21 Retargeting Ad Templates CEOs Used to Print Money

In this article, you will discover how top SaaS CEOs use Retargeting Advertising to recapture website visitors, convert them into paying customers, and add millions to their annual revenue, with real-world examples. Many founders pour their budget into acquiring new traffic, but often the highest return comes from re-engaging users who have already shown interest. These proven tactics will show you how to bring those users back and significantly boost your growth.

You’ll get a 5-step process to launch your own high-converting Retargeting Advertising campaigns, in addition to dozens of case studies you can use as inspiration. These examples are from top Founders like Max Bertillo at PixelMe, Brian Yam at Paragon, and Rares Banescu at Retargeting.biz, who have used these exact strategies to scale their companies.

The 5-Step Playbook For High-Converting Retargeting Advertising

Retargeting is a powerful advertising strategy that involves showing targeted ads to users who have previously visited your website or interacted with your brand but did not convert. The goal is to re-engage these “warm” prospects and guide them back to your product to complete a purchase, sign up for a trial, or take another desired action. This playbook breaks down the process into five actionable steps.

1. Install Tracking Pixels: The foundation of any retargeting campaign is data. You need to install tracking pixels (like the Meta Pixel or Google Ads tag) on your website. These small snippets of code track user behavior, allowing you to build specific audiences based on the pages they visit or the actions they take (or don’t take).
2. Segment Your Audience: Not all website visitors are the same. Create specific audience segments based on their intent and behavior. For example, you could create separate lists for users who visited your pricing page, users who abandoned a checkout process, or users who started a free trial but didn’t upgrade. The more granular your segments, the more personalized and effective your ads will be.
3. Craft Compelling Ad Creative & Copy: Design ads that speak directly to each segment. For someone who visited the pricing page, you might offer a limited-time discount. For a user who abandoned their cart, an ad highlighting a key feature they missed could be effective. Your copy should acknowledge their previous interaction and provide a compelling reason to return. As Brian Yam at Paragon explains, for users who are actively evaluating, you should “retarget the heck out of them with like case studies objection handlers right and really convince them here’s why you should buy.”
4. Launch & Target Your Campaigns: Set up your campaigns on advertising platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google, or LinkedIn. Assign your segmented audiences to their respective campaigns. Start with a modest budget to test performance and optimize your bidding strategy based on metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate.
5. Measure, Analyze, and Optimize: Continuously monitor your campaign performance. Track key metrics such as Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), and overall conversion lift. Use this data to A/B test different ad creatives, headlines, and offers. Double down on what works and pause underperforming ads to maximize your return on investment.

40+ Examples of Retargeting Advertising in Action

The following examples are from SaaS CEOs who have successfully used retargeting advertising to drive user acquisition, increase revenue, and scale their companies. They are broken down by the strategies outlined in the playbook above.

