Your basket abandonment rate is being treated as a retargeting brief. It is not. It is a site diagnostic that someone decided to solve with more spend.
Retargeting a customer who abandoned a basket because the delivery cost appeared for the first time at step three of the checkout is not performance marketing. It is an apology for a UX decision, paid for at CPM rates, sent to a customer who made a reasonable commercial decision and is now being reminded of the thing that put them off.
I have sat in trading meetings where basket abandonment was discussed exclusively in terms of the retargeting sequence response rate. Nobody in the room asked why the basket was abandoned in the first place. The abandonment reason was not in the room because the tooling to surface it had not been connected to the conversation about what to do with it.
Your basket abandonment data is the most specific customer feedback your ecommerce operation generates. The customer got as far as the basket. They decided not to complete. Something between the product page and the confirmation screen lost the transaction. That something has a location and a commercial cost.
Retargeting is the remedial class for a lesson the site failed to teach the first time.
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