A minimum viable funnel is what we typically setup for most clients starting out. This is basically a funnel that starts out as simple as possible to establish baselines for Customer Acquisition Costs and Return On Ad Spend. Once we have our baselines, we can adjust the funnel where we see fit.

The beauty of setting things up this way is that if it works, that’s great and you can just start scaling. If it doesn’t work, you will be in a really good spot to add on to your campaigns as needed, rather than having to backtrack from launching an extremely complex funnel from the get-go.

So how do we set this up?

We use a basic Top of Funnel (TOF), Middle of Funnel (MOF), Bottom of Funnel (BOF) setup.

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Top of Funnel

This targets cold audiences, or people who have never heard of your brand before.

Your ad copy and creative here should reflect the fact that they don’t know you yet. It should be very “introductory” ad copy and focus on the problem that they have and how your product can solve their problem.

Your Customer Acquisition Costs will be higher in this piece of the funnel and that’s OK. The important thing is that you’re building up your retargeting audience.

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Middle of Funnel

This targets people who have recently engaged with your brand in any way — this could be site visitors, people who liked your Instagram post, people who shared your Facebook post or sent your brand a message — literally any possible way someone could engage with your brand would qualify them for MOF. What we’re doing here is building an audience of people who already know your brand. The time window we use here depends on how much traffic your site gets and how large your social followings are, but we usually look to start with around a 14 day window.

Your ad copy here can reflect the fact that this audience already knows your brand. We like to test out different selling points from TOF here. The reason for this is that if they didn’t purchase from your TOF ads, they may require a different selling angle to get them to convert. We want to make sure we cover all of our bases here.

This is also usually where we include discounts (if you choose to offer them). The reason for this is that there may be some people who would’ve purchased from your TOF ads, but couldn’t justify the price. We’ll hit them with a discount here to see if that converts them.

Generally speaking, Customer Acquisition Cost should be lower than TOF at this phase.

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BOTTOM OF FUNNEL

This audience consists of anybody who has recently took more high-intent actions like adding a product to their cart or in initiating checkout on your site. Again, the time window depends on how much traffic you’re getting, but we like to start with a 30 day BOF audience to ensure the budget feeds out. If you have a higher volume of traffic taking these events, you can use a smaller window.

This is a very high-intent audience. After all, they already have clicked on your ad, visited your site, viewed your product, added it to cart, and initiated checkout. For whatever reason they decided not to purchase; however, they likely will with a bit more persuasion. Since these customers are so high intent, we steer clear of offering discounts at this point in the funnel. The reason for this is that they’re probably going to purchase anyway with a bit more persuasion, so there’s no reason to give them an unnecessary discount.

To add that additional persuasion, we like to use really great testimonial ad copy here from raving fans of your product. We try to create as much fear of missing out (FOMO) as possible and make them realize how much they NEED your product. This usually does the trick.

Customer Acquisition Cost should be lowest at this stage in the funnel since this is your highest-intent audience.

Again, we will START with this setup and then adjust as need be. You may find that you need to adjust your retargeting windows, maybe add in a more extensive retargeting stack, tweak your ad copy, etc.

Running a great Facebook campaign is all about establishing a baseline of results and then understanding how to analyze the data and decide upon the correct next steps to take from there.

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