How to Start Your First Full-Funnel Ad Campaign
When starting up your first campaign with FieldTest, you’ll likely have a lot of questions. Marketing is part art, part science and if you’re new to the world it can be a challenge getting up to speed with what is expected of you, and what you can expect from it. If this is your first campaign the answers to these questions might look a little different than if you’re already an experienced marketer with several campaigns under your belt, but generally speaking your campaigns will serve one of three functions: To drive traffic to your site, to collect useful information on your consumer base and, ultimately, to make sales.
All three of these functions operate in tandem with one another, each one helping the next. There’s a reason the term ‘funnel’ gets used for this, and it’s not just because it makes for a fun visual!
When customers engage with your brand in the awareness stage, they begin to travel down the funnel, where they reach the consideration stage and eventually are pushed to convert. Each of these stages will require some setup, but once they’re in place you can begin to shift your priorities away from the dirty work of campaign setup and towards the fine art of optimization and experimentation! This blog post will walk you through that initial work to get your campaigns set up in a way that is effective at every stage of the marketing funnel. Let’s begin where all effective campaigns on FieldTest must, the installation of our data tracking pixel.
First steps: Install your FieldTest Pixels
Customer data is of utmost importance in digital marketing, and it is never more important than in the first several days and weeks of your marketing campaigns. If you’ve never run a marketing campaign before or if you haven’t found much success in past efforts you can find yourself having to rely on intuition and guesswork, and while these can be based on informed understandings of your brand they are nowhere near as reliable as cold, hard data.
How do you collect that data? Simple! When you start your first campaign with FieldTest, we automatically generate a snippet of code just for you that will act as a “net” to catch the data of everyone who visits your site. We will use this data for a myriad of fun advanced techniques later down the funnel, but for now your primary goal is collecting insights about who is engaging with your brand. You’ll be using these insights to prove out or challenge those foundational assumptions and intuitions you have about your customers and eventually begin to expand your reach into new markets.
Here’s how to install your FieldTest pixels:
Sign up and login to FieldTest here
If this is your first time logging into FieldTest, you will be prompted with your custom pixel in a pop-up window. If you have logged in before, click Pixels on the left sidebar, this will take you to the pixels page.
Simply copy the pixel as provided and paste it into the header (above the <head> tag) on every page of your website. Typically this is done by editing your header template or your theme document. For example, for Shopify users, this is found under "theme.liquid". For Squarespace users this is found under Settings>Advanced>Code Injections.
Note: You can click or tap the "Download" button to download a simple text document with the tag, or the "Email" button to email the tag to your site admin or developer. If you need additional help placing your pixel, please contact support@fieldtest.la.
Once the pixel is placed, after five or so "hits" (or site visits) the Tracking Pixel will activate, and this page will begin displaying a simple graph of daily hits to your website. Clicking the "Show Pixel" button underneath this graph will display your live pixel code if needed.
Once your pixel is implemented and active, it's time to setup your Purchase Pixel.
The Purchase Pixel tracks sales, fires "conversions" in your FieldTest reporting, and allows you to view the order ID numbers and revenue from each sale driven by your ad campaigns. It's super important, in that it allows you to see your sales and order from FieldTest campaigns. It’s also super easy to install. However, the pixel code changes depending on which website platform you need, so make sure you follow these instructions carefully!
From the FieldTest platform, click Pixels on the left sidebar, this will take you to the pixels page.
Navigate to Purchase Pixel, which will be just below Tracking Pixel. Select the platform you use to create or host your website. Once again we will generate your custom pixel. Simply copy this code and paste it onto your checkout confirmation page (the "thank you", receipt page that appears to a user after a successful sale). Typically this code can be placed in a "Checkout" or "Conversion Tracking" section of your platform, but each setup is different and in some cases unique.
Note: You can click or tap the "Download" button to download a simple text document with the tag, or the "Email" button to email the tag to your site admin or developer. If you need additional help placing your pixel, please contact support@fieldtest.la.
Once your Purchase Pixel has been placed, either do a test purchase on your website, or wait for an organic sale to occur, at which point you'll be looking for three "Active" green lights to appear within your Purchase Pixel field. One for the general pixel placement, located at the top right of the "Total" Hits indicator, and two for your macros, one for each "pass-back": Order ID, and Purchase Value.
