Funnels Aren't Dead. Here's What's Actually Hurting Your Meta Ads Results

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:00)

Funnels are not dead. The funnel will never die. The funnel is essentially speaking to people where they’re at. How that looks and the structure of that might change.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:08)

Hi and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. I’m Dahna, founder of Bright Red Marketing, and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in eCommerce and eCommerce store owners. If you’re wanting relatable stories and actionable advice, as well as the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you’re in the right place. So let’s get into today’s episode.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:28)

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. Today you’re here with me, and I’m going to be talking to you about the dangers of Advantage+ and all this messaging that we’re seeing at the moment about how funnels are dead. So let’s get into it.

It feels like every week someone is telling us that funnels are dead, Advantage+ is the only thing that works, and you should be doing insert latest tactic here. As someone who is in the marketing space, I just know how difficult it is to manage ads when you’re constantly chasing that — chasing the next big thing, testing new things every time someone tells you something’s changed. So if that is you and your results are all over the place, this episode is for you.

I’m going to talk to you about why chasing the algorithm and these constant changes is making you a worse marketer, and what you can do instead.

First things first, we need to stop guessing and look at what’s actually happening. The problem with all of these gurus and experts telling us to try this new strategy — Meta’s changed this, use our proprietary system, it’s the only way your ads are going to work right now — is that it does not work if it doesn’t work for your business. They have no idea what’s happening in your business.

We do free audits as part of our marketing, and I look at a lot of accounts. I can see that those who are following these trends, listening to these gurus, reading the articles and podcasts that are constantly trying to sell something — keep that in mind when it comes to where you’re getting your information from. Usually, the people giving you that information are trying to sell you something, so take it with a grain of salt. Obviously, we’re kind of doing the same here, but just listen to the information and sanity check it.

At the end of the day, marketing is very much about results. It’s very much about what is working for your business. A lot of people in the marketing space really want to get that sanity check against other businesses — they want benchmarks, they want to see what their competitors are doing or what everyone in the industry is doing. The challenge with that is you don’t actually know their numbers, their strategy, or the behind-the-scenes of what those businesses are doing. So it’s very hard to take what you see externally and apply it to your own business internally.

Keep that in mind when you’re trying to find comparisons — you can’t see everything. You’re only seeing what’s out there, not the behind-the-scenes. That business you’re trying to copy: do you know what their profit margins are? A lot of places like to talk about revenue, and revenue is nice, but profit margins are far more important. It’s really important that you know what’s happening in your business first, so you can assess whether that advice actually applies to you.

So the first thing I want you to do — and we talked about this briefly in the last episode — is to use the Audience Segments tool. What this tool is going to do is give you really good insight into where in the funnel you are spending your money. A funnel is never dying. It’s not going anywhere. What it does is take someone from their very first interaction with your brand — someone who has never heard of you — through to someone a little more engaged — maybe they’ve followed you on Instagram, been to your website, seen a couple of your ads — through to your existing customers.

I have spoken about this for years and it will never stop being relevant: you have to talk to people where they’re at. You cannot speak to someone who has never heard of you the same way you speak to a customer who has bought from you every month for the last two years. You just can’t.

So regardless of your opinion on funnels, you have to have content for those three stages. The Audience Segments tool gives us insight into that, which is one of the greatest things Meta has done for advertisers in a really long time. Make sure you have it set up — I explain how in the previous episode, or just Google it and you’ll find some great tutorials.

What we’re looking for is where your spend is going for those funnel stages at the campaign level. Is your top of funnel actually spending for top of funnel? Is your middle of funnel actually spending for middle of funnel? If you’re running Advantage+ and you don’t have them broken down into those sections, is it still spending that budget appropriately?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (05:04)

A couple of things we’ve seen recently: we did an audit not that long ago where the client had a traditional funnel setup — top, middle, and bottom of funnel. Their top of funnel was spending on existing customers, their middle of funnel was spending on new customers, and their retargeting was doing a bit of both. So they were spending all this money and doing all this strategic work to segment their funnel, and Meta wasn’t listening.

