Rethinking the Funnel: Sophie Fell on Maximizing Top-of-Funnel Paid Search Advertising

Sophie Fell , Director of Paid Media at Two Trees PPC , lays it out straight—most brands mess up their top-of-funnel paid search strategies by treating them like a quick fix. Spoiler: it’s not. Ahead of her talk brightonSEO , Sophie explains how to actually get value from awareness campaigns, what metrics really matter, and why paid search isn’t just about conversions. Sophie breaks down these strategies in detail, showing why the right approach matters. Here's her slidedeck.

1. How do you balance campaigns across different stages of the funnel? Are there specific tactics you recommend for top-of-funnel vs. bottom-of-funnel advertising?

For upper-funnel awareness-driving activity, content forms such as images, videos, etc., work well across the majority of platforms. Most platforms have options to create campaigns towards awareness and reach objectives, and prioritize reach and impressions over engagement, clicks, or conversions.?

It’s also important to consider outbound vs. inbound marketing methods. For the most part, outbound or push marketing makes far more sense when it comes to driving awareness from brand-new audiences. Because PPC is more of an inbound or pull marketing method - as it requires users to conduct a search first - it can be tricky to get this right for upper-funnel objectives or to scale, as you’ll always be limited by search volumes. However, there is value in using more generic terms to get in front of audiences higher up in the funnel, as well as in answering questions and offering solutions to a user’s problems.

PPC is also incredibly strong in driving lower funnel objectives such as conversions - whether that be newsletter sign-ups, sales, or lead generation. These objectives are often harder to achieve from typically upper-funnel strategies and platforms such as social media or video advertising.

2. When it comes to targeting in paid search, what are the most effective ways to identify and reach the right audience at the right stage of the funnel?

While it’s difficult to target per se using paid search, you can alter the demographics that see your ads. It’s rare that your brand has a product or service that’s universally applicable to everyone within a country or everyone worldwide! Using basic campaign settings such as targeting by geography and language can help create a more coherent experience for users and reduce wastage for advertisers.

In the lower stages of the funnel, such as Consideration and Conversion, using customer data can ensure that the right audience sees your ads. Or that the right audience is seeing the right ads for them! Using customer data - such as cart abandoners, those who have subscribed to a newsletter but never purchased, or those who have used a free trial of your product but not purchased - you can create tailored messaging for each audience. For example, you may offer cart abandoners a 5-10% discount to encourage them to return and complete their checkout - an offer that you would not want to be publicly available to all!?

Similarly, you can use such data to exclude audiences from seeing your ads entirely—perhaps you want to exclude current or previous customers from seeing your branded ads to maximize your branded search budget.

3. How do you use remarketing strategies to move people through the marketing funnel, and what data points are most useful for adjusting these strategies?

If the top of the funnel is about maximizing brand awareness, impressions and educating the audience, the next step is to drive active engagement and consideration. While website clicks and CTR aren’t core metrics for awareness, they are for consideration. And while sales and leads generated aren’t core metrics for consideration, they are for conversions! So, be sure to use the right ad formats, bidding strategies, and goals for each stage in the funnel.

Once someone has clicked an ad or visited your website - and opted into cookies, etc.! - you can remarket to them by showing them the product or service that they viewed. Remarketing doesn’t have to - and shouldn’t - be on a single channel, either. Pair up search ads with display and video advertising, use multi-channel campaign formats such as Performance Max, or use meta-advertising to remarket website visitors from all sources.?

By creating a full-funnel strategy, you can successfully transform awareness into consideration and beyond. For example, you can use in-platform data to show different messaging to those who saw a previous ad and didn’t engage or those who visited your website but did not convert. In creating custom messaging and using data to deliver bespoke messaging and creative to each user’s stage of the funnel, you can successfully show your prospects the right message at the right time for them.

4.? When optimizing top-of-funnel campaigns, what metrics do you prioritize to ensure you're attracting quality leads rather than just high traffic?

While the ultimate goal of PPC activity is conversions, it’s a useful tool for driving awareness too. With the average CTR on Google being 6.2% in 2024, that’s nearly 94% of people who will see your ads but won’t engage. As search activity is generally charged on a CPC (cost per click) basis, that’s 94% awareness that you’re driving for free.

Outside of free awareness, for top-of-funnel strategies via search it’s important to focus on impressions to give you an idea of awareness driven via impressions generated. To uncover missed opportunities for awareness, look at Impression Share metrics, and deeper dives such as Impression Share lost (budget) and Impression Share lost (rank) to understand when and why your ad visibility is being limited.