Once these indicators are all green your pixels are set up properly and you’re ready to move on. If you have any questions give us a shout at support@fieldtest.la.
Awareness: Get the word out and begin driving traffic
How many times have you been driving on the freeway and seen a billboard for a pair of shoes that made you think “I should really look those up”? Or how about one for a soda brand that you’ve already enjoyed a hundred times before that made you go “I could really go for a cold one right now”? In those moments, you just engaged with awareness level marketing. Now, imagine you get to put up a billboard on a freeway that is only driven by people interested in your product. That’s awareness marketing with FieldTest.
We’ve written a lot about what the awareness stage is and how you should create and manage your ad creative to reach your customers here. The goal at this stage is to get the word out about your brand and your products and begin to drive traffic to your site. Your relationship with your customers begins when they see your ad in the sidebar of their daily browsing, subtly introducing your brand to them and planting seeds of what will come.
This moment is one of the most important in the whole customer journey down-funnel - it’s your chance to make a ‘first impression’.
We track these ‘first impressions’ with, you guessed it, the Impressions tab on your FieldTest dashboard. This metric is an extremely important indicator of campaign success in the early days of your marketing, each one has the very real potential to be your next brand loyalist.
Of course the ultimate goal of this phase is to drive traffic to your site, so you should also keep an eye on your Clicks, Visits, and Cost Per Click metrics within your campaign dashboard. These together will give you a good idea of how effectively you are ‘converting’ those first impressions into interested customers. Think of your ‘Impression’ metric as the first eye contact shared across the room with your customer - and a ‘Click’ is your customer walking over to introduce themself.
Here’s how to set up you first awareness campaign:
Login to FieldTest here
Click ‘New Campaign’ in the top right corner. This will start a new blank campaign. Like all campaigns, we recommend naming this something that will make it recognizable at a glance (ie. Awareness- Q2, 2022)
Load your awareness ads into this campaign. Read our creative guide here for additional creative guidance in this stage
Build your audience targeting, starting with the Age tab. We often recommend leaving this set to All Ages unless you are advertising an age restricted product.
Set your gender targeting. Again, we recommend starting by targeting all. Remember, even if you are selling a product marketed for men, women may be interested in it for gifting, etc. and vice versa. Use your own intuition about your product here.
Select the locations you would like to target. If you are promoting a product online this is best left to the entire US. Remember, part of the goal here is to learn new things about your audience and top geos can be one of the most surprising. If you are promoting a local offer or brick and mortar location then set this to only the appropriate DMAs.
If applicable, select a FieldTest Premium Audience. These are highly optimized audiences built using our own expertise and experience and are a great way to jump start your campaigns for applicable products. If these audiences do not seem relevant, not to worry, just skip to the next step.
Select the Target People Interested In tab and search for applicable interests. Again, trust your intuition about your product but try to keep it as broad as possible. This stage is all about discovering new information about your customers. For example, if you sell CBD face cream, instead of targeting topical intenders pick a larger health and beauty segment. Tip: These segments are additive so if you are on a limited budget ie <$5,000/month then try to keep this under 1-3 million total.
Set your schedule and budget to what you are comfortable with. In general we recommend you allocate around 40-50% of your total budget here to start, particularly if this is your first campaign.
Congrats, your awareness campaign is set up and ready to go! You’ll now begin to see your impressions rise as your future customers begin to become aware of your brand. Not only that, but you’ve just taken the most important step towards building an effective down-funnel ad campaign - you’ve begun sending traffic to your website. Each site visitor will help make your mid and lower funnel campaigns run effectively and convert your interested intenders into loyal customers. Now, let’s talk about how to make that happen.
Consideration: Set yourself apart and expand your reach
Once your awareness marketing is in place you’ll find a lot of things become very clear. You’ll discover which ads work and which ones don’t, which headlines effectively drive traffic and which ones just eat up your budget. We’ll discuss the process of fine-tuning and optimizing your campaigns in a later entry, but the important thing to remember is that your awareness level marketing exists in order to fuel the lower funnel stages, to give them the valuable data they need to operate effectively and for any extended period of time.
