Facebook CBO Blueprints: Full-Funnel Strategy

Let’s be honest, how many times have you made an instant decision to purchase something on Facebook? Chances are, you’ve never done this. People usually browse their Facebook news feed to get updates from their friends or preferred brands, not because they’re champing at the bit to buy sneakers from an unknown brand or even from a known one like Nike.

So how can you, as a brand, get noticed by your target audience on Facebook in the first place, and interest them to such an extent as to encourage them to make a purchase from you as a result?

By creating a Full-Funnel Facebook Advertising Strategy …

While one-time growth hacking campaigns are tempting and may bring quick results, it’s wise to avoid solely relying on them. You should have multiple touchpoints in place to move your cold audiences further down the funnel, nurture them, and eventually convert them into loyal customers. 

How CBO Fits into Funnel Advertising

With Facebook introducing its new Campaign Budget Optimization algorithm, many advertisers became really frustrated with the new playbook and started to wonder how they could adapt their already established strategies. So, if you already had a working Facebook advertising funnel with ad set budget optimizations, how can you adjust it with CBO?

If you are new to CBO, we have prepared an ultimate guide for you – Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization Guide: Facts, Tips, Strategies

Don’t think that Campaign Budget Optimization has come to upset your Facebook advertising funnel applecart. On the contrary, it is perfectly cut out for funnel advertising. Remember the number one CBO best practice?

For example, if you mix a cold interest-based audience with your website’s custom audience that is already familiar with your brand, Facebook will spend the budget where there are more people. As a result, you may end up seeing more of your budget being spent on a prospecting audience, when it might have actually been more valuable to your business to spend it on a remarketing audience. 

So, switching to CBO will ultimately be even more helpful when it comes to setting up your evergreen advertising funnel rather than ruin your plans. 

As a reminder, Facebook has recently abandoned the mandatory shift to Campaign Budget Optimization. CBO is now an option, not a requirement, though Facebook still believes that CBO provides more performance and value gains.

This means that you can stick with ABO with confidence if you are sure that your already established funnel strategy helps you achieve your advertising goals. But if you want to go the extra mile and maximize your ROAS, go ahead and switch to CBO. 

In the next sections, we’ll share with you our proven CBO campaign blueprints based on funnel stages. You’ll get ready-to-use CBO setup outlines for Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel and Bottom of the Funnel stages. Note that these blueprints will work best for Ecommerce businesses.

• CBO Blueprint for the Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

• CBO Blueprint for the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

• CBO Blueprint for the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) 

CBO Blueprint for the Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

At the Top of the Funnel stage, your Facebook advertising goal is to attract new audiences. So, all your advertising components like advertising objectives, targeting strategies, ad formats, ad copies, offers, or CTAs should be grouped together in such a way as to interest complete strangers who have never heard of your brand or visited your website before.   

Here is how to structure your Facebook CBO campaign at the Top of the Funnel stage to get the best results.  

Top of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

Before you even enable Campaign Budget Optimization, your first step is to choose the advertising objective that best resonates with your business goal. By choosing the right objective, you literally tell Facebook what actions you want people to take after they see your ad. 

At the TOFU stage, your main goal is to increase brand awareness, reach as many people as possible, or attract more visitors to your website. See the objectives you can choose:

Top of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is arguably the most significant part of the Campaign Budget Optimization setup as it actually determines the number and types of ad sets within a single CBO. To ensure your CBO works correctly for the prospecting stage, you should consider: 

• Size of audiences 
• Types of audiences
• High/Low value groupings

You should use the following types of Facebook Audiences to attract cold audiences:

• Saved audiences based on interests, demographics, and behaviors
• Lookalike audiences 

Here is how you can structure your CBO for the awareness stage. 

As you can see, ad sets or audiences within a single CBO are related to each other, whether in terms of size or value.

By structuring your CBOs in this way, you ensure that the Facebook algorithm will not distribute your budget towards a larger audience, and as a result, you’ll get accurate results for your prospecting campaign. 

Optimal Ad Formats for TOFU

As your TOFU audience are people who are not yet familiar with your brand, your number one goal at this funnel stage is to grab their attention. Your ad formats should be eye-catching with some kind of action and a story-telling aspect to them.

With your awareness stage ads you should be able to address users’ problems and offer them a solution, while also casually highlighting the benefits of your product.

It’s important to avoid taking a hard-sell approach and directly pushing your product features at this stage. The following are the best ad formats to use:

• Video ads
• Image ads 
• Collection ads 
• Instant Experience ads 

Best Offers at the Top of the Funnel Stage

At TOFU stage you can’t jump the gun and suggest that complete strangers purchase your product.

