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Welcome to Building a Full Funnel Meta Ads Strategy. Just to introduce myself, my name is Izzy Seidman. I am the digital marketing manager for flyte new media. I’ve been here for about five and a half years now, going on six in early spring. In my time here I have run ads on Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, a little bit of Google, YouTube for more than 20 clients at any given time.
And that can include B2C, B2B, and non-profit, so it’s a really wide range of clients that we serve. And yeah, I have enjoyed the element of working at an agency that allows me to explore those different areas. And a quick fun fact about me I would love to one day open my own hot dog cart, which you will hear a little bit more about later. And if you are interested, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve got a little QR code here. I’m just going to pause on this screen for one sec.
All right, so to start us off with the real stuff, I’m going to set up my metaphor for the day. I was an English major in college, so I really can’t survive without one. I live in the Deering Highlands area of Portland, Maine. I don’t know if we’ve got some other Portlanders or Mainers in the crowd with us today. But the city of Portland just a few weeks ago completed a $12 million project to build a new community pool and it’s only a couple blocks away from me.
Personally, I’m more of a lake girly than a pool goer, but I have to admit in just walking my dog near it as they were doing construction and when they finally opened on, I think it was July 6th, I’m pretty impressed with this. It’s called the Rising Eddy Community Pool. I’m impressed because it features not one, but two water slides. Pretty fancy if you ask me. A bunch of these fun splash features. They have a splash pad also, that’s not in the shot of this photo, that’s open to the public all day every day. They have zero depth entry, so you can walk in or roll in with no stairs or anything. And they have a lap pool that’s over nine feet deep. So really, they’ve got something for everyone. And I think if they just added my hotdog cart, it could be the perfect pool. But I digress.
Let’s talk about why I think this pool is so well designed. What did the city of Portland do to make this so successful? First and foremost, they thought really carefully about who their audience was. So this includes children, obviously parents, elderly, wheelchair users, and adults who wanted real exercise out of their pool. And they took that information and crafted a pool that offers different features for each of these audience groups.
Importantly, they also have multiple different entry points into the pool. So you can jump off the slide, you can wade in, or you can jump into the deep end direct. I actually don’t know if that’s part of the rules, but you get what I’m trying to say. And if you look at this photo in the design, you can see that the lap pool and the sort of wading area are connected. So all of the pieces of the pool allow people to move from one area to the next really easily.
So imagine a different scenario in which they hadn’t done this, they hadn’t thought about all of these things. Instead, they had designed a pool that was perhaps eight feet deep all the way around every single side. They would’ve ended up with a situation where they were alienating a good portion of their audience for whom the deep end just wasn’t appealing.
And even for the folks that do like to swim in deeper water, this environment of eight feet deep all the way around can be a little daunting. Basically, it would set up a scenario in which they hadn’t primed their users or built any trust yet for them to want to enter into, quote-unquote, “the deep end of the pool.”
And finally, to bring my metaphor back to the Meta Ads, what’s the lesson here? Really, a single campaign can’t do every single job. Running only one Meta Ads campaign is like building that eight-foot pool all the way around. Yes, some people will jump in, but many of them won’t. And on top of that, you’re going to have a pretty hard time optimizing for any one particular audience group or stage of the journey because that campaign is trying to do too many things all at once.
On the other hand, a full funnel strategy, which is hopefully what you will buy into by the end of today, gives people different ways to enter, to engage, and to move closer to the action that we really want them to take. So what are we going to learn in order to get there? We’re going to go over a couple different things today, not only so that you understand the importance of a full funnel approach, but you’re prepared to build one for your unique business.
So to start, we’re going to talk about the different campaign types or objectives as they’re called in Meta. We’re also going to discuss how you can match those objectives to different stages of the customer journey. We’ll discuss how you can set up your measurement, your analytics to support a full funnel strategy, what tools do you need to get there, which campaigns you should run based on your budget.
I know this is probably the most common question that I get when I run any kind of ads- related webinar is “Okay, I have a limited budget. What do I do?” And how do we measure each campaign for the job that it was built to do not every job on the planet. That’s our agenda for the day. We’re going to start off by understanding these six Meta campaign objectives.
I think it’s easy to overlook the importance of this step. It’s literally the first thing after you hit the ‘create a new campaign’ button on Meta, and I get it. You’re excited to set up your targeting, build your ads, get your messaging and your creatives in place, and basically just get things running. But this very first choice that you make will change not only what that ad setup process looks like, the actual components that you need to create your ads are different for each of the objectives. But it will also change the way that Meta as a platform serves your ads to users.