There are a few things you can do to fix that. You can set up some segments, or you can lean into it and go, look, this is what Meta is doing, so I’m going to move into that Advantage+ space because that’s where Meta is taking my account. Alternatively, we have other clients running what they think is a middle-of-funnel campaign, but there are no exclusions in place, so Meta just goes, yep, cool, I’m going to show this to everyone.

It’s really worth having a look at that Audience Segments tool — it’s in your breakdowns — and seeing where that budget is going. I also really like those breakdowns for placements, platforms, and age and gender. Meta is getting to the point where it’s telling us to go all in and let AI do everything, but especially for those on smaller budgets, every dollar needs to be going to the right place. Does that mean we control everything and pull things really tightly back? No, Meta doesn’t really like that anymore. But you can be more educated about where those dollars are going.

Once you’ve done that and you’ve got a really good idea of where your money is going in the funnel, you can start to look at where things are dropping off and where there’s room for improvement. We actually found with one client that the frequency of her middle-of-funnel ads was astronomically high. If you’re not using the Audience Segments tool, you’re just going to notice ad fatigue and make a bunch of new ads, which sounds like the right thing to do. But if you don’t know where that frequency is going haywire, you’ll make the wrong kind of ads.

Knowing exactly where that spend is going is really, really important. Once you’ve done that, you can cull what’s not working, double down on what is, and start making really strategic decisions based on what’s actually happening in your ad account. So many people are saying do this, do that — but they’re not in your ad account. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is to really know your data, know your numbers, and use that information to make good strategic decisions.

Which brings me to my next point around funnels being dead. I’m seeing some lovely ads at the moment from some big players talking about how funnels are dead and Advantage+ is the be-all and end-all. The problem with a lot of this advice is that it is tested on very, very big accounts. Think the likes of Nike, Apple, even LSKD here in Australia — massive accounts with mega budgets. Most of you listening are not running at that level. Even if you’re spending $500 a day, it’s not really enough to be playing the same game that they’re playing.

It’s really important to be careful where your advice is coming from and whether it actually applies to you, which is why point one is so important: know where your business is at.

So, funnels are not dead. The funnel will never die. It’s essentially speaking to people where they’re at. How that looks and the structure of it might change — we are definitely moving into a space where Advantage+ is working really well for some brands — but within that is still the funnel content. Using the Audience Segments tool, even Meta is doing this on our behalf: here’s content for your new audience, here’s content for your engaged audience, here’s content for your existing audience. We still need to have content for each of those phases, regardless of what the structure looks like.

Advantage+ is definitely becoming more of a thing. The structure and the way we do these things is slowly being taken away from us, and Meta is definitely trying to automate as much of this process as possible. But from a strategy standpoint, the funnel will always live on. Imagine you have a shopfront. The person who walks in for the first time — you’re going to treat them differently than the person who shops with you every week. That’s a funnel. You are speaking to them at the point they are at.

So we really want to have some cold content — things that stop the scroll, that introduce the problem you solve, that are a little bit entertaining and engaging. If you’re in the fashion space, you can have some of that aspirational quick win kind of content where it’s just like, look, this is beautiful — you either like it or you don’t and you keep scrolling.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (10:03)

With your warm content, it’s really about two things. Your warm audience is very much about convincing those who haven’t decided to purchase yet to purchase, but it’s also about building that relationship with your customers. One thing I’m seeing a lot of at the moment — and if you’ve gone back and listened to the Priya episode, we talk about this a lot — is that marketing has sort of lost the relationship. I think because it’s gone so digital, we’re really in a space where we’re just shoving things in people’s faces. We forget that the biggest and best brands really have that relationship with their customers. People have that connection to a brand. And I think we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole of just sell, sell, sell all the time, whereas we really need to work on building that relationship.

Your warm ads need to do two jobs. One is to build trust — your social proof, your testimonials, your reviews, your warranties and guarantees. I really like putting FOMO-style ads in there: other people are buying this, we have proof. But you also need that engagement and community content. Your UGC does a really great job of that because it shows other people using the product, but it also starts to build the community — these are the other people buying this product, I feel like I’m part of something. That’s a really important part and something that’s often missed in those warm ads.

And then we have retargeting. I do fear that retargeting ads have fallen into a “hey, did you forget this? Are you still looking for this? Do you want this?” And I don’t know about you, but I have never abandoned my checkout because I forgot about something.

