How To Structure A Full-Funnel Ecommerce Account For Q4 via @sejournal, @tonyadam

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. 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.

Why Automated Campaigns Concentrate At The Bottom 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 Meta Removed Its Only Full-Funnel Lever 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.

How To Rebuild The Existing Customer Cap 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 Gives You The Lever, Switched Off 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 acquisi