So to make smart decisions about which campaign to use, let’s go over each of the six. So here’s our six objectives. I’m going to explain them each, and then we’ll talk a little bit about how you’re choosing the different ones.
An awareness campaign. Meta is going to be optimizing that campaign to serve to the maximum quantity – notice quantity over quality – of users that are within your targeting parameters. So that could be a geographic region. You could have detailed targeting like specific interests or job titles, that sort of thing. As long as they meet your targeting parameters, it’s just whoever falls into that category, your ads are possibly going to get shown to them. And the KPIs that Meta is optimizing for include things like impressions, reach, ad recall, or brand lift, sort of those whose eyeballs are on my ads type KPIs.
Next, we move to engagement campaigns. So these are optimized to serve users who are likely to interact with your ads. We’re looking at likes, comments, the heart reaction, video views, event responses. All of those are KPIs that measure engagement. And it’s really important to note that these campaigns are related to engagement on the platform, so on Facebook or Instagram, not engagement on your website.
Then we move to traffic. This one’s pretty straightforward. We’re serving ads to users who are likely to click on a link. And the KPI here is link clicks. Landing page views is also one of them, but they’re basically the same thing. For leads campaigns, your ads are being served to users who are willing or likely to be able to submit information about themselves; name, email address, phone number, that sort of thing.
And the KPI here can depend on what your lead generation looks like. So that could be an instant form, which is a form that’s directly embedded on Facebook or Instagram. Could be a form on your website. Could also include file downloads that might require someone to submit an email address, or phone calls. I personally don’t know anyone who runs app promotions, but they’ve got to be out there somewhere. And these ads are served to users who are likely to install or use an app in a particular way. Most often the KPI associated with that is app downloads.
And then last but not least is a sales campaign. And this is going to be optimized for users who are likely to take a desired conversion action. And I slowed down on that part because I think this one gets misconstrued sometimes, where sales, that means purchases, when in fact you as the advertiser have the ability to define what your desired conversion action is. It doesn’t have to be a purchase. It could be something a little bit closer to further up the funnel, like adds to cart or begin checkout. But yes, most often it is going to be sales purchases.
And the most important thing to remember is that while the KPIs for different objectives aren’t mutually exclusive, you can only optimize your campaign for one thing. That’s the big idea here is when you’re choosing a campaign objective, that is the one thing that your campaign is going to be optimized for.
So for example, yes, a sales campaign often necessitates that people click on a link to go to your website, but it is not a campaign that is meant to maximize link clicks. So if you had a sales campaign running at the same exact budget as a traffic campaign, your traffic campaign is bound to generate more link clicks than that sales campaign because that is what it’s being optimized for. Likewise if you have a traffic campaign, you can have video ads in that campaign, but it is not meant to maximize video views.
Hopefully you get my point. The biggest mistake that I see when I’m evaluating a Meta Ads setup is that ads managers tend to expect that a single campaign is going to get the most of every outcome, so the biggest reach, the most post engagements, the most link clicks, and the most conversions all at the same time.
Here’s a scenario that might feel a little bit familiar to you guys. So your boss comes to you, and they say they want to reach new people. Awesome. You come in, you set up an awareness campaign, it goes swimmingly. The impressions are in the hundreds of thousands. You feel really great about yourself. They come back to you to review the results, and suddenly they say, “Why didn’t the campaign generate any traffic to our website?” Ugh, frustration for everyone involved.
What’s happening here in this scenario is that there’s a disconnect between how we talk about business goals and campaign objective in the way that it functions for a platform like Meta specifically. What exactly does this guy mean when he says he wants to reach new audiences? Meta is going to take your campaign objective very literally, and once you publish a campaign, you can’t go back and change that objective or the conversion event unless you wanted to start all over again, create a new campaign, or duplicate the existing one. So really, you have to be aligned on what that’s going to be before you reach the next step. Before you put together creatives, before you choose an audience, write your copy, any of that stuff, you and your team need to know what your goal is for the campaign.
And my suggestion here is to start with the question of what is the one metric by which we’ll measure success? That’s not to say that you’re not going to measure other metrics along the way, right? You definitely should. But if you could only achieve one thing, what would that one thing be? Then you can come back to looking at the way that these different campaign objectives are optimized by the platform and match that metric you and your team have decided on to the appropriate campaign objective.
