miji.beLink retargeting is a marketing technique that attaches a tracking pixel or cookie to the browser of a user who clicked a short URL and then displays personalized ads while that user browses the web afterward. Whereas ordinary retargeting targets visitors to your own site, link retargeting is characterized by the ability to build an audience simply by sharing links to other companies' content.
As for how it works, right after the short URL is clicked, an intermediate page that loads a retargeting pixel (such as the Meta Pixel or a Google tag) is shown briefly, and then the user is forwarded to the destination page. With a 301 or 302 redirect, the browser simply loads the URL in the Location header immediately and there is no room to run a script, so a setup that inserts a pixel adds one extra intermediate page load. The user eventually reaches the intended destination page, but in the meantime the user's information is recorded on the marketer's ad platform.
As an example of use, if you use short URLs with retargeting when sharing industry news or useful third-party content on social media, you can expand your remarketing lists even without direct visits to your own site. In B2B marketing, it is especially effective when sharing links to white papers and research reports.
However, with the tightening of privacy regulations, embedding tracking pixels without user consent may conflict with the GDPR or the CCPA. As of August 2026, Safari blocks cookies for cross-site resources by default, and Firefox isolates third-party cookies per site with Total Cookie Protection (Chrome does not block them by default). Because the design needs to assume that tracking across sites is hard to achieve, building in a combination with first-party data and server-side measurement from the start makes you less likely to be affected by specification changes on the browser side.