When you’re planning for your campaigns, there are consumers at different stages of buying that you’re going to target. For example, when someone wants to buy a table lamp, they will probably search for “buy table lamps” or “buy lamps”. These people are having buying intent. At the same time, consumers who want to buy table lamps can search for “table lamps under 1000”, “best table lamps”, “table lamps for study”, “lamps for living room”, etc. So, all these will be used in your campaign to bring these consumers to your PLP page and show them a huge selection of lamps and see that they will convert there on. This is all what we call the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) campaigns. These campaign types will include keywords that have intent for your category and directly related to the brand and category. Examples of types of campaigns used here are: Search Campaigns as users are searching & Display Campaigns to increase reach to such customers.

Once these customers come to your PLP and move through to PDP and ATC, they will drop at different points. These people are dropping possibly for several reasons. They’re probably just at a very early stage of exploring what are the options to buy or they’re evaluating what to buy very seriously and are in the process of buying in the next few days (one needs to understand the evaluation cycle for a category – for a large purchase it could be 1-2 months and for a small purchase it could be 1-2 weeks). If they’re an early stage explorer they would drop. But, if they’re planning to buy with serious intent and they have dropped, it could be because of reasons like pricing or your delivery time or your selection itself. But, since you don’t know why they dropped in the funnel or you cannot easily distinguish, you’ll assume that they’re consumers still in the process of making a decision and hence you’ll have to retarget them and be on top of their mind. This is something that we can call as Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) campaigns. These campaign types will include remarketing lists of website visitors or more specifically PDP visitors and ATC visitors as they showed their intent to almost buy. You will retarget to them with a certain frequency of 3 times a week or even 5 times a week. Popular campaign types are: Display & Video campaigns.

Now, coming to the interesting part of Top of the Funnel (TOFU) campaigns. When you want to sell table lamps, then it is not necessary to only target table lamp related keywords. For example, you may say that a consumer who is buying a particular value of a living room sofa or a couch is also a prospective customer for a premium lamp in his or her home. So, while that customer is not looking for a table lamp, you can still target him. Similarly, a person who has a particular value of car or above can also be considered to have a lifestyle that allows for a premium lamp purchase. So, you can target for a keyword such as “ buy Skoda Kushaq”. These are keywords that have no relation to lamps, but they indicate that the respective person has the affluence to have a lifestyle to consider buying a premium table lamp. Similarly, somebody who is purchasing clothes from specific premium brands or people looking for premium real estate or new homes. These again are not directly related to “table lamps” but these are the kind of people that you need to build your awareness among for them to consider your brand when they want to buy a table lamp. So, while you’ll not be very aggressive in your ad scheduling, you’ll be present in front of them time and again, maybe 2-3 times a month. Or you’ll also use category education and problem solving approaches. For example, you’ll present your category and brand (passively) saying that this category will solve a certain problem of yours as a customer. “A good table lamp will help you to increase your focus and productivity” – that can be a pitch to these people without directly saying we sell table lamps and please buy them. Popular campaign types for these are: DemandGen, Display, and Video.

So, what are the real objectives for these funnel-stage-wise campaigns?

How much is to be really spent on TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU campaigns?

It really depends on what is the stage of your brand, its association with the category, and your business objectives. But, at a large level, you can say that for smaller to medium scale brands, a bulk of the budget will be allocated to MOFU and then BOFU. When we say bulk, we mean 50-60% to MOFU and 20-30% to BOFU. TOFU will take up about 10-30%. Sometimes TOFU can be very low like even 2-5% depending on the business objectives and the awareness of the brand among the larger general audience.

It depends a lot on the overall business scenario and the market scenario. But indicatively 20-50-30 or 30-50-20 is a good budget mix. 

Hope this helps bring some clarity on planning for your campaigns, thank you.