Have you ever shopped online, not made a purchase, then seen the same products on Facebook or Instagram a little while later? Chances are, you’ve probably had this happen to you at least once, if not a thousand times!

Have you ever seen an ad for a brand you follow or that you’ve seen on Facebook or Instagram while reading down your feed? Again, chances are you probably have.

These two circumstances happen when a brand has built out a complex advertising funnel on Facebook Business Manager.

If you are ready to see a massive return on your ad spend (ROAS) and use the same strategies we used to generate $39,322.62 with only $3,670.67 in ad spend, keep reading. We’re going to talk about exactly how to build a successful Facebook ad funnel.

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Top of Funnel Ads (TOF)

The top of the funnel is where most of your ad spend should be. This is where you can build brand awareness and consumer interest while driving traffic to your website. With the TOF conversion campaign, we focus on testing different detailed, targeted and lookalike (LLA) audiences to reach the correct audience for driving sales.

Lookalike audiences are very strong here because they include people who are most similar to a specific audience. For example, a lookalike audience made from people who have previously made a purchase on your website is usually a very strong audience. However, as your ad budget allows, it’s important to test other target audiences and LLAs too because you don’t know what works best until you try it. Every brand is unique, so your audiences will be unique as well.

As we test different audiences, we make a new ad set for each one. Using this approach ensures the data is kept clean and makes it easier to decipher the winning ad sets.

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Now let’s talk about the ads.

For the TOF ads, focus on introducing your brand. This is not the place to make a hard sales pitch. This is where you should share videos that talk about why your brand is awesome and why someone should buy from your company. Using content that is eye catching, making people feel connected to your brand, is key. Give them a reason to stop scrolling through their feed to learn more about your brand.

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Middle of Funnel Ads (MOF)

The middle of the funnel ads are where you can start retargeting people and encourage them to take action, aka make a purchase. In the middle of the funnel, we retarget a wide variety of people including, but not limited to, website traffic that viewed content (VC), people who have engaged with our client on Facebook and/or Instagram, and people who have viewed a certain percentage of their videos.

Again, as your ad budget allows, be sure to test different retargeting audiences.

The ads for your MOF campaign will have more variance than the TOF ads because each ad set can target someone who is in a different place of their ad-buying journey. For example, someone who commented on your Instagram post 4 months ago is in a very different place than someone who was on your website yesterday. Matching your ad copy to the audience is crucial to keep a seamless interaction with your audience.

Bottom of Funnel Ads (BOF)

The BOF campaign is a great way to capture customers who are right on the edge of making a purchase. This campaign simply acts as a reminder to finish an incomplete order.

Let’s take a moment to think about consumer behavior. Oftentimes when someone is making a purchase from Facebook or Instagram, they are either between other activities or they are just scrolling through their feeds waiting for something to do. 

Think of it like this, you’re waiting in the lobby for your dentist appointment, scrolling on Instagram. Your name gets called to go back and see the dentist. You’re not going to say, “Hang on! Let me finish ordering this T-Shirt!”

This is why the BOF campaign is important. By using a catalog objective, you can use the Facebook catalog that is synced with your Facebook pixel to serve ads to customers based on which products they have been looking at on your website. 

Facebook gives you a few basic options to use for audience creation, such as “14 Days Add To Cart, No Purchase.” You can create custom audiences as well, based on your analytics and web traffic. For example, if you have a ton of Add to Carts every day, you can use a smaller timeframe to capture more recent web traffic. On the other hand, if your daily Add to Cart numbers are low, you can extend the timeframe to make sure your audience is large enough to serve ads to.

Now that you know how to build Facebook funnel ad campaigns, it’s time to get to work and start growing your online sales!

As you start building Facebook ad campaigns, it’s important to test things each step of the way. Every brand is unique and what works best for one brand is not necessarily what works best for another. And remember, Facebook ads are not an overnight process! They take time to dial in and start seeing real significant results.