As such, avoid any discount ads, hard sales, or any promotion of your new product line; instead, grab users’ attention with a quick text about or video introduction to your brand concept or any kind of educational content/helping guide that’s indirectly connected with your product.

In short, your offer should be anything that doesn’t require the user to make any commitment. Here are some possible options:

• Read a blog post or guide 
• View an introductory video of your brand
• Visit your website
• Check out your product page 

Best CTAs at the TOFU Stage

• Learn More  
• Watch More 
• Listen Now 
• See Menu

CBO Blueprint for the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) 

At the middle of the funnel stage, your goal is to identify those people who have engaged with your offer to some degree at the previous funnel stage, nurture them further, and convert them into leads.

Your MOFU audience is already familiar with your brand, but is not yet ready to purchase from you – they are still evaluating, and need more information to make an informed decision.

It is at this stage that your prospects may add an item to their wishlist, subscribe to a newsletter, send a message, download an industry report in return for their email address, or request a free product sample. See below how to run a CBO campaign at the MOFU stage.   

Middle of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

At MOFU stage, your main goal is to engage and nurture your audience further, whether by driving traffic to a product page, offering downloadable content, or showing how your products can benefit your audience. Here are the objectives you can choose from: 

• Traffic 
• Lead Generation
• Messages
• Conversions

Middle of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

To target your middle of the funnel audience, you should already have Facebook pixels installed for your most important events. As such, the main audience type you should use at this stage is Custom Audiences. 

When setting up CBO campaigns for MOFU, the audience type/size rule becomes even more important. Your video viewers don’t have the same value as those who have provided their email addresses, even though both audiences are interested in your product.

So, to get accurate results, group audiences of a similar size and value under separate CBOs. See some possible CBO groupings for the middle of the funnel stage. 

Optimal Ad Formats for MOFU

Since your MOFU audiences already know about your brand, you don’t need any complex ad types here.

You should be focusing on what makes you different from your competition, what makes your products unique, and how to use them in real life. These ad formats have been proven to work best:

• Image ads
• Video Ads 
• Carousel Ads

Best Offers at the Middle of the Funnel Stage

Your MOFU offers should be more tangible, present the use cases of the products, offer free samples in exchange for an email address or phone number, and describe the features of your product as well as the benefits and advantages it offers over your competitors, whether through a video or a whitepaper.

In a nutshell, your mission is to prove to your potential customers that your product can effectively solve their problem better than others. 

Best offers at this stage:

• Product use case videos 
• Product Descriptions
• Downloadable ebooks, guides, whitepapers, etc.
• Free product samples 
• Free demos/free trials (in case you offer a SaaS product)

Best CTAs at the MOFU Stage

• Download
• Subscribe
• Sign Up
• Apply Now
• Book Now
• Get Offer
• Get Quote

CBO Blueprint for the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) 

So, you have attracted complete strangers, got them interested in your product, and created a relationship with them. Now what? It’s time for direct selling.

At the bottom of the funnel stage, you are targeting those people who are literally just a step away from making a purchase from you. All you need to do is add the finishing touches and convert your most interested leads into paying customers.

People who have abandoned shopping carts, those who have tried your product free samples and left positive reviews, or those who regularly view your product pages and add items to their wish list are definitely your future customers. They just need an additional proof of trust to go ahead and purchase from you.

Bottom of the funnel CBO campaign objectives

Your main goal at the BOFU is to convert your leads into paying customers. That’s why campaign objectives should be related to direct sales.

• Conversions
• Catalogue Sales
• Store Traffic

Bottom of the Funnel CBO Audience Targeting

You should select the most valuable audiences from the previous two stages and retarget them by using custom audiences.

While grouping ad sets within CBOs, again try to find groupings that are somehow similar in size and value so that Facebook spends your budget fairly. This is the CBO structure we offer for the BOFU stage:

Optimal Ad Formats for BOFU

At BOFU stage, you are seeking to display your products and brand reputation in the best light. These are some optimal ad formats to choose from:

• Image Ads
• Video Ads
• Carousel Ads
• Dynamic Product Ads 

Best Offers at the Bottom of the Funnel Stage

So far you’ve been warming up your audience by educating and guiding them or providing them with free stuff to try before they buy. But now it’s time to push hard sales whether by offering prospects a discount or simply highlighting your product value proposition. 

Some of the best offers at BOFU:

• Discount Ads
• Special Deals
• New line of products
• Testimonial Videos
• Limited Time Offers
• Competitive Price Offers
• Ads accenting free delivery, money back guarantee, etc.

Best CTAs at the BOFU Stage

• Shop Now
• Sign Up
• Get Offer
• Get Quote 
• Subscribe