If you want your PPC campaigns to convert in 2025, they need to show up with a purpose. 

A full-funnel PPC marketing strategy ensures you’re reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time, whether they’re just discovering your brand or ready to buy. 

This article:

• Walks through each stage of the funnel – awareness, consideration, and conversion.
• Breaks down the keywords, targeting, ad formats, and landing page elements that make each one work, using the hot tub industry as an example.

Think of it as your tactical guide to building smarter, stage-specific campaigns that drive results.

Awareness stage

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) campaigns are focused on consumers in the awareness stage, when they haven’t yet entered the market for your product or identified a problem that needs solving. 

Awareness campaigns are meant to do exactly what they say: to make customers aware of your brand so that when they finally enter the market, you have a leg up due to brand recognition. 

A perfect example of this is insurance companies. 

People don’t need insurance often, but when they do, it sure helps that the Geico gecko is one of the first things you think of.

Keyword and audience research

• Identify keywords that are informational in nature, that align with your brand’s offerings and your target audience’s interest.
• Utilize tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool to develop a list of these keywords that have a decent amount of search volume.
• A couple examples of search queries that fall into the awareness phase:
  • “Are hot tubs good for you?”
  • “Are hot tubs worth it?”
  • “How much are hot tubs?”
• Use audience targeting to advertise to people who you think are a good fit for your product. Do your customers skew older? Advertise on websites that also cater to those demographics. (Tools like SparkToro can help you find where your audience is on the web.)

Dig deeper: PPC keyword research: What you need to know

Ad creation

• Display advertising is a big part of an awareness-based strategy. Craft display ads that are visually compelling and effectively show your brand’s value.
• Use video ads to introduce your brand and highlight key product features.
• The goal is to entice users to learn more, so use attention-grabbing headlines focused on the user’s seeking more information.

Landing page optimization

• Design your landing page so they match your ads in both messaging and visuals. Inconsistent branding and messaging only makes the user’s journey more confusing.
• Focus your landing pages on providing valuable content that educates the user’s about a specific product or your industry as a whole. Relevant blog posts are a good choice for awareness-based campaigns.
• Make sure to include clear calls to action (CTAs) to encourage readers to continue down the purchase funnel, such as “download brochure” or “learn more.” 

Dig deeper: Guide to PPC top-of-funnel reporting

Consideration

Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) campaigns are focused on consumers in the consideration stage, where they have officially entered the market for a product but they have yet to find the solution or product that fits their needs.

Consideration campaigns are meant to give a customer the information they need to make a purchase.

This could be many different things, like:

• Information about the product or service.
• Sales information that could entice the customer to finally make a purchase.

Keyword research

• Identify keywords related to your products or services that indicate interest by the user. Users in the consideration phase often use keywords like “best” or “review” to help find the best brands and products. 
• Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool to develop a list of these keywords that have a decent amount of search volume.
• A couple examples of search queries that fall into the consideration phase:
  • “Hot tub sales.”
  • “Best hot tub brands.”
  • “Hot tub store.”
  • “Hot tub comparisons.”
  • “Jacuzzi hot tub reviews.”

Ad creation

• Focus on ad copy that provides valuable information to the consumer while also showing the value of your brand specifically.
  • For hot tub sales, this could include “One year of free service with purchase” in addition to information about the hot tubs.
• Create compelling remarketing ads that keep user’s interested after they’ve interacted with your content.
• Use Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, which offer a mix of text, display, and video creative options.

Landing page optimization

• Design your landing page so that it matches your ads in both messaging and visuals. This is consistent across all stages of the funnel. (Branding is important, folks!) 
• Highlight social proof of your business and products, such as reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc. These build brand credibility and are incredibly important in building trust with new customers.
• Make sure to include clear calls to action to encourage users to proceed to the bottom of the funnel. CTAs like “Start your free trial” or “Subscribe to our email list” are perfect for this stage. 

Dig deeper: PPC keyword strategy: How to align search intent with funnel stages

Conversion stage

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) campaigns are focused on consumers in the conversion stage, where they’ve identified what they want and are ready to make a purchase. 

Conversion campaigns are pretty self-explanatory: they’re campaigns designed to get users to convert at that moment. 

If users don’t convert, the rest of the funnel is pointless, so it’s important to ensure your conversion campaigns are running as effectively as possible.

Keyword and audience research

• Identify keywords that are transaction or purchase-based. These tend to be longer-tail keywords and could include the product name, model number, or words like “buy.”
• Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool to develop a list of these keywords that have a decent amount of search volume.
• A couple examples of search queries that fall into the awareness phase:
  • “Buy Jacuzzi hot tub.”
  • “Jacuzzi J-LX Smart Tub.”
  • “Jacuzzi hot tub store near me.”
• Create remarketing lists so you can target users who have been to your website without converting. Offering exclusive sales to these users may entice them to finally convert.

Ad creation

• Focus on ad copy that uses clear, purchase-oriented CTAs (e.g., “buy now” or “request a quote”), and any promotions you are running.
• Use dynamic remarketing ads to target people who have added items to a cart but haven’t converted.

Landing page optimization

• Your conversion campaign landing pages should be as streamlined as possible so that there’s no friction preventing the user from converting. Many conversion-based landing pages will even remove the top navigation from the page so the only thing the user can do is convert or leave the page.
• Include any promotional elements on the landing page (e.g., discounts, free shipping, limited-time offers).
• This applies to all landing pages, but ensure that the page load times are fast and that it works well on mobile. Nothing feels worse to a user than slow landing pages.

Measurement

Now that your campaigns are set up and optimized for every stage of the funnel, how do you determine whether your campaigns are performing well? 

Here are a few tips for measuring progress and success across the marketing funnel.

Set up conversion tracking

• Ensure that conversion tracking is set up throughout your site so you can track users’ interactions throughout every stage of the funnel. Use Google Tag Manager for all conversion tracking purposes.
• Define and create conversion actions for every stage of the marketing funnel so you can determine success. Here are some example conversions for each stage:
  • Awareness: Blog views, brochure/case study downloads.
  • Consideration: Email list subscriptions, free trial sign-ups.
  • Conversion: Purchase, request a quote.

Analyze key performance metrics

• Continually monitor your key performance metrics (KPIs) so you can see improvement over time. Metrics like click-through rate and conversion rate can help you determine whether your campaigns are reaching a qualified audience or if you need to pivot.
• Within Google Ads, look at your different audience segments to see when and where people are interacting with your brand the most and focus on those high-quality segments.

Pull the right levers to boost PPC performance

PPC is not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing strategy. As marketers, we should always be A/B testing something to see if we can improve our performance.

Whether it’s ad creative, landing pages, or targeting, there’s no shortage of levers to pull to improve your campaigns.

Optimize your campaigns based on the data you’re seeing so that you continue to improve ad targeting and performance over time.

Source link