How to Build a High-Converting Facebook Ads Funnel [2024]

Facebook is a great platform not only for people but also for eCommerce brands to connect with the world.

And Facebook ads help reach out to the right audience for your business. But it doesn’t work the same for every business out there. Why? Because many businesses don’t know how to leverage Facebook ads.

Just like any marketing strategy, you need to approach Facebook ads systematically and strategically — and that’s why you need to build a Facebook ads funnel.

In this blog, we’ll help you with a step-by-step guide to building an effective and high-converting Facebook ads funnel along with examples and best practices.

What is a Facebook Ads Funnel?

You might have heard of many funnels — sales funnel, click funnel, and website conversion funnel. But Facebook ads funnel is a funnel strategy designed specifically for Facebook ads.

Facebook ads funnel is a paid ads strategy where you create different Facebook ad campaigns for different stages of the funnel — top of the funnel (awareness stage), middle of the funnel (consideration stage), bottom of the funnel (conversion stage), and retention/repurchase stage.

Similar to other funnel concepts, this strategy walks customers through a journey—from being unaware of your brand to becoming your customer—and it can even go further to making them your repeat buyers.

The idea is to have a strategic approach to maximize the revenue of the Facebook ad campaigns instead of running random ads.

Stages of the Facebook Ads Funnel

First of all, let’s just briefly understand the main four stages of the Facebook ads funnel, and then, we’ll go into more detail in the step-by-step guide:

• Top of the Funnel (ToFu) / Awareness Stage

At this stage, you’ll find a “cold audience” that might not be aware of your product or service. The goal is to make them aware of your brand and products/services. So, at this stage, you could run brand awareness and engagement campaigns.

• Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) / Consideration Stage

After the customers have become aware of your brand through your initial ad campaigns, you need to provide them with value and bring your offering into their consideration.

This can be called your “warm audience” as they have shown some level of interest in your product or service — but they aren’t ready to buy just yet.

• Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) / Conversion Stage

This is the most crucial stage of the funnel.

By now, customers have shown a high level of interest in your offering and are just a step away from purchasing your product or service. Thus, this can be called your “hot audience”.

This can also include the visitors who may have added your products to their cart or abandoned checkout. You need to make sure you provide them with compelling content to convert these leads.

• Retention / Repurchase Stage

Your funnel doesn’t end once the customer has purchased your product/service. Finding new customers is hard, so don’t forget the ones that have already bought something from your brand.

In fact, those customers are a great opportunity to bring in more sales by encouraging them for repeat purchases. Promote upselling and cross-selling items.

This will help you increase your eCommerce ROI as it will reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).

How to Build a Facebook Ads Funnel — A Beginner’s Guide

Step #1: Prepare for Implementing the Funnel

Before implementing our Facebook ads funnel, we need to define and prepare a few things.

1.1 Define Your Target Audience & Strategy

First things first, define the target audience so that you can —

• define your ad strategy,
• prepare your ad creatives, and 
• create other content tailored to the target audience.

When you know your target audience very well, you can create personalized ad creatives and content that touch upon their emotions and pain points.

Your ads campaign strategy may vary depending on the kind of product/service you’re trying to sell. For example, if you’re selling a high-ticket item, it makes more sense to first generate leads and then close the deals through sales calls.

But if you’re selling small items like beauty products or personal care items, you might want to present your best offer directly through a landing page.

1.2 Create and Align Your Content for Ad Campaigns

To run different ad campaigns, obviously, you’re going to create ad creatives like videos, images, and copy for your ads. However, ad creatives alone aren’t enough for the funnel strategy.

You need to create content that will help you drive those campaigns successfully by providing value to the audience and keeping them engaged with your brand.

These content assets could include:

• Blog posts
• Video guides
• eBooks
• Checklists
• Quizzes
• Other digital assets

The goal is to provide value to your audience. Share guides, best practices, or tools that could solve their problems.

In these assets, you can also incorporate CTAs to promote your newsletter or offer a lead magnet. It can help you in the further stages of your funnel when you need to nurture the leads.

1.3 Create Landing Pages for Certain Ad Campaigns

When you run lead generation or conversion ad campaigns, you can use landing pages to drive customers to take your desired action.

For example, when running an ad for your best-selling product, instead of sending users to a regular product page, send them to a dedicated landing page. Design the landing page with conversion in mind and use CTAs to drive customers as per your desired goal.

Use GemPages to design landing pages for your Shopify store. GemPages offers you advanced AI-powered features, professionally designed templates, and a drag-and-drop visual editor to customize the landing pages, quickly and easily.

Here’s a Facebook landing page example from Beardbrand:

1.4 Important: Make Sure Meta Pixel is Set Up

Before you start running any of your ad campaigns, you must ensure Meta pixel is set up on your website or online store.

