Prospecting
Prospecting is advertising to strangers, the cold half of the account that manufactures what retargeting harvests.
What prospecting is
Prospecting is advertising to strangers: campaigns aimed at people with no prior contact with the brand, the cold half of the account whose job is manufacturing the audiences everything else harvests.
Why prospecting matters
Retargeting only recirculates what prospecting caught: an account skewed toward warm audiences posts beautiful efficiency while the pool it fishes quietly drains. Prospecting is where growth actually comes from, at honest, uglier costs, and the discipline is funding it properly instead of letting the cheap-looking bottom of the funnel eat the budget that fills it.
Running the cold half
- Budget split on purpose: a deliberate prospecting share, defended against efficiency envy
- Exclusions enforced: customers and site visitors carved out so cold money stays cold
- Creative for the uninitiated: context and proof for people who owe you nothing
- Judged on its own clock: new-customer costs and downstream payback, not last-click ROAS
Frequently asked questions
What’s the right prospecting-to-retargeting split?
Weighted heavily toward prospecting for growing brands: retargeting pools are small and self-limiting, and past a modest budget they saturate. The tell you’ve over-fed retargeting is frequency climbing while reach flatlines, efficiency metrics polishing a shrinking circle.
Why does prospecting look so much worse than retargeting?
Because it’s doing the hard part: strangers convert slower and get less attribution credit, while retargeting harvests intent prospecting created and takes the credit at the till. Incrementality testing routinely redistributes the glory; the dashboards alone never will.