Marketing Funnel Strategy: Stop Optimising the Bottom and Ignoring the Top

A marketing funnel strategy is a framework for guiding potential customers from first awareness of your brand through to conversion and retention, with distinct tactics, messaging, and measurement at each stage. Done well, it connects your media investment to business outcomes rather than just activity metrics. Done poorly, it becomes an excuse to pour budget into the bottom of the funnel while calling it performance marketing.

Most brands have a funnel. Far fewer have a funnel strategy. The difference is whether you’re making deliberate choices about where to invest, who to reach, and what each stage is actually supposed to do for the business.

Why Most Funnel Strategies Are Just Lower-Funnel Tactics With a Diagram

Earlier in my career, I was guilty of this myself. I ran performance channels hard, watched the conversion numbers climb, and reported it upward with confidence. What I didn’t interrogate carefully enough was how much of that conversion activity was genuinely created by our marketing, and how much was simply captured from people who were already going to buy.

Think about how a physical clothes shop works. Someone who walks in and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing the window. But the shop didn’t create that intent by having a good fitting room. The fitting room just converted existing intent. If you want more buyers, you need more people walking through the door in the first place. The fitting room optimisation is real and worth doing, but it has a ceiling. The ceiling is the number of people who already wanted to come in.

Performance marketing, particularly paid search and retargeting, works the same way. It is extraordinarily good at capturing intent that already exists. It is much weaker at generating new intent. When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100 and managing significant media budgets across dozens of client accounts, one of the clearest patterns I saw was brands that had optimised their lower funnel into a corner. Their cost per acquisition looked excellent. Their overall growth had stalled. The pipeline of new, unconverted prospects had quietly dried up because nobody had been feeding it.

If your funnel strategy is mostly retargeting, branded search, and bottom-of-funnel email sequences, you don’t have a funnel strategy. You have a harvesting operation. It will work until it doesn’t, and by then you’ll have underinvested in awareness for long enough that rebuilding takes years, not months.

What a Properly Structured Funnel Actually Looks Like

The classic TOFU, MOFU, BOFU model (top, middle, and bottom of funnel) is a reasonable starting point, and Semrush’s breakdown of the conversion funnel covers the mechanics clearly. The model itself isn’t wrong. The problem is how most organisations apply it.

In practice, a well-structured funnel has three things that most funnels lack: clear stage ownership, stage-appropriate metrics, and an honest assessment of where the biggest constraint actually sits.

Stage ownership means someone is accountable for each part of the funnel and has the budget to do something meaningful at that stage. When awareness is owned by brand, consideration by content, and conversion by performance, and those three teams share neither data nor budget conversations, the funnel is a fiction. It exists on a slide, not in the business.

Stage-appropriate metrics means you are not measuring brand awareness campaigns on last-click conversions. I have sat in more client meetings than I can count where a perfectly well-executed awareness campaign was declared a failure because it didn’t convert at the same rate as a retargeting campaign. That is like judging a recruitment ad by how many people it promoted to manager in week one. The metric has to match the stage.

Identifying the real constraint is the hardest part and the part that gets skipped most often. Before you optimise anything, you need to know where the funnel is actually leaking. Is the problem awareness, meaning not enough people know you exist? Is it consideration, meaning people know you but aren’t engaging? Is it conversion, meaning people are interested but not buying? Or is it retention, meaning you’re winning customers and then losing them? Each of these requires a completely different response. Optimising your checkout flow when your problem is awareness is a waste of time. CRO experts consistently point out that conversion rate optimisation only works when you’re sending the right traffic in the first place.

If you want a deeper look at how conversion thinking fits into the broader funnel, the CRO and Testing hub covers the mechanics of optimising each stage with more granularity than I’ll go into here.

How Attribution Models Distort Funnel Investment Decisions

One of the most corrosive forces in funnel strategy is how attribution models report on performance. Last-click attribution, which most businesses still rely on in some form, systematically rewards the final touchpoint and ignores everything that happened before it. In a multi-stage funnel, that means your upper and mid-funnel activity is perpetually undervalued, and your lower-funnel channels take credit for work they didn’t do.

I’ve watched this play out in budget planning cycles more times than I’d like to admit. A brand runs a significant awareness campaign. Three months later, branded search volume increases and direct traffic rises. The performance team reports strong results. The awareness campaign doesn’t get credit because there’s no clean attribution path. The following year, the awareness budget gets cut and the performance budget increases. Two years later, the brand wonders why their cost per acquisition is climbing and their growth has plateaued.

The honest answer is that attribution models are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. They are built to be measurable, not to be accurate. When you make funnel investment decisions based purely on what your attribution model rewards, you are optimising for what is easy to measure rather than what is actually driving growth.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore attribution data. It means you should read it critically. Look at brand search volume trends, direct traffic patterns, and customer acquisition costs over 12 to 24 month windows, not just last quarter’s last-click numbers. The signal is there if you look for it in the right places.

Building the Upper Funnel: Reach New Audiences or Accept a Growth Ceiling

The upper funnel exists to do one thing: put your brand in front of people who don’t know you yet and give them a reason to care. It is the least measurable part of the funnel and therefore the most frequently underfunded. That’s a predictable consequence of how most marketing teams are structured and measured, but it’s still a strategic mistake.

Reaching new audiences requires a different mindset from conversion optimisation. You are not trying to close a sale. You are trying to create a memory, a frame of reference, a reason for someone to think of you when the need eventually arises. The creative brief is different, the media strategy is different, and the success metrics are different.

