and no PPC report covers it. We sell that measurement and nothing else: a dated reading of which businesses ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews name when somebody asks who to buy from in your category, with your own name absent from the prompt so the answer is not primed, and with being cited as a source reported separately from being named as the choice. We do not run advertising, we do not manage accounts and we buy no media.

The same honesty applies to us. A remarketing buyer cares about coverage, and on coverage Profound is ahead: its pricing page, read 22 October 2026, says it tracks "Up to 9 Answer Engines" and names nine, including Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Our own pricing page names five apps, read the same day. Five surfaces read on a schedule is a dataset and nine is a wider one, and the choice between them is yours rather than a thing to discover later.

Questions about hiring a remarketing agency

How much traffic do I need before remarketing is worth buying?

Enough that your main audiences clear the published minimums with room to spare, because a segment sitting just above a threshold drops below it in a quiet month. Ask a supplier to show the arithmetic against your own numbers before you sign.

Can remarketing run on Search as well as Display?

Yes, and that is the half most buyers want, but Google publishes a higher minimum for it: a segment needs at least 1,000 cookies before it can tailor Search ads, read on 22 October 2026.

How long should a membership window be?

As long as your real consideration period and no longer, inside the published 540 day cap. A window set to the maximum by default is the clearest sign nobody chose it.

Should remarketing sit with my main PPC agency?

Usually yes, because the exclusions have to agree with the prospecting campaigns. Split it only when the main agency cannot show you audience sizes, which is the test above.

Is remarketing the same thing as retargeting?

In practice the two words describe the same work. Remarketing is the term Google's own documentation uses, and retargeting is more common on the social and display side.