How to Avoid Stinky TOFU Ads

In this week’s newsletter, I write about how EdTechs can drive Top-Of-Funnel paid traffic that smells like flowers.

Do you see your TOFU ads driving traffic, but little movement toward MOFU?

Maybe your top-of-funnel ads are just fine, but the ad platforms stink.

The BIG PROBLEM for us, advertisers, is the blind trust (or at least near-sighted) we put on ad platforms.

We drive paid top-of-funnel traffic through social media and, these days, we tend to overtrust AI and algorithms.

Especially with Facebook, there’s this myth that “the algorithm is smarter than us” and will get us the best traffic.

No, it’s not and it won’t. Much less for top-of-funnel ads, where there aren’t usually many parameters to define a “conversion”.

The cost of not acting is huge:

Wasted time

Have you ever thought “God! So much time wasted on this!” after you found that your problem could’ve been solved right from the start?

I know I have.

The worst: there’s no replacement for wasted time.

Wasted budget

Wasting budget bothers me, a lot. So much could’ve been done with that budget.

Reputation and internal relationships are affected

At some point that wasted time and budget won’t sit right with someone.

Then things can get ugly. Decision makers will want to:

  • change strategy and tactics

  • move budgets around

  • press for short-term bottom-of-funnel results

And then…

Even your confidence is affected

I know I’ve been there. You probably have too. Not a good place to be.

That’s why I trust hard data, not obscure algorithms.

Because of this approach, I also track what happens after the click.

The Fragrant TOFU Method

You will feel sooo much better if you do this.

❝

“Trust, but Verify”

Ronald Reagan

The way to improve your analysis of your ads is by:

  1. Never blindly trust ad platforms

  2. Track creatives

  3. Test creatives

  4. Track creatives formats

What you’ll want to track, you ask?

Track Landing Page Engagement

Engagement comes in multiple forms.

  • Time spent on the page

  • Scroll depth

  • Clicks on elements

  • Starting a form (and not completing)

  • Submitting a form

  • Moving to a next page

And tracking these engagements give you further benefits:

Custom audiences

You’re able to create audiences of people who engaged with your landing page. You’re able to even create lookalike audiences from them.

Retarget Efficiently

Instead of retargeting everyone who landed on your landing pages, you will:

  1. Retarget people who engaged

  2. Remove these people from your TOFU campaigns

Inspiration for MOFU Ads

Now that you know the ads that most engaged your audience, you can use them as the basis for your middle-of-funnel ads and landing pages.

But ok.

Enough of painting the picture. Here’s how you do it step-by-step:

1. Create an exploration in GA4

In GA4, custom reports are called Explorations.

2. Select dimensions, metrics, and filters

Import the information you might want to use, by clicking on the “+” signs.

In GA4:

Dimensions are data in text or date/time format.

Metrics are data in number format.

List of DIMENSIONS

Session source / medium

Session campaign

Session manual ad content

Landing page + query string

Percent scrolled

List of METRICS

Sessions

Engagement rate

Engaged sessions

Average engagement time per session

Search for the names, select them, and click “Import”.

Add the dimensions to ROWS.

Add the metrics to VALUES.

FILTER by the dimensions and metrics you imported.

Usually, a “Contains” condition is enough. But if you’re feeling fancy, you can use Regular Expressions.

Just select the “matches regex” condition.

This way you can filter multiple source / medium for example:

(facebook|linkedin) / (cpc|ppc|paid)

Use parenthesis for groups and the pipe symbol as a replacement for “or”.

Then you will read (facebook|linkedin) / (cpc|ppc|paid) as facebook or linkedin space forward-slash space cpc or ppc or paid.

And there you have it: a report with your ad creatives and the engagement they brought to your website.

What if the “ad content” dimension is empty?

Then you need to ad a UTM parameter to the URLs in your ads.

Follow the pattern:

https://yourwebsite.com/yourlandingpage?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=your-campagin-name&utm_content=your-ad-creative-name

3. Analyse

Unfortunately, GA4 doesn’t let you order the report by dimensions, but you can order by metrics or you can always export to Excel or Google Sheets to do further analysis.

What you want to find are the best compound effects of:

CTR, CPC, CPM

and

Engagement rate or Engaged sessions

Maybe this way, your TOFU will be more fragrant.

DO YOU NEED

  • a leader for your marketing team?

  • a hand to help you form a marketing team?

  • or someone to create and execute your marketing strategy?

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