Bottom of the funnel
Bottom of the funnel is advertising to people who are already close to buying, like someone who searched your name or left a product in the cart. A funnel is a simple picture of buying in stages, and the bottom is the last stage. These ads often look very efficient because the person was already likely to buy.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
What counts as lower funnel
Lower funnel is the bottom of a simple buying path. Strangers sit in the upper funnel. People who are comparing sit in the mid funnel. Lower funnel is people ready to act.
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The drink brand also runs ads on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Lower funnel for that drink brand is branded paid search (Google ads on the drink brand's own name), shopping ads on the exact 24-can case, and cart retargeting (ads to people who added a case and left). Creative is short and transactional: price, shipping, the 30-day guarantee. Nobody here needs the brand story again.
Why lower funnel matters
Lower funnel is the cheapest place to close a sale, and it stops a competitor from picking off people who were coming to you. Someone who abandoned a cart because a phone rang really does need the reminder. Brand search also keeps a rival from showing up when she types your name.
Lower funnel is also finite. It scales only as fast as the demand feeding it. An account with no upper funnel hits a ceiling, then starts paying more for the same buyers. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. That drink brand's cart audience is only as big as last month's site traffic.
How to measure lower funnel
Walk the numbers slowly. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. 5,000 people added a $48 case to the drink brand's cart and left. The drink brand holds 1,000 of those 5,000 cart abandoners out of ads on purpose (a holdout: a group you do not advertise to, so you can compare). Of those 1,000 holdout people, 50 still buy. That is 5% buying with no ad. The drink brand shows cart ads to the other 4,000 people and spends $4,000. 400 of those 4,000 people buy. The ads manager credits all 400 purchases, so credited sales are 400 × $48 = $19,200. Reported ROAS (return on ad spend) is $19,200 / $4,000 cart-ad spend = 4.8. It looks excellent.
Now apply the holdout rate to that same drink brand. If 5% of holdout people buy with no ad, then 5% of the 4,000 advertised people is 200 people who would have bought anyway. Extra sales caused by the cart ads: 400 purchases − 200 that would have happened = 200 extra purchases. Incremental revenue: 200 extra purchases × $48 = $9,600. Incremental ROAS (return on ad spend from sales the ads caused): $9,600 / $4,000 cart-ad spend = 2.4. Still useful. About half as flattering as the dashboard. Incrementality (whether the ads caused sales that would not have happened) is the only honest read here. Read reported ROAS as a ceiling, not a result.
Common lower funnel mistakes
- Moving budget into lower funnel every quarter because the ROAS (return on ad spend) column looks best, then wondering why new customers stalled.
- Letting budget allocation (how you split spend across campaigns) chase reported efficiency until the only spend left is harvesting.
- Retargeting people who already bought, then counting the repeat order as a new customer.
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