Why Meta Pixel?

• Meta pixel helps ensure your Facebook ads are shown to the right audience. It’ll help you find the audience who has already visited a certain page or taken a specific desired action on your website.
• It helps you configure automatic bidding to reach potential customers who are more likely to buy from your brand.
• With Meta pixel, you can easily measure the performance of your ads.

Learn more: Add Meta Pixel to Your Shopify Store

Step #2: Run Campaigns for the Top of the Funnel (Awareness Stage)

As we mentioned before, at this stage, your potential customers don’t know about your brand and its product/service. So, the first goal is to make them aware of your brand.

Run Brand Awareness Campaigns

Here, your ads need to be focused on getting wider reach, and more importantly, engagement. Keep in mind — you don’t need to try to sell your products or services at this stage. So, the ad creatives must be created to gain their attention and engagement.

When they’ll see your ad, they’ll be like — “Hey, what brand is this, what does it do, let me just check their website….” — and that’s how your brand name will become familiar to them.

Now, to effectively run these ad campaigns, make sure you target the right audience. Meta Ads Manager has three types of audiences:

Use the “Lookalike Audiences” feature as it’ll help you reach an audience that’s similar to yours. 

Campaign Objectives:

You can run the following campaigns —

• “Traffic” campaign to send Facebook users to your blog where you provide valuable content to them.
• “Video views” campaign to gain engagement from your potential customers.
• “Engagement” campaign to get page likes and post engagements.

Pro tip: In this early stage of brand awareness, people might not be interested in your brand’s ads. So, you can run ads with creative or entertaining videos or images that can grab their attention. You can even use memes to attract users if that aligns with your branding.

Here’s one of the best top-of-the-funnel Facebook ad examples. Earth Shoes promoted giveaway content which can help the brand with great engagement:

Step #3: Run Campaigns for the Middle of the Funnel (Consideration Stage)

The cold audience that engaged with your top-of-the-funnel ad campaigns will now become your “warm audience”. So, now you need to narrow down the focus on the warm audience that has shown interest in your brand and its offering. 

Important note: While running ad campaigns for the middle of the funnel, you can remove the “cold audience” from your targeting criteria. You don’t want to spend your efforts on users who aren’t interested in your offer.

3.1 Create a Lead Generation Campaign

“Lead generation” is the process of collecting the contact information (typically email address or phone number or both) of potential customers for marketing and sales purposes.

This could be an effective strategy especially if you’re selling high-ticket products and you require getting on a call with leads or nurturing them through a different strategy like email marketing.

In a nutshell, you need to generate leads to eventually take them to the bottom of the funnel where you’ll aim to convert them into your customers. 

But the thing is, customers don’t give their contact information easily unless you have something valuable to offer in exchange for their contact details.

For example, as an eCommerce brand, you can offer eBooks related to your niche, or offer a special coupon code or free sample. If you’re a service-based business, you can offer a consultation call or anything depending on what your niche and product/service are.

Here’s an example where Shutterfly offers a free sample kit to attract leads:

You can create a lead generation campaign through Facebook Ads Manager and customers can submit their details within Facebook itself.

You can choose the method of lead generation depending on requirements or the nature of your business. For example, you can simply ask the users to fill in the details with the “Instant Forms” option.

Alternatively, you can also encourage users to initiate a chat with your team through Messenger and then proceed further with the lead based on the chat conversation.

If you’re directly generating leads in the Meta Ads Manager, you can download the leads’ data and move it to your customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage your sales pipeline.

3.2 Use Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing campaigns help nurture your potential customers and move them toward the bottom of the funnel, i.e., the conversion stage.

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing (also known as “retargeting”) is a strategy to target specific potential customers who have already visited your website or interacted with your brand but haven’t made the purchase. 

When potential customers visit your website, a "cookie" is placed on the user’s browser, which can help track them on different social media and other platforms for advertising purposes.

This helps you reach out to the audience who has already interacted with your brand. You can show them the benefits of your product or service and give them a solid reason as to why they should consider purchasing from your brand.

3.3 Keep Your Leads Engaged and Warm Them Up for the Next Stage

When you gather an audience through your initial campaigns, some leads might move through the funnel easily, and convert into your customers. However, some will just keep observing things until they build complete trust.

Apart from explaining to them about the features and benefits, show them social proof to build the trustworthiness and credibility of your brand. Many brands leverage user-generated content (UGC) so well in their Facebook ads because it looks real and sounds authentic.

This Black Feather ad is a great example of UCG-style video content:

Step #4: Run Campaigns for the Bottom of the Funnel (Conversion Stage)

Okay! By now, you have made your potential customers aware of your brand, evoked an interest to buy your product, and built credibility with your content and social proof.

