Welcome to our newest blog series: Digital Paid Advertising 101! This series will be a guide for what to expect when you’re expecting results from paid ads.

Let’s start with this question: What led you here, to this blog, looking for insights into paid digital advertising in the first place? Perhaps it was a scene like this... You thought you made a great paid advertising campaign. You picked your objective, set your budget, selected your creative, and plugged in your website link. Then, you sat back and watched the money flow in, right? Wrong 😆.

Maybe you’ve had that exact experience. You created some Facebook Ads or Google Ads and you expected results. But your expectations were not met. Unfortunately, that experience is all too prevalent. There’s a common misconception out there that if you simply throw some money behind your digital advertising efforts, revenue will automatically follow. But there’s actually a lot more nuance that goes into making paid advertising campaigns successful.

We’ve seen the above scenario happen time and time again. That’s why we want to demystify the process and shed some light on what it takes to generate real revenue from digital paid advertising campaigns. So stop throwing your money away, and buckle up!

Building a Paid Advertising Funnel

First things first, in order to generate revenue from your paid advertising campaigns, you have to go back to sales basics: building out your funnel. Just like any sales funnel, the paid ad funnel is broken into three parts: top, middle, and bottom. It’s imperative to build a strong funnel for any new brand or even an established brand that’s entering the digital advertising space for the first time in order to build brand awareness, generate new leads, and drive conversions.

Top of Funnel Ad Campaigns

The top of the funnel is where you grow brand awareness and learn more about which audiences and creatives work best for your business. Good campaign objectives for top of funnel ads are brand awareness, reach, video views, and engagement. These ad objectives have the primary goal of getting in front of new potential customers to give them an introduction into who you are as a brand and what you’re offering.

For Facebook and Instagram ads, it’s a good idea to create video ads for this stage of the funnel. The reason being that you can create custom audiences based on users who have viewed your video ads, so you can retarget them in the lower stages of the funnel. Facebook and Instagram have also stated that they give preferential treatment to videos in their algorithms.

Mid Funnel Ad Campaigns

The middle of the funnel is where you focus on lead generation and nurturing potential customers that have taken action on your top of funnel ads. This is when you show them what makes your business unique and better than the competition. For this stage, we recommend utilizing tools like Facebook forms, which can be used in ad campaigns with the goal of lead generation. These forms make it super easy for potential customers to convert because they don’t need to leave Facebook to fill in their contact information. Facebook also provides the option to sync this new contact information directly to your CRM.

You can also use campaign objectives like website traffic and landing page views to not only increase traffic to your website or landing page, but also to pixel these audiences for remarketing at the bottom of the funnel.

After you’ve gathered new leads, continue your marketing efforts by following up with them via email and offering them some sort of discount or incentive to make a purchase on your website!

You can also use this tactic after driving traffic to your website by creating a custom audience. Knowing that you will only hit users you’ve sent to your specific landing page, you can create an ad with a specific incentive only for them to usher them through the purchase pathway.

Lower Funnel Ad Campaigns

And last but certainly not least, the bottom of the funnel is where you focus on generating conversions. This one kind of speaks for itself when setting up your campaign objective. Choose conversions, as they are the goal here. Depending on your business, a conversion might be a website purchase or a form submission, so it is critical that when using this objective, the Facebook pixel knows what website action a conversion should be tied to.

It’s important to establish a strong funnel in order to effectively move people through the stages of getting to know your brand, so when they arrive at the bottom, they are primed and ready to convert.

Throughout the entirety of the funnel, it’s crucial to consider your target audience and tailor your ad creative accordingly. Selecting your target audience is something we will discuss at a later point in this blog series, so stay tuned!

It’s Your Turn!

Looking to get started building your very own paid advertising sales funnel but don’t know where to begin? Reach out to us today so we can help you build the funnel of your dreams that will build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive conversions!