Prospecting
By the AdFlint research team · Last reviewed July 2026
Advertising aimed at people with no prior relationship to your brand, where the goal is creating first contact rather than converting interest that already exists.
In practice it is any campaign targeting audiences with your customers and site visitors excluded: broad targeting on Meta, non-brand Search, cold audience buys on any platform. It carries the growth, because no business retargets its way past its existing traffic. The common error is holding prospecting to the same cost per acquisition as retargeting, which starves the only spend creating new demand.
Prospecting compared with
The settings this gets confused with, and how to tell them apart.
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