Now, it’s time to hit the main target.

4.1 Prepare Your Custom Audience for Conversion Campaign

Here, you need to make sure that you’re targeting a very specific audience, i.e., your “hot audience” who is highly interested and very likely to buy your product or service.

Create a custom audience of users who have engaged with your content and downloaded your lead magnet. It will increase your chances of conversions.

4.2 Run a Conversion Campaign to a Custom Audience

Now, promote your best offer to them to maximize the chance of converting the hot audience into your actual customers. Also,  to enhance your conversion rates, you may need to use various strategies and tactics such as:

• Offer a discount code
• Use urgency and scarcity tactics
• Offer free shipping
• Write compelling copy to drive action

Here’s an example of the bottom-of-the-funnel Facebook ad where Avon offers up to 65% off and highlights it as a limited-time offer to create urgency:

Step #5: Run Campaigns for the Retention or Repurchase Stage

Don’t consider the job done once the customer has completed a purchase. You need to convert your one-time buyers into repeat buyers or loyal customers.

5.1 Delivery Great Post-Purchase Experience

This isn’t specifically related to ad campaigns but is still an important part of the process. Make sure the customers have a great experience after purchasing your product. If they need help, always be there to resolve their issues.

Delivering a great customer experience will make them more likely to become your brand’s loyal customers and frequent buyers.

Pro tip: Get your new customers in your brand’s “ecosystem” through either a community or a loyalty program. Once they become members of your brand’s program, you won't have to spend on ads for those specific customers.

5.2 Run Upselling & Cross-Selling Campaigns

Once a customer has purchased a certain product or service, they might be interested in buying an upgraded version of that product. 

Upsell such products to bring in repeat sales from such customers. Also, you can run special ad campaigns for cross-selling products, i.e., to sell them other relevant products.

Keep in mind — upselling and cross-selling campaigns don’t necessarily need to be done through Facebook ads only. You can optimize your post-purchase pages for upselling and cross-selling. And then, you can do it through email or SMS marketing as well.

So, when doing it through Facebook ads, be careful about what audience you target for upselling and cross-selling. You may want to exclude the audience that’s already within your reach through email marketing or the members of your community or any other program.

Best Practices for Facebook Ads Funnel:

• Optimize for Mobile

A recent report from Statista shows 97% of US users are accessing Facebook through their mobile phones.

Make sure your ad creatives, website, and landing pages are optimized for mobile users. Follow Meta’s guide to optimize your ad creatives for mobile.

• Research on the Facebook Ad Library

The Facebook ad library is a great resource with a plethora of inspirations to create your ad campaigns. Research brands in your niche and analyze what’s working best for them.

• Run A/B Tests on Facebook Ads

By running A/B tests on your Facebook ads, you can find out which ad set is likely to perform better and you can invest more on it. There are different ways you can run A/B tests on your ads. For example, you can split tests with different creatives, copy, or discount offers.

• Perform A/B Tests on Facebook Landing Pages

Using a dedicated landing page enhances your chances of conversion. The benefit with landing pages is that you can optimize the effectiveness and conversions by testing different variants. 

You can do that by running A/B tests on different versions of your landing page. GemPages not only helps you create these landing pages but also allows you to run A/B tests.

• Use Video Ads

Video ads perform great as it’s an engaging form of content. 30% of the US mobile shoppers said that "video" is the best medium for them when discovering new products.

However, make sure the video is uploaded directly to Facebook/Meta Ads Manager instead of using another platform like YouTube. Just like many other social media platforms, Facebook likes to keep its audience on its own platform.

• Regularly Engage with Your Audience

Don’t use Facebook to just run ad campaigns. You need to build a genuine connection with your customers. To do this, you must engage with your followers or target audience.

When you show care and concern for your audience, it helps you build the trust and credibility of your brand. You can even help the customer by resolving their queries or concerns through direct messages.

• Measure Your Facebook Ads Analytics

You need to be aware of how your campaigns are performing at each stage of the funnel. Measure analytics and key metrics such as:

• Conversion Rate
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
• CPM (Cost Per Mile) - Cost per 1,000 impressions on your ad
• CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Start Building a Robust Facebook Ads Funnel

As of 2023, Facebook had more than THREE BILLION monthly active users.

That’s a gigantic number, isn’t it? 

But what’s important for you is that it shows how huge an opportunity you have to reach a wider audience for your business promotion.

That said, it’s also up to you to make the most out of your investment in Facebook ads. So, when implementing the funnel, keep an eye on any areas of improvement, and take corrective actions as and when needed.

FAQs About Facebook Ads and Funnel