How To Structure A Full-Funnel Ecommerce Account For Q4 via @sejournal, @tonyadam
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SEJ ⋅ Paid Media Strategy How To Structure A Full-Funnel Ecommerce Account For Q4 Keep your full-funnel ecommerce budget working beyond existing demand with Google and Meta customer exclusions and protected prospecting spend before Q4. Tony Adam 23 seconds ago ⋅ 11 min read Tony Adam CEO at Visible Factors Bio Follow A full-funnel ecommerce setup is easy to put on a media plan and hard to keep in an ad account. Google and Meta each hand you one automated campaign type that claims to cover every stage, and each will spend most of your budget at the bottom of the funnel, because that is where conversions are cheapest. Which means the work is not adding a campaign per stage. It is deciding what you exclude from the automated campaigns and what you fund upstream on purpose, because the bidder will not go up there on its own. Black Friday is November 27. If you want this to affect it, you should start this now. Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns are both sold as covering the whole funnel. In a narrow sense that is fair. They serve across surfaces and reach people at different stages. But both are bidding toward a conversion target, and a conversion from someone who has visited your site three times costs a fraction of a conversion from someone who has never heard of you. Give any bidder a single efficiency target and no other instruction, and it will buy the cheap conversions first. That is not a malfunction. It is the system doing what it is supposed to do. Those bottom-funnel conversions are real and of course you should be buying them. That’s not the problem. It is that when the automated campaigns absorb the whole budget, nothing funds the top, so the account competes for demand that already exists instead of creating more of it. Which raises the obvious question, what is driving awareness for the brand? Blended efficiency will not flag any of this. It reports roughly the same figure whether you grew the customer base or harvested it, which is how this runs for several quarters without anyone naming it. Then you’re in Q4, you push more budget into the same campaigns, and the extra money buys more of the same people at worse prices. I wrote earlier this year about pairing Performance Max with Standard Shopping to keep some control over where budget lands. This is the same argument across both platforms at the account level. See also: PPC Automation Layering: How Smart Advertisers Combine Automation With Strategy This is the change most ecommerce advertisers have not adjusted to, and it is why the October work matters more this year than last. Advantage+ Shopping campaigns used to include an Existing Customer Budget Cap. You set a percentage and Meta held spend on existing customers below it. It was the most useful full-funnel control Meta ever shipped for ecommerce and it took no structural work at all. Now that it’s gone, Meta’s Help Center lists the feature as no longer available, with a note that you can still do the same thing manually. Advantage+ Shopping has itself been folded into Advantage+ Sales campaigns, which brought ad sets back and added custom audience exclusions. The capability still exists. Meta moved the work out of a settings field and onto you to manage it. Meta’s documentation describes two ways to replicate it, and they suit different account sizes. The simple version is one manual sales campaign that excludes custom audiences representing your existing customers. That is the equivalent of the old cap set to zero percent. Everything in that campaign is prospecting by definition. The version we use on larger accounts is two ad sets. One targets existing customers and one targets broadly with those customers excluded. If you are running Advantage+ campaign budget, apply ad set spending limits to hold the split where you want it. That gives you the percentage control back and adds something the old cap never allowed, which is running different creative to each group. The reason most people have not done this yet is that nothing visibly broke when the cap disappeared. Campaigns kept running and ROAS kept reporting fine. The structure just quietly stopped being a full funnel. Google’s equivalent control is the new customer acquisition goal, and its problem is the reverse of Meta’s. It exists, it works, and plenty of accounts never turn it on. According to Google Ads Help, the goal runs in two modes. The first bids higher for new customers while still serving existing ones and the second serves new customers only. It’s available on Performance Max, Search, and Demand Gen campaigns, which between them cover most of what an ecommerce account runs. How Google identifies a new customer is what decides whether it works or not. It uses either your past online purchase conversion history or existing customer lists you share through Customer Match and label in the acquisition panel of your conversions summary. Left on conversion history alone, it works from whatever purchase data happens to live in the account, which on many sites is partial. Give it a real Customer Match list of your actual buyers and it gets better. This is the highest-value part of what you’re reading and people usually skip it because it requires someone to export a customer file. One constraint to know is that Google’s documentation notes that Performance Max campaigns for store goals are only compatible with the new customers only mode. If you run store goals, the bid-higher option is not available to you. See also: Google’s Push For Data Strength Is Really A Push For Better Bidding Bid higher for new customers is where we start on almost every account. It shifts the weighting while keeping campaign volume intact, so you are not making a bet the account cannot absorb in a quarter where volume matters. New customers only belongs on a campaign you have deliberately carved out as a prospecting vehicle, funded separately, and agreed to judge on different numbers than your harvest campaigns. Point it at your main revenue driver in October and you will spend the rest of the quarter explaining the ROAS chart. Both of those tactics are the same idea, just using different platforms. You aren’t adding funnel stages. You are taking the cheap conversions off the table inside specific campaigns, so that budget has somewhere else to go. The exclusion list that does most of the work in an ecommerce account is short: That last one causes more arguments than the rest combined, so let me be clear, I am not saying brand traffic is free money you would have collected anyway. If a competitor is bidding on your brand and you are not, you can lose that sale. That happens, it is measurable, and brands tend to learn it expensively. Be defensive and buy your brand terms just to make sure you don’t miss out on those easy revenue opportunities. The argument is not about whether brand is worth buying. It is that brand is a different job with different economics. It converts beautifully, which means any campaign it touches looks excellent, and once it is folded into a campaign you are judging on new customer acquisition you can no longer read either job clearly. Keep buying brand. Keep it in its own campaign so your prospecting numbers are telling you something about prospecting. There is a reason I am writing this now. Upper-funnel spend takes roughly six to eight weeks before it impacts revenue. People who meet your brand for the first time in October make up a meaningful share of your November buyers. People who meet you for the first time on November 20 are mostly just expensive. That is my observation across the accounts we work in, not a published benchmark, and your own lag depends on price point and consideration cycle. A $40 consumable moves faster than a $3,000 mattress. Pull your own time to conversion data before you take my range as gospel.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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