Prospecting Campaign
A paid media campaign targeting cold audiences—people who have never interacted with your brand—to acquire net-new customers at scale.
Your warm audiences—site visitors, cart abandoners, past buyers—are a finite pool. Burn through them without refilling the top of the funnel and customer acquisition costs climb. A prospecting campaign is what fills that intake: it runs against cold audiences with no prior brand contact, designed to minimize overlap with your existing customer base.
How it shows up in the wild
Happy Hippo (bath and body brand, Alberta, Canada; Shopify Plus): In the brand’s first prospecting campaign using Shopify Audiences as the cold seed on Meta, 23% of all attributed sales came from buyers with no prior purchase history — fewer than 1% had any activity before the campaign. Happy Hippo then used those audiences as a 1% Meta lookalike seed: the resulting prospecting campaign delivered 4.7x ROAS, an 86% new-to-brand purchase rate, 51% lower CPMs, and 72% lower customer acquisition cost. Conversion rate increased 200% over prior campaigns targeting the same cold pool.
Bushbalm (skincare brand, Canada; Shopify Plus): Bushbalm runs prospecting campaigns on Meta using Shopify Audiences as the cold targeting seed. Shopify Audiences-based campaigns consistently outperformed Bushbalm’s prior best campaigns by 20–30% in ROAS across multiple 3-week runs, with a 42% higher clickthrough rate than broad prospecting baselines. CPMs ran above broad-targeting campaigns; stronger conversion rates offset the cost, with higher new-to-brand purchase volume as the primary efficiency gain.
Why it matters
Prospecting campaigns typically run at 2x–3x ROAS — significantly below retargeting’s 8x–15x. The metric that tells you if prospecting is working is new-to-brand customer rate and volume, not blended ROAS. My hunch is that most brands attributing retargeting efficiency drops to creative fatigue are actually running a depleted warm pool.
Related terms
- Retargeting — the campaign type for warm audiences, always structured alongside prospecting in a full-funnel account
- Lookalike Audience — the targeting method most commonly used to find cold audiences in prospecting campaigns
- Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns — the Meta campaign structure that blends prospecting and retargeting into one budget pool
- Customer Acquisition Cost — the primary efficiency metric for evaluating prospecting campaign performance
Frequently asked questions
What ROAS should I expect from a prospecting campaign? Prospecting campaigns typically run at 2x–3x ROAS. The gap versus retargeting (8x–15x) is structural — cold audiences have lower purchase intent. The right success metrics are new-to-brand customer volume and rate; ROAS underperforms against retargeting by design.
Should I exclude existing customers from prospecting campaigns? Yes — always upload your customer list to minimize overlap with existing buyers, so prospecting budget reaches genuinely cold audiences. Without proper exclusions, reported ROAS inflates because existing customers convert inside the campaign. Meta removed detailed targeting exclusions on March 31, 2025; the current workaround in Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is an existing customer budget cap set at 25–30%.