Ads & Traffic

Prospecting

Ads shown to people who've never engaged with your store — cold traffic. The top of the funnel; where most ad budget goes and where scaling comes from.

Prospecting is advertising to people who have no prior relationship with your brand — cold traffic at the top of the funnel. It's the opposite of retargeting, and it's where the vast majority of ad budget goes for any store trying to grow.

Prospecting ROAS is structurally lower than retargeting ROAS (typically 1.5-3x vs. 5-10x), because you're paying to earn attention from scratch. The trade-off is volume: retargeting has a ceiling equal to your current traffic, while prospecting has essentially no ceiling.

The key prospecting metric isn't ROAS — it's blended ROAS / MER across both prospecting and retargeting together. Healthy ratios: 60-80% of spend on prospecting, 20-40% on retargeting.

Related terms in Ads & Traffic
A/B Test
A controlled test comparing two versions (A and B) of an ad, page, or flow, splitting traffic 50/50 to identify the winner by a defined metric.
ABO
Ad Set Budget Optimization — budgets set at the ad-set level instead of the campaign. Gives manual control over which audiences get spend; best for testing.
Ad Account
Your advertising workspace inside a platform (Meta, TikTok, Google). Can be banned, disabled, or flagged, taking your audiences, pixels, and spend history with it.
Ad Library
Meta's public archive of every ad currently running on Facebook and Instagram. The single best research tool for spying on competitor creative.
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