Once you get engagement and clicks further down the funnel process, competitive metrics such as quality scores and CTRs can help you understand how your ads are performing in the auction process, whereas metrics such as bounce rates and average time spent on a page can help you to understand the quality of traffic that’s generated by your ads.

5. Since top-of-funnel advertising is more about awareness, how do you adjust messaging and creative to engage users who may not yet be ready to convert?

The main lever you can pull within your ads to drive the action you want a user to take is via CTAs. CTAs don’t have to be as stringent as ‘Learn more’ or ‘Call now’. Your wider ad copy can generate a CTA too, such as ‘Call us now for your free quote!’ or ’Fill in our quick and easy form to receive our bestselling eBook in your inbox!’. So, throughout the journey, ensure that you’re clear and specific on the single action that you want a user to take.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, I suggest not forcing CTAs or action at the awareness stage in the funnel. If you must use CTAs, ‘Learn more’, or ‘Find out more’ can help drive a customer to seek extra information about your product, service, and/or brand. The top of the funnel is all about driving awareness, and even a single ad impression can achieve that goal, without the need for action. In the mid-to-late stages of the funnel, you can be much clearer with your CTAs to drive action.

At the top of the funnel, ad copy and creative should be focused on educating the potential customer or client; you shouldn’t throw a user into the deep end with a pricing page or by asking them to make choices straight away, as this can be off-putting and is premature in their journey. This type of content is much more suited to the Consideration and Conversion stages of the funnel and can be incredibly effective in driving action instead.

6. How important is aligning top-of-funnel ads with content marketing strategies? What types of content tend to perform best at this stage in the funnel?

It’s extremely important! Top-of-funnel ads and content should be focused on problem-solving, presenting solutions, and giving an introduction to your brand. Only by providing a viable solution (in the form of a product or service) to an issue that search engine users are experiencing can you move them down the funnel into the Consideration stage.?

Whether we’re talking about blog content, landing pages, or social media videos, they all need to be aligned to the right stage of the funnel and to the questions that the audience has at that time in their journey. Awareness is about viewability and reach, but it’s also about demonstrating value and building trust. This is why social media and video advertising are often used as the go-to for top-of-funnel advertising; UGC (user-generated content), product or service information, and product look and feel are more easily delivered in short bursts via these formats.

When it comes to PPC, it’s important that your ad copy presents a solution to a problem, based on the user’s search query. For example, if a user is searching for ‘best project management software’, consider how you can demonstrate that you’re the best within just 3-4 lines of text. It’s important to utilize ad assets (FKA ad extensions) to add extra content and context. Structured snippets, callouts, site links, business names, logos, and images can all help to enhance your listing on the SERP, taking up valuable ‘real estate’ on the page and giving users even more information ahead of that all-important click that triggers a charge.

7. If someone were to start a new PPC campaign from scratch today, what would be the first three things you would recommend focusing on for long-term success?

For anyone starting a brand-new campaign, I always push them to research as much as possible before even touching the ad platforms. Quantifying search demand volumes, figuring out the target audience (even if that’s just geographically), calculating appropriate budgets, setting goals, and planning out your ad copy ahead of time are all critical steps that shouldn’t be rushed or only considered once in the platform. Campaigns often see better success when they’re well thought-out and planned from the start, rather than just by creating something and focusing the strategy on optimizations only.

In the tactical sense, on brand-new accounts, I recommend starting with a strategy that generates data such as Maximize Clicks. Despite the name, it’s incredibly important to have conversion tracking set up to understand conversion paths. Smart bidding strategies such as Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, Target CPA, etc., all need a solid foundation of conversion history to work effectively. So, for fast learning and to reduce wastage, always start by generating traffic first to generate learnings, with the end goal of shifting to a conversion-based bidding strategy once you have 30 days of quality data.

8. Where do you see the future of AI in PPC reporting? Will AI play a larger role in how we generate and interpret client reports, and what should marketers do to prepare for that?

Absolutely! At the moment, a lot of automated reporting is highly concentrated on numbers, with anecdotes and data analysis happening in addition via human input. It would be awesome to see AI grow in complexity to remove the need for manual annotations. For example, instead of just showing that CPCs increased period on period numerically, explain why CPCs changed and any internal and external factors that would’ve impacted this, whether that’s a new competitor bidding aggressively, a change to campaign settings, or simply demand shifting due to seasonality.

For marketers, I believe reporting roles will move away from being hands-on to more of a Quality Assurance (QA) role. As AI reporting tools learn and evolve, it’s important that there’s a human eye on output and accuracy—in both the numbers and explanations for the changes experienced—and the ability to deliver feedback to the system(s) involved to improve the outputs generated.?

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