A full-funnel ecommerce setup is easy to put on a media plan and hard to keep in an ad account. Google and Meta each hand you one automated campaign type that claims to cover every stage, and each will spend most of your budget at the bottom of the funnel, because that is where conversions are cheapest.
Which means the work is not adding a campaign per stage. It is deciding what you exclude from the automated campaigns and what you fund upstream on purpose, because the bidder will not go up there on its own.
Black Friday is November 27. If you want this to affect it, you should start this now.
Why Automated Campaigns Concentrate At The Bottom
Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns are both sold as covering the whole funnel. In a narrow sense that is fair. They serve across surfaces and reach people at different stages.
But both are bidding toward a conversion target, and a conversion from someone who has visited your site three times costs a fraction of a conversion from someone who has never heard of you. Give any bidder a single efficiency target and no other instruction, and it will buy the cheap conversions first. That is not a malfunction. It is the system doing what it is supposed to do.
Those bottom-funnel conversions are real and of course you should be buying them. That’s not the problem. It is that when the automated campaigns absorb the whole budget, nothing funds the top, so the account competes for demand that already exists instead of creating more of it. Which raises the obvious question, what is driving awareness for the brand?
Blended efficiency will not flag any of this. It reports roughly the same figure whether you grew the customer base or harvested it, which is how this runs for several quarters without anyone naming it. Then you’re in Q4, you push more budget into the same campaigns, and the extra money buys more of the same people at worse prices.
I wrote earlier this year about pairing Performance Max with Standard Shopping to keep some control over where budget lands. This is the same argument across both platforms at the account level.
See also: PPC Automation Layering: How Smart Advertisers Combine Automation With Strategy
Meta Removed Its Only Full-Funnel Lever
This is the change most ecommerce advertisers have not adjusted to, and it is why the October work matters more this year than last.
Advantage+ Shopping campaigns used to include an Existing Customer Budget Cap. You set a percentage and Meta held spend on existing customers below it. It was the most useful full-funnel control Meta ever shipped for ecommerce and it took no structural work at all.
Now that it’s gone, Meta’s Help Center lists the feature as no longer available, with a note that you can still do the same thing manually. Advantage+ Shopping has itself been folded into Advantage+ Sales campaigns, which brought ad sets back and added custom audience exclusions.
The capability still exists. Meta moved the work out of a settings field and onto you to manage it.
How To Rebuild The Existing Customer Cap
Meta’s documentation describes two ways to replicate it, and they suit different account sizes.
The simple version is one manual sales campaign that excludes custom audiences representing your existing customers. That is the equivalent of the old cap set to zero percent. Everything in that campaign is prospecting by definition.
The version we use on larger accounts is two ad sets. One targets existing customers and one targets broadly with those customers excluded. If you are running Advantage+ campaign budget, apply ad set spending limits to hold the split where you want it. That gives you the percentage control back and adds something the old cap never allowed, which is running different creative to each group.
The reason most people have not done this yet is that nothing visibly broke when the cap disappeared. Campaigns kept running and ROAS kept reporting fine. The structure just quietly stopped being a full funnel.
Google Gives You The Lever, Switched Off
Google’s equivalent control is the new customer acquisition goal, and its problem is the reverse of Meta’s. It exists, it works, and plenty of accounts never turn it on.
According to Google Ads Help, the goal runs in two modes. The first bids higher for new customers while still serving existing ones and the second serves new customers only. It’s available on Performance Max, Search, and Demand Gen campaigns, which between them cover most of what an ecommerce account runs.
How Google identifies a new customer is what decides whether it works or not. It uses either your past online purchase conversion history or existing customer lists you share through Customer Match and label in the acquisition panel of your conversions summary.
Left on conversion history alone, it works from whatever purchase data happens to live in the account, which on many sites is partial. Give it a real Customer Match list of your actual buyers and it gets better. This is the highest-value part of what you’re reading and people usually skip it because it requires someone to export a customer file.
One constraint to know is that Google’s documentation notes that Performance Max campaigns for store goals are only compatible with the new customers only mode. If you run store goals, the bid-higher option is not available to you.
See also: Google’s Push For Data Strength Is Really A Push For Better Bidding
Which New Customer Mode To Pick
Bid higher for new customers is where we start on almost every account. It shifts the weighting while keeping campaign volume intact, so you are not making a bet the account cannot absorb in a quarter where volume matters.
New customers only belongs on a campaign you have deliberately carved out as a prospecting vehicle, funded separately, and agreed to judge on different numbers than your harvest campaigns. Point it at your main revenue driver in October and you will spend the rest of the quarter explaining the ROAS chart.
