Should We Change How We Talk About The Funnel?

If the title of this post caught your eye, you’ve probably heard (or even said) phrases like:

• “Do you have upper funnel capabilities?”
• “We’ll want to capture users at the bottom of the funnel with search campaigns.”
• “Paid social works well for mid-funnel consideration campaigns.”

Paid media professionals often equate stages of the funnel to different channels or platforms. In my opinion, this is a legacy approach that has been grandfathered into media plans from a time before advertising platforms had the capabilities they do today. There’s a good chance you might have seen a media plan that looked something like this when simplified:

The initial thinking for this structure is sound; use media types that have a wider reach at a cheaper cost to promote brand awareness, then increase online engagement through immersive ad formats, followed by meeting users at a point of interest during a search. However, this structure begins to breakdown conceptually when you ask a question like,

“If a user has had several interactions with a brand and is ready to make a purchase, then sees a YouTube TV ad which drives them to buy, can that ad still be considered upper funnel?”

One of the challenges to this legacy funnel approach, is that it doesn’t consider a modern buyer’s journey. In reality, display, paid social, and paid search can each sit across all three stages of the (simplified) funnel. It’s not about where your ads are being placed, it’s about who your ads are targeting.

When taking an audience-centric approach to media planning, I believe that it’s important to separate the channel from the desired action. DV360 programmatic display doesn’t automatically generate brand awareness, just as Facebook doesn’t naturally drive direct responses. Instead, I like to think about the funnel as different types of audiences based on brand interactions. For example

• Upper Funnel - users who have never had a recorded interaction with a brand (no website visits, video views, social engagements, etc…)
• Mid Funnel - users who have interacted with the brand, but don’t yet show a strong propensity to purchase (homepage website visits, YouTube video views, etc…)
• Lower Funnel - users who have taken one, or multiple, online interactions showing a strong likelihood of purchase (downloaded a white paper, requested more info, set up a meeting, etc…)

Once you have an understanding of your brand’s digital touchpoints, and have conducted some research on different paths along your customers’ online journeys, you can begin building your audience structure. This approach further emphasizes the need and usefulness of first party data. When a few of these pieces start to come together, the process begins to inspire questions like:

• Where are my brand’s different audiences spending their time? What ad platforms have the capability to target these specific audiences in those places?
• Do I have creative assets that are relevant for both the ad placements and audiences I’ll be targeting?
• Have I properly set up the appropriate optimization events across platforms that are related to the actions I want each audience to take?

These steps can help to keep your brand’s audience at the forefront of your media planning process, and I believe that an audience-centric approach will become critical as paid media continues to put the consumer first.?

Have questions, thoughts, or disagreements? I’d love to chat!