“We ran an ad with a 30 % discount and nobody bought.” It is a common story before a sale: the promo is shown to everyone, the money is spent, and there are almost no sales. It seems the discount is too small or the ad “didn’t take off”. Quite often the problem is different: the discount was shown to people who know nothing about you yet.
First, the limits of this text. We did not find a direct rule from Meta on this: Meta’s help pages have no separate guidance saying “don’t show promos to cold audiences”. Below is what practitioners (advertising specialists) say, what Meta’s documentation says about website visitors, and our own experience, which we call exactly that. There are deliberately no figures here: we found no fresh, confirmed number for how many sales a promo to a cold audience brings. We checked Meta’s documentation on 18 October 2026; the help page about website audiences opened with its title only, so we checked the substance against Meta’s developer documentation.
Who “cold” and “warm” people are
Advertisers use these words for two kinds of people. A cold audience is people who have not heard of you yet: they are seeing your ad for the first time. A warm audience is people who have already met you somehow: visited your website, watched your videos, messaged you. The difference is simple: warm people don’t need to be told who you are.
Why a discount doesn’t work on cold people
Practitioners say this: a person who sees your ad for the first time doesn’t respond to a discount. They don’t know who you are yet, whether you can be trusted, or whether the product is good. A discount from an unknown brand looks less like a bargain and more like a reason to be cautious: “what’s wrong with it, if they sell so cheap?” First the person has to get to know you, and only then does the price become an argument.
This is not a Meta rule but practitioners’ observation, and we present it that way. Some of them advise showing a person several “touches” before the promo: a video, reviews, website pages. How many exactly, there is no agreement, and we found no firm number with a reliable primary source, so we don’t give one.
How to do it differently
1. Introduce yourself first. Show cold people not the discount but yourself: a short video about what you do, customer reviews, examples of your work, an honest answer to the buyer’s main question. The aim of this ad is not a sale but being remembered.
2. Show the promo to people who have already visited. You can build an audience from website visitors. Meta calls it a “website custom audience”. It works like this: the Meta pixel sits on your website and the system remembers who visited. Those are the people you later show the promo to. Meta’s developer documentation describes this audience as people who visited your website or took specific actions on it. There is a second warm group too: people who watched your videos or interacted with your Facebook page or Instagram profile.
3. Open your promo ad and see who it is set up for. You can do this yourself in a minute, without a contractor. In Ads Manager, open the ad that is currently running with the promo and find, at the ad set level, the block where the audience is set. Check that it doesn’t say “everyone in the city aged 18 to 65” or broad interests. If it does, cold people see the promo too.
Practical traps
From our experience and from what colleagues in the industry write, three things come up most often.
The warm audience is too small. If only a few dozen people visit your website a month, there simply won’t be enough warm people for the promo. Practitioners warn that Meta delivers a very small audience poorly or hardly at all. We found no single official minimum figure. Go by the audience size estimate that Ads Manager shows before launch, and don’t narrow it further by age or interests without need.
The promo is shown to people who have already bought. Someone who has just bought at full price sees the same discount and feels cheated. Practitioners advise excluding buyers from the group that sees the promo.
The promo is remembered three days before. You can’t gather the people who need “warming up” a couple of days before a sale. It is better to build the warm audience in advance: videos, reviews, posts several weeks before the promo. How many weeks depends on your traffic; there is no universal number.
How to tell the promo reached the wrong people
There are simple signs you can see without a contractor. Many people visit the website, but almost nobody reaches the cart or the form. Under the ad people write “what company is this?” or “is this a scam?”. Clicks are cheap, but there are no orders. In our experience, this is usually what a promo shown to people who don’t know you looks like: there is interest in the discount, but not yet trust. It is not proof, but a reason to review exactly who the ad is going to. Compare how the same promo works for those who have already visited the website. If the difference is noticeable, you have your answer in front of you.
Another view: is it really forbidden to show it to cold people at all
There is a contradiction here and we don’t hide it. Some practitioners, like us above, advise not showing the promo to cold people and leading them through a warm-up. Others say that since 2026 Meta, after updating its delivery system (called “Andromeda”), works better with a broad audience, while narrow retargeting (ads only for website visitors) loses in the auction and gives little reach. This is also practitioners’ retelling: we did not find it stated directly in Meta’s help, and the documentation we saw does not confirm the name “Andromeda” itself.
Practitioners also describe that in Advantage+ audience mode (where Meta looks for people itself) your visitor lists work as a hint rather than a hard boundary: the system shows the ad first to people similar to them and then expands. This too comes from third-party descriptions, not from Meta’s help.
What follows for a business owner. Both approaches agree on the main point: a discount on its own does not sell to someone who doesn’t know you. The difference is in how you warm them up: separate campaigns for introduction and for the promo, or a broad audience where the system learns from purchases. The choice depends on budget and purchase volume. If there are few purchases, in our experience it is safer to separate them: introduction on one side, the promo for those who already visited on the other. There is no single answer for everyone.
What to check before the next promo
- Who is the promo ad set up for: a broad audience, or those who already visited the website or watched videos?
- Is the Meta pixel installed on the website, and is an audience being collected from it?
- Is there an introduction ad (video, reviews) running before the promo, not on the same day?
- Are buyers excluded from seeing the promo?
- Are there enough warm people for the promo to have anyone to show to?
If your website isn’t ready to take enquiries yet, first look at the website checklist before advertising. For more on preparing for a sale, see the article Black Friday, November 27: what to do in October.
Summary
A promo sells to people who already know you, not to those seeing you for the first time. Remember three steps:
- introduce yourself first: video, reviews, examples of work;
- show the promo to those who already visited the website or watched your videos;
- open your promo ad and see who it is set up for.
How we work with advertising for shops and services is in the search advertising and Performance Max sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you where money is going on showing ads to people who are not yet ready to buy.