Exclusions Are The Real Full-Funnel Control
Both of those tactics are the same idea, just using different platforms. You aren’t adding funnel stages. You are taking the cheap conversions off the table inside specific campaigns, so that budget has somewhere else to go.
The exclusion list that does most of the work in an ecommerce account is short:
- Purchasers in the last 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on your repurchase cycle.
- Your full customer file, uploaded, and refreshed rather than uploaded once in 2024.
- Cart abandoners, if you run a separate flow for them, so two campaigns are not bidding on the same person.
- Brand terms, kept out of the campaigns you are judging on new customer acquisition.
What To Do About Brand Terms
That last one causes more arguments than the rest combined, so let me be clear, I am not saying brand traffic is free money you would have collected anyway. If a competitor is bidding on your brand and you are not, you can lose that sale. That happens, it is measurable, and brands tend to learn it expensively. Be defensive and buy your brand terms just to make sure you don’t miss out on those easy revenue opportunities.
The argument is not about whether brand is worth buying. It is that brand is a different job with different economics. It converts beautifully, which means any campaign it touches looks excellent, and once it is folded into a campaign you are judging on new customer acquisition you can no longer read either job clearly. Keep buying brand. Keep it in its own campaign so your prospecting numbers are telling you something about prospecting.
Why This Work Has To Happen Now
There is a reason I am writing this now. Upper-funnel spend takes roughly six to eight weeks before it impacts revenue. People who meet your brand for the first time in October make up a meaningful share of your November buyers. People who meet you for the first time on November 20 are mostly just expensive.
That is my observation across the accounts we work in, not a published benchmark, and your own lag depends on price point and consideration cycle. A $40 consumable moves faster than a $3,000 mattress. Pull your own time to conversion data before you take my range as gospel.
What holds up across the accounts we run is the sequence of events. Prospecting funded in October pays out during Q4. Prospecting funded during Q4 mostly pays out in January, at holiday prices, which is the worst version of the trade.
The corollary matters just as much. If you cut prospecting in November because the ROAS looks soft next to your harvest campaigns, you have not saved money. You have moved your December problem forward and called it efficiency.
The October Checklist
If you do nothing else this month, do these five things in this order:
- Export your customer file and upload it as a Customer Match list. Label it in the acquisition panel of your conversions summary so Google can use it.
- Turn on the new customer acquisition goal in bid-higher mode on your Performance Max campaigns.
- Rebuild the existing customer cap on Meta using the two ad set structure with spending limits.
- Audit your exclusions across both platforms. Most accounts have stale lists and at least one campaign nobody remembers building.
- Set your prospecting budget as a fixed number rather than a percentage of whatever is left over. Percentages get cut first when Q4 gets tense.
None of this is difficult, it’s just work that everyone wants to put off. Next thing you know, it’s December and you realize how big of a mistake you made by not doing it sooner.
What I Would Not Do Right Now
Do not restructure your account in the last two weeks before Black Friday. Whatever you gain in theoretical structure you give back in learning. If you are reading this in mid-November, hold what you have and fix it in January.
Do not push everything into new customers only mode at once because an article told you prospecting matters. Move the weighting, watch two weeks, move it again.
And do not judge upstream campaigns on last-click ROAS. That’s a separate conversation about measurement, and I am deliberately not having it here, because it is the argument that swallows every full-funnel discussion and leaves the actual account untouched. Get the structure right in October. Argue about attribution in January, when you have both the data and the time.
Where To Start This Week
A full-funnel ecommerce account is not a diagram on a media plan. It is a set of exclusions, a customer list somebody actually keeps current, and a prospecting budget that survives contact with a nervous November. That prospecting line is your awareness budget whether anyone in the room calls it that or not, and no automated campaign is going to fund it for you. Google and Meta have both spent the last two years moving those controls out of settings fields and into work you have to do yourself, and Meta retiring the Existing Customer Budget Cap is the clearest example to date.
Pick one item off the checklist and do it this week. If you only have time for one, upload the customer list, because everything else works better once both platforms know who your customers already are.
Key Takeaways
- Automated campaigns concentrate spend where conversions are cheapest, which is the bottom of the funnel. Those sales are worth buying. The problem is that nothing is left funding the top.
- Meta retired the Existing Customer Budget Cap, so holding budget on new customers now takes campaign structure and exclusions you build yourself.
- Google’s new customer acquisition goal does the same job, but it is off by default and it works better on a Customer Match list than on conversion history alone.
- Upper-funnel money has to go in before Q4, not during. October is the last month it can affect November revenue.
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