The first and foremost step for a successful marketing campaign is to spread awareness about your brand so as to generate as many leads as possible. Generating leads is essential to increased sales.

In the e-commerce industry,  we have a concept of 'the marketing funnel' which is used to categorize and differentiate audience engagement with our products online. 

What is the 'marketing funnel'?

The marketing funnel consists of three major parts-

1. Upper Funnel / Top Funnel Audience- 

   It includes the entire audience you tap through social media engagement and all website visitors. This is where you generate leads and attract new customers.

2. Middle Funnel Audience-

   It includes the part of the audience which has engaged with your product website by adding products to the cart and initiating the checkout process.

3. Lower Funnel Audience-

   Includes all those who have made a purchase.

Why is the 'Top Funnel' so important?

The top funnel, as mentioned above, is used to generate leads and increase the potential customer base. To ensure a constant supply of abundant Middle and Lower funnel audiences, it is important to have a broad Upper Funnel Audience. All these audiences are retargeted through Engage, and specifically, Middle Funnel is retargeted through Dynamic.

Hence, the top funnel is required to ensure audience exhaustion does not happen in e-commerce marketing.

To improve upper-funnel audiences, we set up upper-funnel campaigns.

Types of Upper Funnel campaigns on Facebook:

1. Traffic Campaigns-

   The major goal of traffic campaigns is to drive traffic to the website which can then be retargeted using the retargeting and remarketing campaigns. Usually, we see these campaigns bring in a lot of junk traffic with low average session durations and high bounce rates.

2. View Content Optimized Campaign-

   The major goal of this campaign is to drive high-intent traffic to the e-commerce website at a low cost. The targeting is kept niche which ensures relevant traffic and low CPMs.

3. Brand Recall (Optimized for Video Views) Campaign-

   The objective of this campaign is to get the most plays on the video ads and show the ads to the audience who are likely to watch the video ad for at least 2 continuous seconds or 15 seconds and longer.

Upper Funnel campaigns on Google:

1. Discovery-

   You can use Discovery campaigns to help reach large customers across the Google feed to achieve your performance goals in Google Advertising. This campaign type helps you deliver highly visual, inspiring personalized ad experiences to people who are ready to discover and engage with your brand.

   

2. Youtube-

   On YouTube, people can discover videos in various ways (for example, by searching on the YouTube search page, clicking suggested videos on the watch page, or choosing a video from the homepage feed). You can use YouTube to advertise more effectively to people who are searching for your product or brand.

   

When to set up 'Top Funnel' campaigns?

• New launch-

  When a new product/category/sub-brand is to be launched, run these campaigns to create awareness at low cost with higher reach.

• Sale-

  When a sale is to be launched, prepare and run the campaign for three to four days, so that during the limited period of the sale the audiences can be retargeted.

• Low audience base-

  If you have a small size of the audience, especially in the case when dynamic or retargeting campaigns are not performing, run these campaigns to increase audience size.

• Pushing specific categories/landing pages-

  Can be tried where traffic needs to be redirected to a particular webpage. For example- If you want to push a new category, or a low-performing category, a Traffic campaign can be set up to route some traffic to those category pages.

IMPORTANT POINTS  TO KEEP IN MIND

1. Campaigns:

• Any Existing Prospect campaigns in either Conversions/Catalog Sales objectives can be utilized for the View Content Optimised campaigns.

• New prospect campaigns can also be created and used to View content-optimized Campaigns.

Note: Engage & Dynamic campaigns are not recommended for view content optimization as the idea is to retarget at a later stage.

1.  Budget

• Do not spend more than 10-15% of the overall budget.

• Our main objective is to get conversions and this campaign is optimized for quality traffic at the least cost per click.

1. Targeting:

• It is advisable to have niche targeting - Age group, genders, and top locations must be checked from GA and used.

• Not advisable to have any open demographic persona.

• Lookalikes can even be limited to conversions based. Try Personas for new websites and brands.

1. Ad Copies:

• Ad copies should have 'Call to Action' such as “Learn More”.

• Videos, especially brand-specific videos perform better.

• Can also promote categories not being run via smart ads.

• Pro Tip- Custom ads, which have given good CTR% can be populated in Traffic Campaigns. (In case you’re planning to run a traffic campaign for an existing client).

1. Performance

• Keep a regular check on the Bounce Rate and the performance of the retargeting campaigns

• Pro Tip: The time spent per session on the website should be more than 20 seconds which can be checked via Avg. Session Duration on GA.

Top funnel marketing is essential to develop a strong audience base for your products, which will eventually help you with increased conversions. Specific ad campaigns on Google and Facebook can help you reach a large audience base. All you need to take care of are  the technicalities discussed in this blog.

Adyogi can help you achieve all this and more! At Adyogi, we make advertising easier and more profitable for e-commerce businesses across the globe. We've been able to increase e-commerce revenue by 7x - 8x through Adyogi's performance-based solutions. 

Get in touch to see how we can help you grow your business online.