Prospecting vs retargeting
These two strategies serve different roles in your ad account. Prospecting fills the top of the funnel. Retargeting converts people who already know you.| Prospecting | Retargeting | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Cold. People who have never interacted with your brand. | Warm. Website visitors, video viewers, cart abandoners, past buyers. |
| Typical CPA | $25 - $60+ (varies by industry) | $10 - $30 (lower because audience is warmer) |
| Role in funnel | Top of funnel. Generates awareness and first touches. | Mid/bottom of funnel. Converts existing interest into purchases. |
| Typical budget split | 70% - 80% of total ad spend | 20% - 30% of total ad spend |
| Audience size | Large (millions of people) | Small (thousands to low hundreds of thousands) |
| Creative focus | Introduce the brand, show the product, build curiosity | Overcome objections, offer urgency, remind of what they saw |
Prospecting in plain English
Prospecting is fishing in new waters. You’re casting a wide net into an ocean of people who don’t know your brand yet. Some will bite, most won’t. That’s normal. The point is to consistently feed new people into your funnel so your retargeting audiences stay fresh and your business keeps growing. Without prospecting, your retargeting audiences shrink over time. You end up showing ads to the same small group of people at increasing frequency, driving up CPA and burning out your audience. Prospecting is what keeps the machine running.Common prospecting mistakes
Spending too much on retargeting
Spending too much on retargeting
It’s tempting to pour budget into retargeting because the CPA is lower. But retargeting only works when there are warm audiences to retarget. If you spend 60%+ on retargeting, your warm audiences shrink, frequency rises, and performance collapses. Most healthy ad accounts spend 70-80% on prospecting.
Not testing broad and lookalike audiences
Not testing broad and lookalike audiences
Many advertisers only use interest-based targeting for prospecting. In 2024-2025, Meta’s algorithm has gotten very good at finding buyers with minimal targeting constraints. Broad targeting (no interests, just age/gender/location) and lookalike audiences based on purchasers often outperform narrow interest stacks. Test both.
Expecting the same CPA as retargeting
Expecting the same CPA as retargeting
Prospecting CPA will almost always be higher than retargeting CPA. That’s not a problem. It’s the nature of cold traffic. A $45 prospecting CPA that feeds a $15 retargeting CPA can produce a blended CPA of $30, which might be very profitable. Judge prospecting by blended account performance, not in isolation.
Ignoring prospecting creative needs
Ignoring prospecting creative needs
Retargeting creative can assume the viewer knows your product. Prospecting creative can’t. Cold audiences need to understand what you sell, why it matters, and why they should care in the first 2-3 seconds. Use scroll-stopping hooks, show the product in use, and lead with a problem the viewer recognizes. Reusing retargeting ads for prospecting almost always underperforms.
Turning off prospecting when times get tough
Turning off prospecting when times get tough
When budgets get cut, prospecting is usually the first to go. This creates a death spiral: less prospecting means smaller retargeting pools, which means higher retargeting CPAs, which leads to more budget cuts. Protect your prospecting budget. It’s the long-term growth engine.
How to build a prospecting strategy
Define your prospecting audiences
Start with 2-3 audience types: a broad audience (age, gender, location only), a 1-3% lookalike audience based on purchasers or high-value customers, and one interest-based audience. Run them in separate ad sets so you can compare performance.
Create cold-traffic creative
Build ads specifically for people who don’t know you. Lead with the problem, show the product, include social proof. Short-form video (15-30 seconds) tends to work well for prospecting. Plan for 3-5 ad creative variations per ad set.
Set your budget split
Allocate 70-80% of your total daily budget to prospecting. If you’re spending $100/day, that’s $70-$80 on prospecting and $20-$30 on retargeting. Use CBO at the campaign level or set ad set budgets manually.
Exclude warm audiences
Exclude website visitors (last 30-180 days), purchasers, and email lists from your prospecting campaigns. This prevents overlap with retargeting and ensures your prospecting budget goes entirely to cold traffic. Build custom audiences for these exclusions.
Refresh creative regularly
Prospecting audiences are large, but ad fatigue still happens. Plan to rotate in new creative every 2-4 weeks. Monitor CTR and CPA for signs of fatigue (declining CTR, rising CPA over 5-7 days).
Track your prospecting performance in one place
AdAdvisor breaks down your CPA, ROAS, and spend by campaign type so you can see exactly how your prospecting and retargeting campaigns perform. Instead of bouncing between spreadsheets, you get a clear picture of whether your budget split is working.Try AdAdvisor Free
See prospecting and retargeting performance side-by-side across all your campaigns.
Break-Even ROAS Calculator
Find out what ROAS your prospecting campaigns need to hit to stay profitable.