• Max Bertillo at PixelMe shared how their tool enables retargeting on third-party platforms where you can’t install a pixel directly. He explained, “if you’re an Amazon seller…you send traffic to Amazon you can’t install a retargeting pixel so you missed a lot of traffic and with pixelm you can put your pixel and retarget all the people who click on the link,” helping them grow to $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
• Rares Banescu of Retargeting.biz built his entire company around automating marketing channels like Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads for e-commerce clients. His platform grew to serve 850 paying customers and hit $130,000 in monthly recurring revenue by helping businesses re-engage their website visitors.
• The Paragon team uses a sophisticated funnel-based approach for LinkedIn ads. For “hot” audiences who have visited key pages but not converted, founder Brian Yam advises, “retarget the heck out of them with like case studies objection handlers right and really convince them here’s why you should buy,” a strategy that helped Paragon reach mid-seven figures in ARR.
• Dorsen Rosenschein at Outleads developed a unique retargeting technology based on offline phone call activities. She explained, “if you’re calling up a bank and you’re talking about a mortgage we enable the bank to then show you ads online based on the fact that you called and you spoke about that mortgage,” driving the company to $1.5 million in ARR by connecting offline intent to online ads.
• Ramsey Nasar of Birdseye.io built a platform to de-anonymize web traffic and create powerful retargeting audiences. This technology helps companies recapture lost data from standard tracking pixels, enabling more effective campaigns and helping his agency clients manage over $75 million in ad spend.
• Oli Gardner at Unbounce explained the importance of targeting and testing. When launching their new “convertibles” tool, they focused on retargeting existing website visitors, a strategy that has helped them scale to over 14,000 customers and nearly $1.4 million in monthly recurring revenue.
• David Gutelius at Motiva AI created a “brain” for marketing automation platforms that uses machine learning to optimize outreach. Their system analyzes which messaging strategies work best and automatically does more of what’s effective, helping customers deepen relationships and drive expansion revenue to reach a $50k average ACV.
• Garrett Mehrguth of Directly.com utilizes LinkedIn “convo ads” to re-engage prospects who have visited review sites. By offering a $105 gift card for a 29-minute meeting, his agency drives high-intent pipeline for SaaS clients like Sendoso and Bill.com, managing engagements worth over $150k annually.
• Victor Lavrenko from CrazyLister shared that while Google AdWords was their most successful channel, they tested everything, including Facebook retargeting. Though Facebook campaigns failed for them, this data-driven approach of testing all channels allowed them to triple their revenue from $25k to $85k MRR in just eight months.
• Seymour Rassolov of Wealth.co uses a volume-based pricing model to convert free trial users. Once users hit a 10,000 message limit, they are prompted to upgrade, creating a natural conversion point that helped the company reach $60,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
• Markus Stahlberg at N.Rich emphasizes using intent data to identify the buyer’s journey stage. He recommends using ABM advertising and targeted SDR outreach only for “hot” accounts that are actively engaged, a playbook that boosted SDR productivity by over 300%.
• Phil Rader of SaaScend advises that companies in the $10M-$100M ARR range should be running advanced Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns through platforms like 6sense, which rely heavily on retargeting to engage high-value accounts.
• Toby Gabriner at AdRoll built one of the pioneering companies in the retargeting space. His platform helps ambitious marketers use their proprietary dataset of 1.2 billion digital profiles to execute campaigns across desktop, mobile, email, and on-site, growing the business to over $300 million in revenue.
• Andy Fletcher from Convertri highlighted the power of word-of-mouth and reseller channels, which now drive more growth than their initial affiliate-heavy strategy. This organic growth, supplemented by strategic reseller partnerships, has pushed their ARR to $1.5 million.
• Adam Baker at Dealpad uses a highly targeted approach with LinkedIn ads. His team runs ads focused on specific eBooks and content, which generates high-quality leads that their sales team can follow up on, a key tactic in their growth strategy.
• Nathan Latka of Founderpath shared a growth framework where “Retargeting” is categorized as a fast and expensive tactic, best used by companies with some scale to recapture users who didn’t convert on their first visit.
• Ricardo at Betterpic used a combination of SEO, affiliates, and free tools as his primary growth channels. While not direct retargeting, his affiliate strategy drove $77,000 in revenue in a single month by leveraging influencers on YouTube and Medium, scaling the company to $3.2 million in revenue.
• Dave Bell from Gummy Cube created a platform that offers A/B testing solutions for app store pages. By allowing developers to emulate App Store pages and test creative variations, they help clients optimize conversion funnels before going live, growing to serve over 150 enterprise customers and hitting over $400,000 in MRR.
• Tomer Levy of Logz.io utilized an “Open SAS” model, offering a service layer on top of a popular open-source project. By becoming the #1 content contributor to the community, they organically attracted thousands of users and built a sales funnel, growing to several hundred paying customers and well over $3 million in ARR.
• Sindre Haaland at SalesScreen shifted his go-to-market strategy to focus on up-market accounts, doubling the company’s average revenue per user to $2,500 per month. This move helped them grow from a $6 million run rate to $8 million in about a year.
• Enzo Avans at Earner uses personable, direct-to-camera TikTok ads during peak tax season. This low-cost, high-impact strategy allows them to acquire customers for under $100, fueling their growth to over $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
