Top of the funnel

What counts as upper funnel

Marketers talk about a funnel because buying usually happens in stages. At the top are people who do not know you. In the middle are people who know you and are comparing options. At the bottom are people ready to act. Upper funnel is the top: spend aimed at strangers.

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. When the drink brand buys a 30-second YouTube ad introducing the drink to women who watch fitness videos, and excludes anyone who already visited the site, that is upper funnel. The targeting is defined by who the drink brand wants to meet, not by what someone just did on the site.

Anything that buys attention from people with no relationship to you sits here. Broad video, connected TV (ads on streaming TV apps), audio, sponsorships, influencer seeding, and cold prospecting audiences (paid ads to people who have never engaged with you). A search ad on a generic phrase like "electrolyte drink for women" can be upper funnel too. Format does not decide it. Intent does. The same video ad served only to people who abandoned a cart is lower funnel, not upper.

Why upper funnel matters

Lower funnel harvests demand. It does not create it. 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. If that drink brand cut everything except retargeting (ads to people who already visited), it would eventually run out of people to retarget. The efficient campaigns would quietly get more expensive because the pool of warm visitors would shrink.

Upper funnel is also where the brand gets room to say something. Once someone knows the name, the click-through rate (clicks divided by times the ad was shown) on everything downstream tends to move. A drink brand's YouTube intro is doing work for the Instagram cart ad, even though the cart ad will take the credit.

How to measure upper funnel

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 spends $20,000 in April on a YouTube intro ad. 500,000 people see that YouTube ad at least once. That 500,000 is reach: distinct people, not views. The YouTube ad is served 1,000,000 times, so average frequency is 2 (each person saw the YouTube ad about twice). 10,000 people click. 100 buy a $48 case that same week. Credited sales are $4,800. Last-click ROAS (return on ad spend: credited sales divided by spend) is $4,800 / $20,000 YouTube spend = 0.24. On a spreadsheet that 0.24 last-click ROAS looks like a failure.

Then look at what the spreadsheet missed. 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. Weekly Google searches for the drink brand's name go from 200 branded searches to 800. Site visits from people who never clicked the YouTube ad still rise. Next month, the cart ads and brand-search ads have more people to work with. The YouTube line created demand that other ads harvested.

Use reach (distinct people who saw the ad), frequency (times each person saw it), and branded search as the running dashboard. Use incrementality tests (turn the ads off in a matched region and see whether total sales move) to answer whether the ads caused anything. Last-click ROAS (return on ad spend) on an awareness line is a number with no meaning attached.

Common upper funnel mistakes

• Setting a purchase ROAS (return on ad spend) target on a reach campaign, then pausing it in week two because 0.24 last-click ROAS looks awful.
• Running upper funnel in short bursts so nobody ever sees the ad twice, and nobody remembers the name.
• Letting upper funnel eat budget with no plan for the mid funnel to catch the interest it created. A drink brand's comparison page and ingredients ad exist for that catch.