Reaching the unreachable

Two requests shaped the last 18 months of my agency life. Every client wanted us to find efficiencies in the campaigns we ran, everywhere. And every client wanted us to do “something” with AI. This is what came out of the two together, and it is the closest thing I have to a method.

The problem it solves is simple to state. Advertising platforms are very good at targeting the people who already know you. The most popular ones focus almost entirely on the in-market slice of your audience: people who are likely to buy, as long as they see the right ad, at the right time, enough times, over a specific period. That is a real service and it makes money. It is also a ceiling.

Who the unreachable are

Picture three circles, one inside the next.

The inner circle is your customers. You can reach them with your own data and through the platforms, and they are cheap to reach because the platforms know exactly who they are.

Around them is your in-market audience: people who have searched for the category, visited a competitor, or behaved in a way the algorithm reads as intent. You reach them when you share content and when you pay for campaigns. Most of your media budget goes here whether you intend it to or not.

Then there is everyone else. The unreachable are potential customers whose online behaviour sits outside what the algorithms and platforms consider worth targeting. They haven’t searched, they haven’t visited, they haven’t bought from a rival this month. They are, by a distance, the largest circle, and most platforms will simply not show your ads to them.

The platforms are not being lazy. They want to give you enough results to keep you spending, and not so much that you dominate. If you pooled all your money into a top-of-funnel campaign you would see nothing you could call a direct result, so they steer you away from that build. From where they sit it is rational. From where you sit it means your growth is capped at the size of the people who were already coming.

Why nobody reaches them

Three reasons, and they compound.

The road from first contact to a tracked sale is long. For an unreachable customer it can take a year, sometimes more, for one full path to complete. Most marketing forecasts are 12 months long. There is no room in a 12-month forecast for a customer who takes 14 months to arrive, so nobody plans for them.

Other channels steal the credit anyway. Even after that long path finishes, the sale will almost always be claimed by a Meta retargeting ad or a brand search click, because those are the last things the person touched. The awareness view that started it 11 months earlier is invisible to a last-click report.

And everyone has to justify a purpose per channel. Marketers, agencies and the platforms themselves all need to show what each pound did. If a channel can’t demonstrate a sale, its share of the budget is harder to stake. So the channels that reach new people, which by definition show sales slowly, lose the budget argument every quarter to the channels that harvest existing demand.

When you find a way through this you start to see revenue that was never in the plan. But you have to be brave, commit to it, and trust the data, which is tough, because the data takes a long time to arrive.

The deal you have to make first

Nobody gets to spend more. That is the constraint every client set, and I think it is the right one. To reach new people you need budget for it, and you need it without touching the revenue targets you’ve already promised.

So the method starts by finding the money inside the existing account. Prevent wastage, discover efficiencies, use technology where it helps. Only then do you move the money up the funnel, and only then do you measure what it does.

Four steps. The first two find the budget. The second two spend and measure it.

Step 1: consolidate the lower-funnel spend

Strip back hard on any spend that contributes to a sale that was going to happen anyway.

The main offender is brand search. If you search your own brand name and your organic listing is already first, the paid ad above it is a lone ranger: it sits there collecting clicks from people who typed your name and would have clicked the free result underneath. Some brand search is worth keeping, particularly where competitors bid on your name. Most of it is not. There is technology that stops you spending on branded keywords when your organic result already holds the top position, and the first thing we did on every account was switch it on.

The second offender is over-indexed retargeting. Retargeting is cheap and it looks brilliant on a dashboard, because it talks to people who already visited you. Past a certain frequency it is paying to follow people who were coming back regardless. Cap it.

Everything freed here goes into a holding pot. Don’t spend it yet.

Step 2: block the invalid clicks

Some of the traffic you pay for is not people. Bots, scrapers, click farms, and competitors clicking your ads to burn your budget. The industry’s estimate is that invalid clicks are 15 to 25% of what you spend on Google and the other platforms. I’d treat that as a vendor’s number. Here is ours.

On one account, over the 30 days from 19 August to 17 September 2025, the blocking tool classified the sources of our paid traffic like this.

Source type	Sources	Clicks	Share of clicks
Legitimate	358,518	420,389	82.47%
Suspicious	5,114	14,481	2.84%
Invalid	50,525	74,849	14.68%

The cost of the traffic from invalid sources in that window was £37,410.07. One account, one month.

The fix is unglamorous. Blacklist the IP addresses flagged as fraudulent or spam, and the ones the tool’s models recognise as likely competitors, so the platforms stop serving them your ads and stop charging you for the click. Conversion rate goes up because the denominator stops being padded with robots. Return on ad spend goes up for the same reason.