When I judged the Effie Awards, the entries that stood out at the upper funnel level were the ones where the brand had a clear point of view and committed to it consistently across time. Not a campaign. A consistent presence. The brands that won effectiveness awards over multiple years weren’t the ones with the cleverest individual executions. They were the ones that had built genuine mental availability in their category through sustained, distinctive communication.

For most businesses, the practical upper-funnel toolkit includes display and video advertising, content marketing designed for discovery rather than conversion, social media presence that builds familiarity rather than chasing clicks, and PR or earned media that reaches audiences you haven’t paid to access. None of these are glamorous. All of them compound over time in ways that are hard to see in a monthly report and impossible to see in a last-click attribution model.

The Middle Funnel: Where Most Brands Leave Money on the Table

If the upper funnel is underfunded, the middle funnel is often simply neglected. There is a gap in most marketing strategies between the awareness-building activity at the top and the conversion-focused activity at the bottom, and that gap is where a lot of potential customers quietly disappear.

The middle funnel is about consideration. Someone knows you exist. They’re not ready to buy yet. What are you doing to stay relevant, build trust, and move them closer to a decision? In most businesses, the honest answer is: not much. They either get retargeted with a conversion ad before they’re ready, or they fall out of the funnel entirely.

Email sequences, lead nurturing programmes, comparison content, case studies, and detailed product or service information all live here. So does the quality of your landing page experience. A weak landing page at the consideration stage doesn’t just fail to convert, it actively damages the trust you’ve spent upper-funnel budget building. Landing page optimisation at the consideration stage is a different discipline from conversion rate optimisation at the bottom of the funnel. The goal is to inform and reassure, not just to remove friction from a transaction.

Behavioural data is genuinely useful here. Tools like heatmapping and session recording can show you where people are engaging, where they’re hesitating, and where they’re leaving. That’s not a conversion optimisation exercise, it’s a diagnostic tool for understanding what’s creating doubt or confusion at the consideration stage. Fix those things and your lower-funnel conversion rates often improve without touching anything at the bottom of the funnel.

Lower Funnel Optimisation: Valuable, But Not a Growth Strategy

I want to be clear: lower-funnel optimisation matters. Reducing friction at the point of purchase, improving your checkout flow, testing your calls to action, and refining your retargeting sequences are all worth doing. Ecommerce CRO in particular can have a meaningful impact on revenue without increasing media spend. That’s real money.

The problem isn’t optimising the lower funnel. The problem is treating lower-funnel optimisation as a substitute for a full funnel strategy. A 15% improvement in conversion rate on a thin pipeline is still a thin pipeline. You’ve improved the efficiency of a constrained system rather than addressing the constraint.

Split testing landing pages and conversion elements is a legitimate discipline with real returns. But it works best when the traffic you’re sending is qualified, the offer is genuinely competitive, and the rest of the funnel has done its job of building awareness and consideration. As Unbounce has pointed out, poor quality traffic will undermine conversion rate optimisation regardless of how well-designed your landing page is. The funnel is a system. Optimising one part of it in isolation produces diminishing returns.

The lower funnel also has a natural ceiling that is set by the upper and middle funnel. If you want to raise that ceiling, you have to invest higher up. There is no shortcut around this. I’ve seen brands try to find one for years.

Measuring Funnel Performance Without Lying to Yourself

Honest measurement is harder than it sounds, particularly when your stakeholders want clean numbers and your attribution model is happy to provide them.

A useful starting point is to build a funnel dashboard that tracks stage-specific metrics rather than just conversion and revenue. At the top of the funnel, you want reach, brand search volume trends, and share of voice where you can measure it. In the middle, engagement rates, time on site, return visitor rates, and lead quality indicators. At the bottom, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and revenue by channel. Across the whole funnel, you want customer lifetime value and payback period, because a strategy that acquires customers cheaply but loses them quickly is not a good strategy.

The CRO playbook approach of working systematically through funnel stages with clear hypotheses and measurable tests is the right methodology. What it needs to be paired with is an honest audit of where your real constraint sits before you decide which stage to test first.

I’d also strongly recommend tracking incrementality where you can. Holdout tests, geo-based experiments, and media mix modelling are all imperfect, but they give you a more honest read on what your marketing is actually causing versus what it’s simply present during. The difference between correlation and causation in marketing measurement is not an academic point. It has real budget implications.

Marketing doesn’t need perfect measurement. It needs honest approximation. The goal is to be directionally right over time, not precisely wrong in the short term.

Connecting the Funnel: The Structural Problem Nobody Talks About

The biggest practical barrier to effective funnel strategy isn’t budget or tools or creative quality. It’s organisational structure. Most marketing teams are set up in ways that actively prevent the funnel from functioning as a system.

Brand teams run awareness campaigns with brand metrics. Content teams produce assets with engagement metrics. Performance teams run paid channels with conversion metrics. These three groups often don’t share data, don’t coordinate messaging, and don’t have a shared view of what a healthy funnel looks like. The result is three separate campaigns with a funnel diagram drawn around them in the quarterly review.

When I was running agencies, the clients who got the best results from their funnel investment were the ones where a single senior person had visibility across all stages and the authority to make trade-off decisions. Not necessarily a CMO with a massive team. Sometimes just a sharp marketing director who understood the whole system and could push back when the performance team wanted to cut brand budget to hit a short-term CPA target.

If you don’t have that person, or that function, the funnel will default to whatever is most measurable. Which is almost always the bottom. Which is almost always a problem.

There’s a lot more to explore on the practical side of connecting funnel stages through testing and optimisation. The conversion optimisation hub covers how to approach this systematically, with specific frameworks for identifying where your funnel is leaking and what to do about it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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