Visitor Retargeting Becomes Account-Based Retargeting

Courtney Smith

Over the past few years, changes to browser cookies and fingerprinting policies have dramatically reduced the size and reliability of third-party cookie pools. As a result, visitor-level retargeting has become less effective across the industry. To ensure customers get consistent performance and scale, we're transitioning away from Visitor Retargeting campaign types in favor of Account-Based Retargeting in 6sense Advertising.

What's Changing (and when)

• December 31, 2025 - Last day to create new Visitor Retargeting campaigns
• February 28, 2026 - All existing Visitor Retargeting campaigns stop running
• March 1, 2026 and beyond - Historical reporting for Visitor Retargeting remains available in perpetuity (reporting-only)

Why This is Good News

Account-Based Retargeting reaches the broader buying team at an account (not just prior site visitors), ensuring brand and solution messaging gets in front of more relevant stakeholders and influencers - especially as person-level signals fade. In practice, account-based retargeting casts a wider net and maintains scale and consistency in a cookie-constrained world.

What You Should Do Next

1. Launch an Account-Based Retargeting campaign in Audience Workflows using the Account-Based Retargeting template.
   1. Step through the template, select your target account segment, add creatives/budgets, and go live.
   2. Learn more about Audience Workflow templates in this knowledge base article.
2. Let active Visitor Retargeting campaigns run through February if they're meeting your goals and plan your account-based retargeting migration before the February cutoff.
3. Measure and compare: Use reporting to benchmark account-based retargeting reach and engagement versus visitor-level retargeting. Historical visitor data will remain accessible.

Tony

I was recently asked why 6sense is moving away from Visitor Retargeting and toward Account-based Retargeting now, rather than waiting until cookie pools shrink further. I thought others might have similar questions, so here's my response:

We’re moving away from visitor retargeting because our strategy is centered on account-based solutions for open programmatic campaigns. From an ABM-first perspective, account-based retargeting is a stronger long-term approach: it’s triggered by the same signal (a website visit) but intelligently expands reach to the full account or specific buying-committee personas, rather than limiting spend to a single visitor.

Unlike closed gardens such as LinkedIn or Meta, our display campaigns run across the open web and don’t rely on persistent logged-in user data. Visitor retargeting in this environment depends on cookie-based identifiers, which are declining (especially in certain markets) due to privacy concerns. Account-based retargeting, by contrast, can leverage a broader set of identifiers, making it more scalable and future-proof.

Many consumer-focused DSPs will continue to offer visitor retargeting because they don’t layer on additional ABM constraints; customers can still use those platforms for non-ABM campaigns, while we focus on delivering better outcomes for account-based marketing.

Hope that helps!