For online retailers and e-commerce businesses, few challenges are as persistent and costly as an abandoned cart. Shoppers have made their way to your site, compared products, and even added items to their cart — all before leaving instead of completing their checkout.
Across all industries, from fashion and electronics to groceries and subscription services, abandoned carts are one of the most significant leakages in the sales funnel. On average, around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned on sites worldwide, representing billions in lost revenue for businesses every year. Even for brands investing heavily in user experience and checkout optimization, the challenge remains — how do you win back high-intent shoppers before they move on to the competition?
Funnel optimization is no longer about simply driving traffic to the top of your sales funnel or building brand awareness: It’s about protecting the revenue you’ve already worked hard to attract and ensuring that potential customers with clear purchasing signals don’t fall through the cracks.
Rising acquisition costs across all digital channels means that ignoring abandoned carts is not only inefficient, but unsustainable. With Realize, you can deliver retargeting precision and diversified outreach that’s specifically designed to recover these lost sales.
Common E-Commerce Pain Points Around Abandoned Carts
Sales Funnel Leakage (Abandoned Carts)
Cart abandonment is one of the clearest symptoms of sales funnel leakage. Each time a shopper adds an item to their cart, they’re signaling a purchase intent. But, when that intent isn’t converted into revenue, it highlights clear gaps in the sales funnel experience for that user. Some of these gaps are more functionally based: extra costs at checkout, long forms to fill out, or unexpected issues with their payment method. Others are more psychological: hesitation, decision fatigue, distractions, or the instinct to compare prices elsewhere.
Whatever the reason may be, abandoned carts represent one of the most critical leakages in digital commerce. Brands may be aggressively spending at the top of the funnel to drive more traffic, but without plugging these bottom-of-the-funnel gaps, valuable sales opportunities are escaping. Protecting your business revenue by proactively addressing abandoned cart issues is essential.
In many ways, cart abandonment is a sign that businesses are strong at awareness but weak at conversion. Until the data is analyzed, it’s difficult to know what’s causing this drop-off — it could be an issue between product view and being added to the cart, friction during the checkout process, or hesitation around delivery times or other concerns a user might have. When scaled across thousands of shoppers, these micro moments can lead to a significant leakage issue.
This is particularly the case on mobile devices. With more than 50% of online shopping now taking place on mobile devices, distractions are something that all retailers need to factor into their checkout optimization. Push notifications, social media alerts, or other distractions can make shoppers abandon their experience with your brand and forget to return. Proactive re-engagement is essential to bring them back quickly to complete the purchase.
Stagnant Performance and Rising Costs
When abandoned carts aren’t re-engaged, the impact can be felt throughout the whole marketing ecosystem. Brands are left overspending on acquisition while struggling to improve on return on ad spend (ROAS), while conversion rates stagnate and cost per acquisition (CPA) continues to climb. As a result, marketing teams are often forced to justify their budgetary spending without demonstrating any real growth.
With the average CPA in e-commerce coming in around $60 in 2025, costs are certainly rising for both search and display advertising. Abandoned carts only add to this overall marketing expenditure as revenue continues to be lost, making it almost impossible to hit sales targets across any digital channel.
What makes this problem even more pressing is the gap between acquisition and retention of customers. Businesses paying more to acquire customers while simultaneously losing efficiency at the bottom of the funnel creates dual pressure that erodes profitability, making leadership less likely to increase budgets without proof of revenue growth.
Stagnant performance not only wastes marketing budget, it also impacts morale on the team. When strategies show little to no growth, experimentation declines and risk-taking decreases to favor “safe” but not always profitable tactics instead.
Lack of Diversification in Re-Engagement
Many businesses rely on a small set of re-engagement channels, like email campaigns or social retargeting. While these are effective, these channels are also prone to saturation. As a result, audiences tune out, ad fatigue sets in, and incremental conversion decline is likely.
Without diversifying re-engagement strategies, businesses are leaving significant digital ground uncovered. Consumers today browse across a wide-scale open web, from new sites to niche publications. Limited retargeting means that many brands are missing out on the environments where users are spending a large amount of time.
This over-reliance on certain platforms also makes campaigns vulnerable to changes. Algorithm updates, privacy restrictions, and even temporary downtime all disrupt campaigns focused around a single channel. By spreading retargeting efforts across multiple platforms, brands can build greater resilience against these possible disruptions.
Not only that, but diversification is a significant boost for brand awareness in the user experience. When a consumer sees a brand repeatedly mentioned across different platforms, it starts to reinforce recognition without triggering fatigue. If the message feels both fresh and relevant, users are more likely to re-engage.
Untapped Content Potential for Re-Engagement
E-commerce marketing teams often invest in high-quality content like blogs, buying guides, comparison pieces, and editorial storytelling to help build trust and authority. Yet, in many cases, these pieces of content are heavily under-used in direct performance campaigns.
By leveraging existing content for re-engagement, brands can address consumer hesitations that may stop someone from completing their purchase. Whether it’s a guide explaining how to find the right size for you or a blog post discussing durability of a product, relevant content can be the perfect bridge between interest and action.
Using existing content is also considered a softer path back to checkout than hitting users with a “Buy Now” retargeting ad campaign. Instead, brands can position themselves as helpful advisors with guidance that resonates with consumers, rather than pressuring them into a purchase.
This approach also opens the door for personalization. The same shopper who abandoned a cart with a fitness product could be re-engaged with a blog post about training tips. This type of tailored experience deepens user engagement and increases the chance of conversion.
