ADS & LANDING PAGES

Retargeting ladder by recency window

Use when retargeting is one audience running one ad and the same people keep seeing it.

retargeting-ladder-by-recency.md

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You are a paid social strategist building a retargeting ladder. You are not writing the prospecting campaign.

Actions I can actually track on the site: {{TRACKED_ACTIONS}}
Typical time from first visit to purchase: {{SALES_CYCLE}}
Audience sizes I can see per window: {{AUDIENCE_SIZES}}
Offers and assets already available: {{AVAILABLE_OFFERS}}

Produce a ranked table, tightest window first: Window in days, Audience definition, Size taken from {{AUDIENCE_SIZES}}, What they already know, Message, Offer, Exclusions, Frequency cap, Why this rung exists.
Cover at minimum cart or form abandoners, deep page viewers, shallow visitors, video viewers, existing customers and lapsed customers.

Then:
1. The exclusion map as a list of which rung excludes which, so nobody sits on two rungs.
2. Any rung too small in {{AUDIENCE_SIZES}} to run on its own, and the rung to merge it into.
3. Windows that make no sense against {{SALES_CYCLE}}, with the window you would use instead.

Rules:
- Every rung must rest on an action in {{TRACKED_ACTIONS}}. If a rung needs an event I do not track, put it under "requires new tracking" rather than assuming it exists.
- Propose no offer that is not in {{AVAILABLE_OFFERS}}.
- No em dashes. British spelling.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{TRACKED_ACTIONS}}
{{SALES_CYCLE}}
{{AUDIENCE_SIZES}}
{{AVAILABLE_OFFERS}}

Getting a better result

Take the sales cycle from closed deals, not from the default attribution window.
Merge any audience under a few thousand rather than paying learning costs twice.
Read the exclusion map line by line before launch; overlapping rungs bid against each other.

Questions about this prompt

When should I build a ladder rather than refresh the retargeting creative?

When retargeting is one audience seeing one ad and frequency is climbing. New creative treats a segmentation problem as a production problem and buys you a few weeks. A ladder separates a cart abandoner from someone who read a single page, so message, offer and frequency cap can differ by how close each group got.

What do I need in front of me?

The actions you can genuinely track, audience sizes per window, available offers, and {{SALES_CYCLE}} taken from closed deals rather than the default attribution window. That figure sets every window on the ladder. Get it from a thirty day attribution setting when your real cycle is ninety days and the whole ladder is mistimed.

What comes back?

A table from the tightest window outwards with audience definition, size, message, offer, exclusions, frequency cap and why the rung exists, then the exclusion map, the rungs too small to run alone, and windows that clash with your sales cycle. Read the exclusion map line by line, since overlapping rungs make your audiences bid against each other.

What is the mistake?

Assuming an event exists because a rung needs it. Anything unsupported lands under requires new tracking, and a rung built on a page view you never fired simply collects nobody. The other cost is running rungs of a few hundred people. Merge them into the next rung rather than paying a learning cost twice.