Now stop for a moment, because this is where a lot of brands do stop. After steps 1 and 2 you have improved return on ad spend and conversion rate without spending a pound more on marketing. It is a good result and you could take it to the board tomorrow.

It does not reach a single unreachable person. It just funds the attempt.

Step 3: map how intent builds

Draw the funnel as a triangle, point down. At the wide top sit the channels that reach the most people at the lowest cost per person with the least relevance: connected TV, video, YouTube, prospecting native and display, Meta awareness and lead-gen. Towards the point sit the channels with the highest intent and the best return: Performance Max, Meta prospecting, brand search, Meta and Performance Max retargeting, retargeting display.

Now mark where the money goes. On most accounts I have looked at it clusters around the point: Demand Gen, Performance Max, Meta prospecting, brand search, retargeting. The top of the triangle is empty or token. That is the shape the platforms recommend, for the reasons in the section above, and it is the shape that guarantees you only ever talk to the two inner circles.

The reason brands can’t move the money up is that they still live and die on last click, or on cookies, and both have stopped working.

Cookies are inaccurate on a large share of the web now. Roughly 60% of people opt out of being tracked across browsers, and of those who opt in on Chrome, the consent resets after 7 days, so a path that takes months breaks anyway. Apple’s privacy restrictions block unique IDs and restrict IP-based tracking, so iPhones, which are a large share of a premium audience, go dark. And the platforms’ own reporting over-counts in their favour while most third-party attribution tools under-count, so the two numbers never agree and nobody trusts either.

What we did instead was track across 4 sources on a single first-party pixel, which is the small piece of code on your own site that records each visit and gives the visitor an ID.

1. Server side, from the commerce platform (Shopify in our case).
2. Browser side, from the site itself.
3. The ad platforms, Meta and Google.
4. UTM parameters on every link we controlled, including email.

Each visitor gets a hashed signal ID from the pixel. It persists for up to 3 years. When a visitor eventually makes a purchase, the system resolves the customer record back to that signal ID, and every earlier interaction, with the ads, the emails and the website, is now attached to a real sale. Not just for customers, for every single website visitor.

That gives you a view like this. Someone clicks a Facebook ad. Ninety days pass. They click a Google retargeting ad. They buy. A last-click model gives the Google ad 100% of the credit and the Facebook ad nothing, which is how your Facebook prospecting campaign ends up looking like a cost centre.

The attribution model built on the joined-up data reconciles your actual sales with what the platforms reported and relinks the hidden conversions to the campaigns that started them. On a typical journey of ad view, social click, email click, search click, sale, the model we used weighted it roughly 30, 25, 20, 15 and 10. Those weights are not gospel. The point is that the view at the top of the funnel gets a share, and that share is calculated from your own sales data rather than assumed.

The consequence is the thing that matters. Awareness becomes a trackable, measurable campaign type. Connected TV, video and YouTube, the channels at the top of the triangle, now have a return on ad spend figure, measured over the real length of the journey. You can make conversion-led decisions about top-of-funnel allocation, which until now was an act of faith.

Step 4: split the strategy

With the budget found and the measurement in place, divide the account in two and judge each half on its own job.

Budget 1 is new customer acquisition. It is built on the models of who the new customers turned out to be, which is to say the unreachable, once you can finally see them. Expect a lower return on ad spend and a higher cost per acquisition. In exchange, every customer is brand new and 100% incremental. The creative is stronger and more brand-level, introductory rather than direct sales, because you are talking to someone who has never heard of you. Over time the measurement gives you something you never had before: proof that these customers would not have arrived otherwise.

Budget 2 is retention and in-market. The expected sales. Higher return, lower cost per acquisition, some new customers and some returning, and a blended return on ad spend of around 5x on the accounts we ran. This is where the platforms want all your money, and now it gets the share it deserves and no more.

The split is what stops the argument. When new-customer activity is judged against in-market activity on the same return figure, it loses every time and gets cut. When each has its own target, the question becomes whether the business wants to grow, and that is a question for the board, not the ad platform.

What it cost us

The method took time, and the hardest part was not technical. It was holding the line through the months where the top-of-funnel spend showed nothing, because the journeys hadn’t completed, while a retargeting campaign next to it posted a 9x return. Every monthly review was a chance to lose nerve.

That is why step 3 has to come before step 4. If you move the money up the funnel without the measurement, you are asking the client to trust you. If you build the measurement first, you are asking them to trust the data, and the data turns up.

The platforms are not going to do this for you. They are paid on the inner circles. The outer one is yours to find, and the budget to find it is already in your account, being spent on people who were coming anyway.