I know it seems simple when you explain it this way, but I think it will really help not only set your expectations for what the outcome of your advertising is going to be, but also put you in the mindset to create and optimize the actual campaign details for that one goal.
Okay, so now we’ve got a good understanding of what are those six objectives that are available to us when we’re building a new campaign in the platform. Let’s talk about how we match them to different stages of your funnel. Generally speaking, there’s four stages to a core marketing funnel. There’s awareness, consideration, conversion, and sort of the forgotten child, which is retention.
Generally, awareness requires little or no action on the part of the user. We really just want them to know that your business, product, or service exists or even just be aware of the fact that they have a problem or a pain point that is relevant to you. Big surprise, but obviously the campaign objective for this one would be awareness, where the goal is just to get in front of as many eyeballs that meet our targeting parameters as possible.
Next, we move into the consideration phase. And now the user is actively participating in the journey. They have to be doing something in order to be considering you. And you could choose a couple different options here. You could use an engagement campaign if you want in-platform actions like those likes or video views. You could also choose traffic to get people to explore your website. Or you might, if you have a low barrier to entry lead, you might be capturing leads at the consideration phase. It’s going to be unique, obviously, to your sales funnel, so it’s up to you and understanding how your business works to decide which – and it can be multiple – of these works best for your consideration phase.
And then what counts as a conversion for your business, again, will be different depending on what your business model is. But the next objective at this stage could include leads. Again, app promos if you’re trying to get people to download an app or that sales objective.
And then retention, like I said, can be forgotten. But you’re usually going to be repeating some of the same objectives that you were using in the conversion stage hoping that the user comes back and either gets into an upsell or is a repeat buy, that sort of thing.
Just a fun fact, on average it takes six to eight touchpoints with a brand to make a sale. And if it’s a B2B brand, I was going back and forth on if I should include this statistic, but it can be up to 200 according to some sources. Depending on what your sales funnel looks like and how much the prospect needs to really think about the purchase before they complete it.
Perhaps it’s a really expensive product or it requires other things that they need to get in place. It’s going to take longer, not only in time, but in the number of touchpoints that you have with that brand.
Okay, we’ve checked some basic boxes. We ran through the first half of this pretty quickly. You should, at this point, be aligned on a primary goal, or aka the KPI that you’re going after. You should have selected an appropriate campaign objective to meet that KPI, and you should match that to whichever stage is appropriate in your customer journey. But even with all these things in place, you’re still not quite ready to build that full funnel approach, and the one thing that’s missing at this point is analytics.
Pretty much it’s all fine and dandy to know what each stage of your funnel looks like, but if you don’t know who’s in it or what actions are being taken while they’re in it, you’ll have a difficult, if not impossible, time moving people from one stage to the next. So what analytics allows you to do is track your audience as they move through the funnel, understanding who is cold, who’s warm, who is red hot, based on their interactions with your brand.
So imagine you’ve done really amazing advertising to get a customer to walk in the front door of your business, but as soon as they’re inside, it’s pitch black. How do you know which shelves that they’re looking at inside the store? Do they have any questions about your product, or are they waiting at the counter ready to check out and you just don’t know yet?
This is what it looks like when you don’t have any analytics set up on your website or through Meta. So what are the tools that you need to get to that base level? I think that there are two must-haves if you’re going to be running Meta ads, and a third that I would highly recommend.
So first, you’re going to need a Meta pixel. This is a tracking code that gets placed on your website and sends data back to Meta for anything beyond an awareness or an engagement campaign. Because those ones are based on in-platform behaviors, this is the only way that Meta is able to verify that it’s actually achieving your objective.
And they don’t tell you that you can’t run a sales campaign without a pixel, but I’m going to tell you, you shouldn’t run a sales campaign without a pixel. If Meta can’t see when a purchase is being made, then it can’t optimize ad delivery for folks who are most likely to take that action.
Next, I think you need Google Analytics. This is how you’re going to evaluate the quality of the users who are arriving from your ads. How long are they spending on your website? Which specific pages are they exploring? And what content are they engaging with, or what actions are they taking when they get there? Sometimes Meta thinks it’s doing a fantastic job sending you traffic, but then you go to Google Analytics and you check what that traffic is doing, and users are only staying for one to five seconds on average. So are they really in the consideration stage of your funnel at that point, or did they just accidentally click on your ad while scrolling on Instagram or whatever? So Pixel, that’s how Meta verifies Google Analytics, this is how you verify that your ads are performing well.
