Prospecting

Prospecting is finding new people who have never heard of you and showing them your ad for the first time, the cold, top-of-funnel half of the work.

Retargeting feels wonderful right up until you notice the pool is finite. Prospecting is how you refill it. Here you are aiming at people with no history with you at all, through broad targeting, lookalike audiences, or interest-based audiences, and asking an ad to earn attention from someone who was not looking for you. The numbers are harder and the cost per result is higher, because you are paying to make a first impression rather than to collect on one you already made.

This matters because prospecting is the part that actually grows the business. Every warm retargeting sale you will ever make started life as a cold prospecting impression, so the two are not rivals, they are a sequence. If you only ever retarget, you are living off an audience someone built in the past, and the day it runs dry there is nothing behind it. Prospecting is what keeps a fresh stream of people flowing into everything downstream.

You have to judge prospecting on different math than retargeting, or you will keep killing the thing that feeds you. On last-click attribution prospecting almost always looks worse, because the credit for the eventual sale often lands on the retargeting ad that closed it. On blended numbers and incrementality it looks far better, because it is the true source of new demand. Cutting prospecting because its ROAS is lower than retargeting is one of the most common ways an account quietly stops growing.

Retargeting spends the demand you already have; prospecting is the only part that makes more of it.