I have abandoned my checkout because I decided I didn’t actually need it. Because I just wasn’t sure if I needed or wanted that product anymore. Because I didn’t really trust the website. Because I just didn’t have enough money in the budget for it that week. No one is really abandoning their cart because they forgot.

So when you are doing any of those retargeting ads — whether that’s email, SMS, or Meta campaigns — ask yourself: why are people actually not buying from you? Usually they haven’t been convinced enough. They don’t really see the need, or they don’t quite trust you yet. A solid dynamic retargeting ad is good for those who maybe didn’t have enough chance to explore the site and just need that gentle reminder. But you definitely need to think about why people are not buying in the first place and try to address some of those issues. Retargeting is a really good one to maximise and work on, because it is so much more complicated than just “hey, did you forget? We’re still here.”

If you can make sure you have content for all of those stages — regardless of whether you go with a traditional structure or Advantage+ — we are still seeing both work for a variety of clients. Advantage+ is certainly not the be-all and end-all that people are claiming, especially for sub-five-million-dollar-a-year brands. For those businesses it’s a real mixed bag. But what is always going to work, and what is never going away, is funnel content. The execution of that is going to look wildly different, but the content itself isn’t going anywhere.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (13:20)

The last thing I’d say around this topic of funnels being dead and chasing Advantage+ and these various strategies is that the best advertisers are really boring — which is super unexciting and not something that people are interested in, because it’s not flashy, it’s not sexy. I can’t give you a special code name, trademark it, and make it sound proprietary. But the best thing you can do for your business is be strategic and be a little boring about it. I don’t think your creative should be boring — your creative should always be interesting and attention-grabbing — but your structure and your testing should be a little boring.

We are not in the game of testing a new strategy every week. We’re not constantly chasing the next big thing or trying to find the one winning secret sauce that some other brand or agency has trademarked. We’re not constantly chasing a different agency because the agency is going to make the big difference. What’s going to work is strategic testing and having a plan. Does that sometimes slow things down when things aren’t working? 100% it does. But do you know what’s going to slow it down a hell of a lot more? Trying a new tactic every single week.

Meta is a creature of habit — or more accurately, a data-guzzling little fiend. The more data it gets, the more consistency it gets, the more likely it is to do its job well. We want to avoid chasing the next big trend. These Meta changes that are rolling out are slow and clunky. Nothing Meta has rolled out in the last five years has warranted massive, rapid changes. Have there been changes required? Absolutely. Are any of them wild strategy overhauls? Not really.

What’s working is what’s working in your ad account. What’s not working is constantly chasing the next big thing. As long as you know what metrics you’re after — what is your actual ROAS? What is your target cost per purchase? Do you know your MER, your marketing efficiency ratio? — once you know those numbers, you can really start looking at your account and going, okay, it’s stable and solid, let’s make some small tweaks, let’s test some things, let’s do it strategically. Not because someone’s screaming doom and gloom and funnels are dead and Meta is going to stop working.

There are always people for whom Meta ads are working. There are always things going wrong and things that will change, but as long as you can be consistent, have a solid strategy, and know what’s working for your business and what numbers you need, you’re going to be in a much better place.

At the end of the day, Meta is a channel. It’s not a strategy. If you go into Meta advertising thinking it’s going to solve all your problems, it absolutely won’t. Meta is more of an amplifier. It’s going to see what’s working and what’s not and amplify that message. That’s why if your website isn’t getting sales, it’s really hard to just go get a Meta ads strategist and expect your problems to be solved — because all Meta does is amplify what you’ve already got. So if you’ve got great branding, great creative, a great message and great strategy, you’re in a really strong position.

Keep the focus on having a really solid strategy and just remember that these tools and the algorithm are going to change, but at the end of the day the fundamentals don’t. Marketing is pretty standard — we’re just adapting to the tools that we have.

So what I’d love for you to do this week is audit your segments, make sure you’ve got content for each of those stages, and come up with a testing strategy. If you don’t already have a full strategy, start working to that rather than chasing things you’re seeing on the internet.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (17:11)

Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. As always, you can find the show notes on our website at brightredmarketing.com.au — just look for the podcast page. Thanks for listening.