Are you running prospecting campaigns and calling them intent targeting? Here’s how to tell the difference.
With the rise of data available and data being the third layer in media buying next to tech and inventory, it’s good to get back to basics and define what is prospecting and what is the use of “in-market audiences.”
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to get my head around the difference properly.
They’re not the same thing. They don’t do the same job. And buying one while expecting the results of the other is why a lot of campaigns look fine on paper but don’t actually grow the customer base.
Prospecting is about reach. You’re getting your brand in front of people who don’t know you exist yet. Most of them aren’t going to buy this month and that’s the point. You’re building awareness early, getting into people’s heads before they’re ready to decide, so that when they are, you’re on the list. You measure it over time. Not on immediate conversions, because that’s not what it’s there to do.
Intent targeting is different. It’s not about reaching a lot of people. It’s about reaching the right people at the right moment, specifically, when they’re already in the process of buying. Someone on carsales comparing four models this week. Someone on a travel comparison site searching flights on a Tuesday night. Someone who has searched the same product three times in the last fortnight. They’re not generally interested in cars or travel, they’re in an active decision to buy.
Being interested and being ready-to-buy are two different stages of the consumer journey. Brands that treat them the same way end up with campaigns that look efficient on a dashboard but aren’t doing the actual job.
The problem is that “in-market audience” has become a label that gets applied to almost anything. Demographic segments. Interest-based audiences. Lookalike models built off past buyers. All of it gets called in-market. And because the label sounds like intent, brands end up paying intent prices for what is essentially prospecting.
The reason the label gets stretched is mostly practical. Building audiences from genuine intent signals means working directly with the platforms where purchase decisions happen like carsales, Webjet, Mozo. Those relationships take years to develop. For data providers who haven’t built them, modelling from interest data is the next best option. It’s not without value. It’s just not the same thing and it’s simply worth knowing which one you’re buying.
If I can give you one advice that you can implement tomorrow: Ask your data provider one question: what were the people in this audience actually doing when the signal was captured? Not what category they fall into. Not what they look like. What did they do, on what platform, and when?
If the answer comes back as “they’ve shown affinity for the category” or “they match the profile of past converters” that is not intent. That is a demographic proxy with a better name. A real intent signal comes from a platform where people showed up specifically to research and buy. The behaviour tells you everything.
The practical difference matters more than most people realise. A broad “in-market travel” segment built from interest data might contain a small share of people who are genuinely intending to travel this month. An audience built from people actively searching and comparing on Webjet this week show genuine intent to travel. Same label on the media plan. Very different thing underneath it.
Both belong in a media plan, just not doing the same job, and not measured the same way.
The brands doing this well treat them as separate problems with separate audience sources, separate channels and separate metrics. They don’t expect a prospecting campaign to deliver the same CPAs as a genuine intent campaign. They measure intent campaigns on what they’re actually good at: Finding people who didn’t know the brand and converting them anyway.
Furthermore, Brands that understand the difference, insist on knowing what they’re actually buying. When they purchase an in-market audience, they want their provider to be able to name the publisher, describe the behaviour and confirm how recent the signal is. Not because they’re especially sophisticated. Because they’ve learned to ask.
That’s the question. Ask it before you buy. If the answer is specific, you have something real. If it’s vague, you have prospecting and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re pricing it and measuring it like prospecting.
Written by Jennifer Dielen, head of partnerships, Audience360.