And then lastly, I personally recommend that you add Google Tag Manager. Not only does this make it a little bit easier to control the Pixel and GA4 in one place without being a website developer, which I am not, you can update code, you can add new tracking software to your Google Tag Manager without ever having to go into the back end of your site. It also lets you create more custom events.
So the Pixel has some built-in things like page view, lead, purchase, subscribe. There’s a whole list of those out of the box events that the Pixel will track if you set them up properly. But what if you want to track when someone watches an introduction video about your brand or requests some fabric samples, for example. Those don’t really fit into the sort of pre-made categories. So Tag Manager can be used to set up custom events that then get passed back to the Pixel or GA4.
Another great example is if someone were to start filling out a form but they don’t actually hit submit at the end, you could track that as a form started or a form-initiated event using Google Tag Manager. I could probably spend the entire webinar talking about why tracking is important, but in the context of ads, you’ll primarily be using this data to create custom audiences. The possibilities here are nearly endless. There’s no limit to how many audiences you can build. Have at it, play around in there, see what they look like, get those estimated audience sizes and just start building them.
You don’t know when or if you’re going to want to use them. But the basic idea that I like to follow is that you should have at least one audience per each stage of the funnel. Basically, did they meet the criteria, the goal, or the KPI for that stage of the journey? For example, if someone visited your landing page they could be marked as considered because they have looked at, so to speak, your offer or your service. And then once the audience is built in Meta, you can create a campaign that targets that audience and works to move them from the consideration phase to the conversion phase.
Hopefully, you see where I’m going with this. So a couple examples of different things that you can create an audience around. Obviously, the most common one that I use is website visitors. It can get down to specific pages that they’re visiting. Maybe you want to track that they visited a blog or a contact page, or a page that has your service listings. You can build an audience around folks who got really close to an action but didn’t quite do it, so they might have clicked on the ad and visited your website, but they didn’t go through with converting, whether that’s a purchase or a form submission.
You can track video viewers. And then some of these are in-platform audiences Facebook and Instagram engagers. I have a couple of these shown in the example. It basically means anyone who has looked at your profile, liked a post, so on and so forth, in whatever time period you set for those.
You can have lead form openers, what I was saying before with starting a form but not necessarily submitting. You can even upload customer lists, so if you have a, a nice healthy email list, that might be a good thing to bring into Meta as a custom audience. Or past purchasers, someone who has completed one of those conversion actions in the past, and maybe you’re running a retention campaign to get them to do another action again.
If I don’t already have this in the Q&A or the chat for this webinar I guarantee that someone will probably eventually ask about it, which is what about Advantage Plus? It’s all over Meta these days. To which I say there is a time and a place. Nowadays Meta’s pretty smart and they have access to a lot of data on their users that they can’t or won’t share with advertisers.
So Advantage Plus can be decent at identifying quality prospects. But here’s my caveat, without analytics and without understanding your funnel it’s going to be stuck in this constant stage of let’s throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. So for an early funnel campaign, like an awareness or an engagement campaign, something like Advantage Plus might actually work really well because you’re really just trying to get in front of new people and figure out who exactly is most interested in your brand, your offer.
But when you use a full funnel strategy, you move away from this guessing on what’s going to work and towards data-driven predictions for user behaviors. So in shorter words, more reliable, more efficient results. Don’t get stuck at the top of the funnel where you’re trying to go after anybody and everybody.
Okay, I promise this is the last time or maybe the second last time that I’m going to use this metaphor. But stick with me. So you’ve got some folks who wade into the pool, and they’ve made it to the deep end but eventually they’re going to get pruney and they’re going to decide that they’re done swimming, right? But if the gates to the pool as a whole are already closed, then no more people are going to enter the deep end.
If instead, you’ve set up a scenario where people have been lounging in the sun, getting warm, acclimating to the temperature of the water in the shallow end, or even just watching how much fun the people on the slides are having, then by the time that first group of people gets out of the water, the next one is going to be ready to go in. This is what that full funnel approach is all about, is building something that’s going to feed itself so that there are new users lined up and ready to go for your advertising at that next stage
Now we get to the fun part which is writing, messaging, and making creatives that resonate with the needs at each stage of that journey. So are you introducing a new product to someone for the very first time? Or are you asking them to revisit an item that they’ve already looked at or that’s maybe waiting for them in their cart? The messaging and creatives for those two scenarios can and should look very different.