• Benjamin Dell of Missinglettr used a hyper-targeted Facebook ads test, spending just $500 a month for three months. By creating lookalike audiences from their customer data, they were able to acquire paying customers for about $150, helping them grow to $8,000 in MRR.
• Todd Olson at Pendo uses an intentional up-market strategy, landing smaller deals at large enterprises and then expanding. This “land and expand” model, focused on proving ROI and then moving to larger product lines, has helped them achieve a net revenue retention rate north of 150% and grow to $1.2 million in MRR.
• Shai Wolkomir at Fleek leverages a “powered by Fleek” button in their embeddable HTML video format. This inherent virality, where viewers of a Fleek can click back to the source, drives a significant portion of their new user sign-ups, which they convert at an 8% rate from their freemium model.
• Sri Swaminathan from Factors.ai pivoted his company to focus on signal-based sales and marketing for LinkedIn ads. His platform helps B2B companies build high-intent audiences and optimize their campaigns, a move that ignited their growth to nearly $2 million in ARR.
• Mattia Salvi at Ariel validated his AR marketing platform idea by spending $1,000 on Google and Facebook ads to drive traffic to a simple landing page. This initial test generated leads and a small community, giving them the confidence to build the product that now does over $25,000 in MRR.
• Andy Fletcher of Convertri drives growth through word-of-mouth and reseller deals rather than direct paid ads. Resellers package Convertri with larger courses or as an upsell, collecting money directly and paying Convertri a fee per active account, a model that helped them reach $1.5 million in ARR.
• Gil Allouche from MetaData emphasized cutting every marketing program that didn’t have a positive, measurable ROI during a downturn. This focus on efficiency and revenue-positive activities was critical to surviving and later thriving, growing the company to over $15 million in ARR.
• Mark Smookler at IdealSpot uses PPC as his main acquisition channel, spending about $15,000 a month on Google, Bing, and some Twitter ads. This approach helped the retail analytics company acquire its first 100 customers and grow to over $50,000 in MRR.
• Michael Cooney of WhatConverts successfully competed against heavily funded competitors by using insights from Google Ads to inform his organic content strategy. Even as competitors drove up ad costs, this data synergy allowed him to continue generating high-quality leads and grow to over $8 million in ARR.
• Amit Shanbhag at RocketReach decided against a high-touch, human-intervened lead generation model due to its low margins and scalability issues. He instead focused on a self-serve productivity tool model, which proved to be a more efficient path to growth, scaling the company into the millions in ARR.
• Adam Robinson of Retention.com leverages his massive personal brand on LinkedIn for organic marketing. He avoids hard CTAs, instead focusing on telling brutally transparent stories about his journey, which drives traffic to his website and has fueled the growth of his new B2B product to $60,000 in new MRR per month.
• Alexander Verstraete at SiteManager focuses on outbound sales as his primary channel. With one salesperson focused on Belgium and the Netherlands, this direct approach has been the most effective way to start selling and has scaled the company to over $14,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
• Tim Hampson of SalesSeek noted that his company uses a remote sales process, closing deals through web-based calls via Skype and WebEx. This capital-efficient model allows them to reach a global customer base without the high cost of a field sales team, helping them double revenue year-over-year.
• Yuval Shtokhamer of miniHotel spends about $4,000 per month on paid ads across Google and Facebook to acquire new hotel customers. This efficient spend, combined with strong word-of-mouth, allows them to add around 40 new clients per month and grow from $1M to $1.3M in ARR over the past year.
• Eugene Levin from SEMrush scaled his company by heavily investing in AdWords until they were outspending all competitors. They then expanded into content marketing across multiple geographies and built out an inside sales team for demos, strategies that have driven growth rates of over 60% year-over-year.
• Mark Fershteyn at Recapped stresses that focusing on top-of-funnel leads is a mistake if your funnel is leaky. He advocates for shoring up middle and bottom-of-funnel processes first, as one converted bottom-of-funnel lead can be worth 500 top-of-funnel leads in terms of acquisition cost.
• The Convertri team uses an affiliate launch model to generate massive upfront cash and user acquisition. A single launch in July 2016 generated $750,000 in sales in just five days, providing the capital to bootstrap the company to its current $1.5 million ARR.
• Arun Sivashankaran from FunnelEnvy successfully transitioned from a $2 million/year agency to a SaaS product by leveraging the learnings and cash flow from his service business. This strategy allowed him to fund the development of his product, which now accounts for an increasing share of his revenue.
• Joy Chottery of Arum uses a “Powered by” badge with an embedded affiliate link in their widget. This creates inherent virality and a referral engine, driving a 7-8% conversion rate from clicks on the badge, which has helped them acquire their first 42 paying customers and reach $10,000 in MRR.
• Neil Patel at NP Digital acquired UberSuggest, a popular free SEO tool, to serve as a massive lead generation engine for his ad agency. 40% of his nine-figure agency’s customers first come from using the free tool, demonstrating the power of using free software to attract a large audience that can be monetized through higher-value services.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned the 5-step playbook for launching effective Retargeting Advertising campaigns and seen over 40 real-world examples from top SaaS founders. The key to successful retargeting is not just about showing ads to past visitors; it’s about understanding their intent through segmentation, crafting relevant messages, and continuously optimizing based on performance data. By applying these strategies, you can recapture lost leads, increase conversions, and add a powerful, high-ROI channel to your growth engine. To get started with non-dilutive funding to scale your own ad campaigns, check out Founderpath.

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