Setting the right budget for your paid media campaigns can be tricky, especially if you’re aiming for a full-funnel strategy. With so many customer touch points to consider, it’s easy to default to spending most of your budget on bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) efforts that focus on immediate conversions.
But here’s the catch: putting all your money into conversions can stunt your long-term growth.
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A Better Approach: Invest Across the Entire Funnel
To get the best results, your budget should support each stage of the customer journey:
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Top of Funnel (TOFU): Raise awareness and attract new audiences with discovery ads, video content, and display campaigns.
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Middle of Funnel (MOFU): Nurture interest with retargeting, testimonials, product highlights, and comparison ads.
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Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): Drive action through high-intent search ads, re-marketing, and special offers.
If you only focus on the BOFU stage, you’re missing opportunities to bring in fresh leads and build relationships with future buyers.
Channel Matters: Social vs. Search
Your return on investment (ROI) also depends heavily on the channels you choose. For example:
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Paid social (like Instagram or Facebook) is often more effective for awareness and engagement.
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Paid search (like Google Ads) typically performs better for capturing demand at the point of conversion.
Aligning your channel strategy with each funnel stage, and adjusting your budget accordingly, is crucial to getting the most from your spend.
Why This Guide Exists
As a leading marketing agency, we know how challenging it can be to strike the right balance, between short-term wins and long-term growth, and across different platforms and strategies.
That’s why we’ve created this guide: to share our expert tips and proven strategies for budgeting smarter across the full funnel in your paid media campaigns.
Understanding Full Funnel Paid Media Marketing
Before diving into marketing budget calculations, it’s important to understand why allocating a meaningful portion of your budget to full-funnel paid media is essential.
A full-funnel marketing strategy isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a proven approach to boosting brand awareness, increasing engagement, and ultimately driving more conversions. As customer journeys become more fragmented and complex, it’s no longer enough to focus solely on the moment of purchase. Brands must stay present throughout the entire decision-making process to remain competitive.
And the numbers back this up. According to a Nielsen meta-analysis shared by Google, companies that implement full-funnel strategies see, on average, a 45% higher return on investment (ROI) compared to those that don’t.
Why Full-Funnel Marketing Matters
With a full-funnel approach, you’re not just targeting customers at a single moment in time, you’re guiding them through every stage of their purchasing journey, from discovery to decision. Here’s how it breaks down:
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Awareness Stage
At this stage, your goal is to make your target audience aware of your brand. This often involves discovery campaigns, display advertising, video content, and educational resources that introduce your brand’s value and positioning. The objective is visibility and reach. -
Consideration Stage
Once a prospect knows who you are, the focus shifts to building trust and demonstrating value. This might include targeted social media campaigns, product comparison ads, customer reviews, retargeting, and feature-focused messaging. You’re answering the question, “Why should I choose you?” -
Conversion Stage
Here, the goal is action, encouraging the customer to purchase, sign up, or reach out. High-performing tactics include branded search campaigns, remarketing, shopping ads, and promotional offers designed to eliminate friction and drive results.
Why Paid Media Marketing for Full Funnel Campaigns?
So, why rely on paid media? The simple answer is that paid advertising delivers quicker results, and gives you more options to specifically target the right audience. You’ve probably noticed that all of the top paid advertising solutions, from Google Ads to Meta, offer access to advanced targeting tools that ensure you can pinpoint the right audience based on your customer profiles.
While you can implement some targeting methods with organic marketing (like keyword research for search engine optimisation campaigns). Paid media ensures you can be granular with your approach.
Plus, it gives you access to more valuable data you can use to guide your future marketing decisions. In a time when Google is phasing out third-party cookies, full-funnel paid marketing gives you a way to acquire data from a range of different campaigns and channels.
Defining your Marketing Budget for Full-Funnel Paid Media
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, budgeting for full-funnel paid media is a multifaceted decision. But here’s how to start making sense of it.
Step 1: Define Your Paid Media Budget
First, consider how much of your overall marketing budget you’re allocating to paid media.
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Meta recommends dedicating 20–30% of your platform budget to full-funnel paid campaigns.
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Deloitte’s research suggests companies are investing even more. On average, 57.9% of total marketing budgets go to digital marketing, and 44% of that is spent on paid media.
This gives you a useful starting point, but the key challenge isn’t just how much to spend. It’s also about how you allocate that spend across the funnel.