The consideration phase stands in the middle of your marketing funnel and acts as a place to continue the conversation with your customer after they’ve expressed. Practically, this means offering details about your product that will convince them that it is better than the competition. Focus your creative and headlines on the things that set your brand apart and choose ad formats that will keep costs low and delivery high (read more about which ads meet that criteria here).
Of course with FieldTest your mid-funnel serves another, very important purpose. In this stage, your data from the upper funnel will be used to build Lookalikes, powerful algorithmically generated audiences that unlock based on your top of funnel performance. Setting these up within a campaign is simple, as we’ll cover in just a moment, but cannot be done until a certain threshold for traffic is reached. The setup process goes as follows:
Here’s how to set up your consideration campaigns:
Reach the required traffic threshold: In order to create an optimized LAL, you’ll need to hit a traffic threshold that provides enough data. This is done through prospecting, covered in the last segment. Once your threshold is reached, you’ll notice your ‘Pixel Audiences’ menu is populated with Lookalikes
Click ‘New Campaign’ to start a new consideration campaign. Like all campaigns, we recommend naming this something that will make it recognizable at a glance (ie. Consideration - Q2, 2022)
Load your consideration ads into this campaign. Read our consideration guide here for additional creative guidance in this stage
Navigate to the Target Audience section of your campaign builder and pull down the My Pixel Audiences dropdown menu. Select the Lookalike Intent audience you’d like to target. ** You’ll notice the rest of your interest targeting options disappear when this is selected, that’s because LALs make additonal interest targeting obsolete - those decisions are made automatically based on upper funnel campaign performance. **
Set your budget and spend to what you are comfortable with. In general we recommend you allocate around 30% of your total budget here to start
That’s it! You’ve set up your consideration campaign. This will not only help convince the people from your top of funnel traffic that your product is right for them, but it will introduce you to new consumers who are already shopping for products like yours.
Action: Drive home the sale
You’ve set up your awareness campaign to drive traffic and feed your lower funnel, you’ve set up your mid-funnel to expand your reach using our powerful technology and to keep your intenders interested in your product, now it is time to finish the process and convert those intenders into customers. How do you accomplish that? Let’s touch on some strategy basics.
We’ve talked a lot about lower funnel strategies that work to increase your conversion rate. Seasonal sales, free shipping offers, exclusive discounts all work wonders to give your intenders that little extra push they need to finally pull out their credit cards and hit purchase. Even a 10% discount on a first order has shown to increase conversion rates as much as 300%, easily enough to make it a worthwhile cost. But how do you put these offers to work in your FieldTest campaigns? The answer is surprisingly simple.
Here’s how to set up your action campaigns:
Click ‘New Campaign’ to start a new action campaign. Follow naming conventions outlined in above sections
Load your conversion ads into this campaign. Read our creative guide here for additional creative guidance in this stage
Navigate to the Target Audience section of your campaign builder and pull down the My Pixel Audiences dropdown menu. Here you will have two choices depending on your creatives
Site Visitors: This will be your standard action stage audience. These site visitors have already expressed interest in yor product and will be primed for conversion messaging.
Converting Users: This is a slightly advanced audience, but an easy one to use once you ave gotten some traction on your campaigns. This audience will be made up only of customers who have made a purchase, leaving them open to be approached with winback messaging or new product rollouts.
Set your budget and spend to what you are comfortable with. This stage is highly targeted and optimized so your money will go far here. In general we recommend you allocate around 20% of your total budget here to start.
Dust off those hands and pat yourself on the back, you just finished setting up your first full-funnel ad campaign! This is everything you’ll need to get started with FieldTest and begin growing your business. From here, the sky is the limit.
And there you have it: Congratulations on building your first full funnel advertising campaign with FieldTest. The good news is these new learnings aren't solely for your initial ad spend. This knowledge you are now equipped with will factor in frequently, not just with your continued FieldTest buying but in other areas of your digital marketing as well. In fact, we'll be revisiting several of these themes in our upcoming articles.
Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can empower you to build high performing ad campaigns and build deep connections with your customers.