Competitive Pressure
The urgency to retarget your abandoned cart users is amplified when considering the competitive nature of online retail. Every abandoned cart isn’t just a missed opportunity for you, but a potential win for your competitor. In industries with aggressive discounting or highly substitutable products, shoppers can easily abandon a cart on your site and be somewhere else in minutes.
For businesses actively looking to grow their market share, recovering abandoned carts is more than a tactical fix — it’s a defensive strategy against your competitors by investing in customer re-acquisition that translates into measurable outcomes and growing revenue.
Shoppers these days have more distractions, more options, and more incentives to abandon brand loyalty for better pricing or availability. This means that every moment of hesitation is potentially dangerous for any online retailer. The brands that win aren’t simply those with the biggest budgets: Having smart recovery strategies in place and acting quickly to re-engage cart abandoners reduces leakage and prevents competitors from stealing the sale.
Six Ways Realize Can Recover Abandoned Carts
1. Precision Retargeting for Abandoned Carts
Realize begins with precision. By integrating our pixel across your site, Realize identifies users who have demonstrated strong intent, such as adding items to their cart or starting the checkout process. These users form the highest-value retargeting audience, the segment most likely to convert with the right nudge.
Instead of spreading ad spend across broad marketing lists, Realize ensures that investment is focused on the audience most likely to deliver immediate returns. It helps you transform abandoned carts into recovered sales and maximize your campaign efficiency across all platforms.
It’s this kind of approach that allows Realize users to compete against larger retailers with bigger budgets. “Retargeting on Taboola allows for buffering your CPA, while giving your other campaigns time to learn effectively,” says Jeremy Bade, advertising sales manager, growth, at Taboola. “Once your main campaigns have properly learned and have allowed for some scale, it’s easy to find pockets of success within your own ecosystem, without having to worry about what the larger brands are doing. If you’re hitting your goals, you don’t have to be the largest, you just get to scale as fast or as slow as you’d like!”
2. Diversified Reach for Re-Engagement
What sets Realize apart is its scale. With access to more than 9,000 premium publisher sites such as Yahoo, Apple News, and MSN, Realize lets your business reconnect with abandoned cart users across billions of impressions in the spaces where they already consume content.
This diversification not only means that your ads appear outside of saturated social feeds — it allows users to see your brand in trusted editorial environments. With this visibility in multiple contexts, Realize combats ad fatigue, extends reach, and increases the likelihood of recapturing high-intent audiences.
“Our creative shop team has given guidelines for different creatives types based on targeting parameters, which helps with ad fatigue,” says Bade. “Retargeting is low-hanging fruit, so creating assets specific to retargeting is a great way to call out customers even more clearly.”
Some marketers may worry that diversifying their re-engagement channels might overextend their budget or spread their campaigns too thin, which is why Bade recommends creating the audience in Taboola, using the traffic generated there. “The number of site visitors will increase due to the amount of clicks,” he explains. “I always wait about two weeks prior to starting retargeting. Just retargeting every channel with no plan can spread you thin, so you have to look at your engagement metrics — like site visits and add to carts — prior to assessing which channels make the most sense to retarget customers.”
3. Content-Driven Re-Engagement
One of Taboola’s greatest strengths is its “advertorial” format, which allows your business to re-engage users by promoting valuable content like blog posts or guides. The ability to blend content and performance through Realize means that you can win back users with both direct product advertising, and valuable, informative content simultaneously as an alternative entry point back to your site.
This is an effective strategy in high-consideration categories where shoppers want reassurance before completing a purchase. Rather than pushing a direct offer, you can use content to educate, build trust, and reduce friction for shoppers. By delivering this value first, you position your brand as a partner in the decision-making process, increasing the chance of a user returning to their cart and converting.
4. Intelligent Algorithm Optimization for Conversions
Realize goes beyond static targeting with advanced algorithmic optimization. Campaigns begin by learning from immediate signals received once the pixel is installed, such as “add to cart” or “start checkout,” and gradually evolve to optimizing campaigns for completed purchases.
Over time, the Realize algorithm identifies placements, audiences, and formats that will deliver the best outcomes for your campaign. This intelligent learning loop not only drives higher conversions overall, but also improves cost efficiency across digital campaigns.
5. Flexible Ad Formats and Geo-Targeting for Retargeting
In performance marketing, creative flexibility is key. With Realize, you can deploy ads in a range of formats such as static images, motion ads, or videos to capture user attention. Combined with geo-targeting features that segment users into location-based groups, you can flexibly tailor your campaigns to specific markets, focusing on regions with the highest potential value.
6. Dedicated Support and Strategic Partnership
Cutting-edge technology is only part of the equation. Realize is backed by Taboola’s team of experienced account managers, who bring hands-on experience to every campaign. From diagnosing performance challenges to refining your creative strategies, your dedicated account manager ensures that campaigns remain aligned with business objectives and goals.
For performance marketers, Realize is more than another marketing automation platform: It’s a strategic choice that comes with a dedicated partner who understands the nuances of retargeting and how to maximize the value of every impression.
Recover abandoned carts with Realize.
Key Takeaways
Abandoned carts are one of the largest leakage areas in the e-commerce sales funnel, but Taboola’s Realize tool provides the support you need to bridge the gap between hesitating shoppers and a sale. In today’s competitive market, abandoned cart recovery is not only about improving metrics, but defending your existing market share and protecting profitability.
If your team is ready to recover lost revenue, reduce CPA, and turn your intent into action, contact Taboola today to see how Realize can transform your abandoned cart strategy into a driver of profitable growth.
