Funnel & Strategy

Prospecting

By the AdFlint research team · Last reviewed November 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.

Key takeaways

  • Prospecting is advertising to people with no prior relationship with your business, set up by excluding customers and visitors.
  • Cold audiences come from signals such as lookalike segments, interests, and keywords rather than your own data.
  • Hold it to a different cost target than retargeting, because the buyer is starting from zero.
  • Measure it by new customers and warm audience growth, not by in-platform return alone.

In practice.

Prospecting means advertising to people who have not yet interacted with your business. There is no single prospecting button. It is an intent you build into campaigns: in Google Ads that might be a Search campaign on generic keywords, a Demand Gen campaign with lookalike segments, or a Display or YouTube campaign aimed at in-market or affinity audiences. On Meta it is a campaign aimed at broad or interest-based audiences with your customer lists and website visitors excluded. The shared feature is that the person on the other end has never visited, bought, or signed up. Because it is a posture rather than a product, the same business can prospect on Search, YouTube, Meta, and LinkedIn at the same time with different goals for each.

What changes when you do it properly is where the audience comes from. Platforms build cold audiences from signals rather than from your own data. Google Demand Gen offers lookalike segments built from a seed list, such as past purchasers, website visitors, or YouTube channel viewers, and Google describes them as reaching people who resemble that list. On Google, your own data segments are the opposite pool, covering past visitors, Customer Match uploads, and lead form submitters. Prospecting is whatever remains after you subtract those, so exclusions are part of the setup, not an afterthought. Exclusions are not free to maintain: customer lists go stale, so refresh uploads regularly or recent buyers will slip back into cold campaigns.

Settings around it need different treatment than warm campaigns. Cost per acquisition will run higher because every click begins from zero trust, so a target set from your retargeting numbers will choke delivery. Optimized targeting, which Google and Meta both offer, can widen reach beyond the audiences you entered, which helps scale but also means exclusions matter more. Creative has to do more explaining: who you are, what you sell, why it is different. A bare discount code works for people who already know you and wastes the first impression on strangers. Expect a learning period when you launch, so judge early weeks on delivery and click quality rather than final cost per acquisition.

The classic error is starving prospecting because its numbers look worse than retargeting. Retargeting only harvests visitors that prospecting and organic channels already produced, so cutting the source shrinks the pool within weeks. The reverse mistake is paying for prospecting before the site, offer, and tracking are ready, then concluding cold traffic does not work. Another is overlap: if exclusions are missing, you pay cold-traffic prices to reach existing customers and report them as new. Treat any single weekly number with caution. Cold campaigns are noisy because the audience is large and intent varies widely from person to person. It also helps to separate prospecting by temperature of interest, such as broad audiences versus lookalikes, so you can see which cold source actually brings customers rather than only visitors.

Read prospecting on new-customer metrics. Look at new customers acquired, cost per new customer, and growth in the size of your warm audiences, which is the pipeline for later retargeting. Compare it on a blended basis with other spend rather than against retargeting in isolation. This week, confirm that your customer list and site visitors are excluded from each cold campaign, then set a cost target that reflects first-order value, or lifetime value if you have repeat purchase data you trust. Write down what a successful month looks like in advance, for example a target number of new customers, so you are not tempted to move the goalposts after seeing results.

Worked example

A skincare shop funds its cold audience

Suppose a Shopify skincare brand spends $4,000 a month on Meta: $1,000 on retargeting visitors and $3,000 on prospecting. Retargeting reports a 5.0 ROAS ($5,000 revenue) and prospecting reports 1.6 ($4,800). The owner is tempted to move $2,000 from prospecting to retargeting.

But the retargeting pool is only filled by the cold traffic. If prospecting drops to $1,000, site visitors in the retargeting window fall by about two thirds, and retargeting spend cannot be deployed at the same efficiency. A better test: keep prospecting steady for 30 days, track new customers (say 120 at $25 each), and compare how many customers return to buy a second time at the 60-day mark before changing anything. The owner now sees prospecting as the cost of keeping the retargeting pool and email list growing, not a failing channel.

Prospecting compared with

The settings this gets confused with, and how to tell them apart.

Common questions.

What is the difference between prospecting and retargeting?

Prospecting targets people who have never interacted with your business. Retargeting targets people who have visited, engaged, or bought. Prospecting builds the pool that retargeting later works.

How do I set up prospecting campaigns on Meta?

Build an audience from broad targeting, interests, or lookalike audiences and exclude your customer list and website visitor audiences. Give the campaign a separate budget so its results are not blended with retargeting.

Is Google Search a prospecting channel?

It can be. A Search campaign on generic, non-brand keywords reaches people who do not know you yet, so it works as prospecting with high intent. Demand Gen and YouTube prospect without any search intent.

What budget split between prospecting and retargeting makes sense?

There is no verified standard split. Retargeting is limited by how many people visit your site, so the right amount is whatever that pool can absorb without frequency climbing. The rest typically belongs in prospecting.

Sources

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