So you can think about it this way. At the early stage, we are focused on introducing the brand and the problem or the pain point that we think the user might be experiencing. In the middle stage, the consideration, you are educating them. What is it that you offer? How does it work? You’re comparing between different brands or different solutions for that problem, and you’re trying to get ahead of early objections. How much does it cost? Why is it so expensive? Is it going to get here on time?
In the late stage, you are really going to focus on making your offer super clear and easy to act on. At this point, they should already be familiar with your brand. They should know that they have a problem that needs to be solved. They should understand what the benefits and solutions of your offer is. And at this point, we’re just waiting to say, “Hey, are you ready?” Something like a sale, 20% off, free quote, things like that are really what we’re using at that late stage.
And then in the retention stage, reminding them that you’re still around. Rewarding them for the fact that they have interacted with you in the past, and trying to deepen that relationship so they’re ready for an additional conversion.
All right, we’ve reached the practical stage. I promised that I would give some advice on budgeting. It sounds good in theory to run one or more campaigns for every stage of the funnel, but how do you know if you can afford to do that? So I’m going to tell you to start with data. A campaign is almost guaranteed to flop if your daily budget is less than the cost per result.
Now, what do I mean by that? If your average cost per click, for example, is $1.50, then a traffic campaign with a budget of $1 a day is a bad idea. Likewise, if your leads typically cost you $15, don’t run a lead campaign at $10 a day. Ideally, you would base those data decisions off of your own business’s unique data, but if you’ve never run ad campaigns before or you just haven’t had the right tracking set up to have that data on hand already, you can also start with some industry benchmarks.
So I’ve included a QR code to WordStream, which is my preferred source for industry benchmarks on Meta. So they’ll provide you with cost per click, cost per lead, cost per conversion, based on, I think it’s a dozen or so sort of standard categories of businesses.
Obviously, take these with a grain of salt, and once you start advertising, make sure that you update what those averages are based on your own personal data instead of always referring back to the industry standards. But it can be a really good place to start if you have no idea how much a campaign can or should cost for your brand type. And then even if you can’t afford to run a campaign at every stage of that journey, you should still be collecting data and building audiences for them because that way when you’re ready, when hopefully one day get handed a larger marketing budget, they’re waiting for you and can be used immediately to build out that full funnel.
And then lastly, if I was really pressed to pick just one campaign type, I probably would choose the traffic campaign. They’re not as cheap as awareness and engagement campaigns, but they’re still usually affordable enough to get worthwhile results, more than a couple of clicks from budgets that are under $20 a day. Plus, they have the added benefit of giving you a little bit more data than those awareness and consideration campaigns where you’re really only looking at actions that are being taken on Facebook and Instagram.
Now if you’re running a traffic campaign, you’re also getting what that person is doing when they reach your website. And that data can be useful even beyond Meta Ads. If you’re running ads on other platforms, if you’re doing email marketing organic social media taking a look at what user behavior is, what content they’re interested in all that good stuff is going to help drive your marketing strategy even if it’s not happening within the Meta platform.
Hopefully, that gives you some practical starting points from a budget standpoint All right, 2:36. I did pretty good on time. Let’s review our main takeaways. So different audiences need different entry points. Just like at the pool, everybody is going to have a sort of slightly different appeal for why they want to interact with your brand.
Campaign objectives tell Meta very literally what kind of behavior we’re optimizing for. So making that decision around objective type is probably one of the most important decisions you’re going to make in your ad strategy. And then tracking and retargeting can turn separate campaigns into that connected full funnel that feeds itself from start to finish.
I unfortunately don’t have time to walk through all of the details, but we do have a lot of really great resources on the flyte blog, so that’s an awesome place to start. And then if your pool needs another entry point in the same way that I was saying one campaign can’t do it all, one platform can’t do it either.
All righty like I said I’m not a pool person, but I did want to include this picture of my dog, Elmer, who was experiencing the water for the very first time.
I guess the final thing to say is, feel free to reach out. We have a contact form on our website. But my email is also izzy@takeflyte.com. You’re welcome to shoot me a message directly. We can chit-chat about Meta ads if you have any questions. And then also if you’re interested in services like ads management, where you don’t have to think about all this stuff because I’ll think about it for you, please send me a message. Thanks for attending, and see you all later.