Step 2: Allocate Budget Across the Funnel
This is where things can get complicated.
It’s common to assume most of your budget should go toward the decision or conversion stage, the bottom of the funnel, where the goal is to close sales. But that’s not always the most effective approach.
A study by Fospha revealed that top-performing brands often do the opposite:
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Only 10% of their budget goes to the bottom of the funnel
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While 25% is dedicated to awareness and consideration (top and middle of the funnel)
This suggests that investing in the early stages of the customer journey, where you build awareness and nurture interest, can yield better long-term results.
So, How Should You Break It Down?
A good rule of thumb is to start with a flexible budget framework based on your business goals, customer journey length, and current funnel performance. Then, refine it using data and testing over time.
Allocating Your Marketing Budget: Top Tips
Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to success here. That’s why, at the Graygency we work with our customers to define their ideal budget strategy based on their specific goals, and the results of previous campaigns. Still, there are a few things you can keep in mind while you’re planning, that could help you to make more lucrative decisions.
Identify your Priorities First
First, you’ll need to think about what you want to accomplish in the near future. Yes, your overall goal might be to generate sales, but you won’t be able to accomplish that if you haven’t built awareness for your brand, and earned the trust of your audience first.
Many newer businesses and startups will often benefit more from investing additional money into the “brand building” and awareness stages of the funnel, at least to begin with.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that your full funnel marketing priorities may change throughout the year. If you’re expecting to launch a new product, for instance, your focus will need to be on generating awareness, not convincing customers to buy a solution before it’s even available.
2. Use Your Existing Data
One of the most challenging parts of optimising your budget for full-funnel paid media is that you’ll likely need to use a variety of different channels. At The Graygency, we often recommend putting the majority of your budget into traffic and reach campaigns on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
These channels reach billions of users globally and offer powerful targeting options to connect with buyers most likely to benefit from your brand.
As customers move further down the funnel, you may need to shift to different platforms. For example, Google paid ads are especially effective at the end of the funnel, helping you reach users who are actively searching and ready to convert.
If you’re testing a new mix of platforms, a good rule of thumb is the 70-20-10 budget model:
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70% on proven channels
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20% on promising channels you believe will perform
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10% on experimental platforms or ideas
Know Which Platforms to Use
One of the most challenging things about optimising your budget for full funnel paid media advertising, is that you’ll probably need to use a variety of different channels. At the Graygency, we often recommend investing the majority of your budget in traffic and reach campaigns on Meta channels like Facebook and Instagram.
After all, these platforms reach billions of customers worldwide, and give you an exceptional opportunity to target specific buyers, with the most potential to benefit your brand.
At other points on the funnel, you might switch to different channels. Google paid ads can be particularly valuable for “end of funnel” conversions, as they help you to target customers with purchasing intent (those who have already moved through most of the funnel).
If you’re experimenting with a new platform mix, the key to success is usually a 70-20-10 distribution ratio. This means spending 70% of your budget on proven channels that you know will deliver results, 20% on channels you expect to deliver results, and 10% on more experimental ideas.
Leave Room for Adjustment
The beauty and challenge of paid media marketing campaigns is that there’s always space for surprises to emerge. You don’t know a campaign on Instagram is going to go viral before it does. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a dynamic approach to your marketing budget.
Don’t set your budget allocation in stone too early. Work with your marketing team to make changes based on actual performance metrics and newly occurring patterns. Consistently track the results of every marketing effort, and make tweaks over time.
Leaving some space in your marketing budget for agile adaptation will ensure you can respond quickly to new opportunities as they emerge.
Mastering Full Funnel Paid Media Marketing Budgets
Choosing the right marketing budget for your paid media strategy, and allocating your finances effectively to each stage of the funnel isn’t easy. There are numerous factors that can come into play when you’re making your decisions, from your goals to your target audience.
In general, we recommend at least investing 30% of your platform budget to upper funnel activity, focusing heavily on traffic and reach campaigns on Meta & TikTok platforms.
However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why we work with our clients to determine the best approach for their needs, and adapt iteratively based on real-time data.
If you’re struggling to make the most of your paid media marketing budget, and want to optimize your funnel with data driven insights, the Graygency can help. Contact us today for insights into the support we can offer with planning, strategy, and marketing implementation.
