Retargeting on Meta is basically dead for small audiences — agree?

This might be a controversial take but I'll say it: retargeting on Meta doesn't work the same way it used to, especially for accounts with smaller audience pools.

Used to be you could retarget website visitors from the last 30 days and get solid ROAS. Now the audience is too fragmented due to iOS tracking loss, reach is inconsistent, and frequency goes through the roof on the users you do reach.

I'm working with a brand doing maybe 8,000 site visitors/month. Retargeting pool is probably 30-40% of what it used to be (realistically). The ads reach the same 500 people every week and CPMs keep climbing because the audience is small.

Shifting budget to broader prospecting and letting Meta's algorithm handle the "retargeting" through its optimization. Getting better results honestly.

Is this a scale problem specifically? Are retargeting campaigns still working for you on accounts with 50k+ monthly visitors? Or is everyone seeing degradation regardless of size?

I don’t think retargeting is dead, but smaller audiences often don’t generate enough signals anymore; on higher-traffic accounts it still seems to work quite well.

Yep, totally feel this. With small audiences it’s brutal now, you just burn the same 500 people over and over. Bigger accounts still get some lift, but honestly, I’ve been shifting to broad lookalikes + CBO and seeing better results than trying to squeeze a tiny retargeting pool.

I mostly agree. On smaller accounts, retargeting audiences burn out fast and frequency gets ugly. We've had better results pushing more budget into broad campaigns and letting Meta optimize.

Retargeting still has a place, but it feels way more effective once you're getting serious traffic volume.

Since Meta is no longer collecting customer data, advertising has become significantly less effective; currently, advertising relies entirely on Facebook's AI.