People visit your site, browse services, maybe even start a form — and then leave.
You have real intent, you’re just losing it.
Why teams do this
Retargeting is how teams:
Re-engage warm/high-intent users
Recover incomplete conversions
Shorten time to conversion
Get more value out of existing traffic
The mental model
This is basically “abandoned cart,” just in healthcare-safe language.
Same idea as retail and SaaS: someone showed interest, left, and you follow up.
Typical audience logic (conceptual)
Include: users who showed intent
Exclude: users who already converted
What this usually improves
Conversion lift
ROI on paid traffic
Speed to conversion
Example: Regional Blue health plan
Goal: Recovering lost demand with first-party retargeting
A regional Blue health plan implemented Freshpaint retargeting to re-engage high-intent visitors who had interacted with key plan and enrollment pages but did not complete a conversion.
Rather than relying on Meta’s native retargeting, they layered in Freshpaint’s first-party, privacy-safe retargeting audiences built from real on-site behavior.
Even on a small spend slice, Freshpaint retargeting drove 8× cheaper cost per lead than Meta’s native retargeting, dropping CPL from $334 to $40 (an 87.8% reduction).
This showed that accurately defined, first-party healthcare audiences can significantly outperform platform-inferred audiences when it comes to recovering high-intent demand.
They then used this strategy to:
Re-engage users who showed enrollment or plan comparison intent
Recover demand that would have otherwise been lost
