Don’t Overlook Mid-Funnel Prospects: AI PPC Strategies For Business Growth

Marketers tend to prioritize top-of-funnel awareness and bottom-funnel conversion efforts.

Yet, the mid-funnel stage is where prospects actively weigh options and is crucial for sustained growth and profitability.

Overlooking this critical stage can reduce revenue potential. Using AI-driven paid media for nurturing and retargeting can bridge this gap, converting high-quality leads into profitable customers.

Importance Of Mid-Funnel Engagement

Prospects in the mid-funnel have already expressed interest and are ready to move to action.

They are conducting detailed comparisons, attending webinars, downloading whitepapers, and critically evaluating their choices.

Despite this intense engagement, advertisers often overlook this critical phase, causing leads to drop off.

Common challenges at this stage include generic content that fails to resonate and intrusive retargeting campaigns.

The lack of personalized campaigns and ad copy further undermines mid-funnel marketing. It’s important now for marketers to reassess their strategies to better engage prospects.

Understanding The Customer Journey: Top-, Mid-, And Bottom-Funnel Behaviors

To effectively target prospects, we have to understand their journey through the marketing funnel.

As we explore AI’s impact on the mid-funnel, let’s first look at how prospect behaviors evolve from awareness to conversion.

For PPC strategists and chief marketing officers, aligning paid media tactics with each funnel stage is key to maximizing AI’s potential in campaigns.

To illustrate how PPC strategies should evolve with the prospect’s mindset, consider the following breakdown of PPC tactics for each funnel stage.

Mid-Funnel Potential

In the “consideration” phase, advertisers now have new ways to engage, segment, and nurture mid-funnel audiences with AI and innovative PPC targeting tactics.

Here are three AI-powered mid-funnel tactics to integrate into the paid search plan.

1. AI-Driven Prospect Targeting

This tactic uses AI to analyze huge amounts of user data signals to identify which specific prospects are most likely to take action (convert) at mid-funnel.

The ad platforms may look at past website interactions to demographic signals to predict who are the most qualified new customers.

Smart Bidding and targeting tools allow advertisers to focus ad budget and messaging on the most effective, hot leads.

In one example, Google Ads segments out new customers, calling it the “New customer acquisition goal.” This lifecycle goal prioritizes bidding to reach and acquire new customers.

Key Advantages:

• Maximizes budget efficiency: Uses AI to identify high-intent prospects within your paid ad campaigns.
• Improves overall conversion rates: By prioritizing higher-intent leads, you naturally see a better chance of converting them into valuable customers down the line.

PPC Features Supporting This Tactic:

• Performance Max (Google Ads and Microsoft Ads): This powerful campaign type leverages AI across all channels (search, display, email, etc) to find converting customers. It prioritizes users showing high-value signals, optimizing your bids and placements to capture them.
• Smart Bidding Strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS): While often used for bottom-funnel sales, these can be set to optimize for mid-funnel conversions. The AI learns which users are more likely to complete these specific actions and bids accordingly.
• Custom Segments (Audience Manager): Combine your valuable first-party data (like customer lists of qualified leads) with Google’s audience signals to create highly targeted segments. AI can then optimize towards these prequalified groups.

2. Dynamic Ad Creative

AI automation can generate personalized ad creatives in real-time, enhancing relevance and engagement.

This means prospects see ads that are custom for their specific interests and previous interactions, in real-time, making the ads feel more relevant and personal.

Key Advantages:

• Ad relevance: Ads feel personal and directly address the user’s observed interests, grabbing attention and increasing engagement.
• Reduces ad fatigue: Users see varied, interesting ads instead of the same old creative repeatedly, preventing boredom and annoyance, which keeps them engaged longer.
• Improves engagement metrics: You’ll see higher click-through rates (CTRs) and potentially better ad quality scores because the ads are well-matched to user intent.

PPC Features Supporting This Tactic:

• Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) and Responsive Display Ads (RDAs): You provide multiple headlines, descriptions, and images. Google’s AI then mixes and matches these assets in real-time to find the best-performing combinations for each unique search query or individual users based on their search query, device, location, and other signals.
• Dynamic Retargeting/Remarketing Ads: For ecommerce, these ads automatically showcase products a user viewed on your site. For B2B, they can dynamically display relevant content, case studies, or solutions based on specific pages visited on your website.
• Google Ads’ Asset Library and AI-Driven Creative Suggestions: These tools help you generate a wide variety of diverse assets, then utilize them effectively to create countless ad variations.

3. Value-Based Bidding For Mid-Funnel Conversions

Shift your focus from conversion volume to conversion value with AI-powered bidding strategies that prioritize high-value leads.

Advertisers can assign a higher monetary value to actions that signify greater intent or higher potential lifetime value, like a demo request vs. a download.

The AI then prioritizes bids and focuses the budget on acquiring more valuable leads.

Key Advantages:

• Optimizes for profitability, not just volume: Ensures your ad spend is directed towards acquiring profitable leads.
• Improves budget allocation: AI intelligently allocates bids based on anticipated lead quality and potential revenue, not just the number of conversions, leading to more efficient spending.
• Aligns PPC directly with business key performance indicators (KPIs): This strategy directly ties your ad performance to revenue goals and bottom-line impact. By focusing on value, PPC becomes a clear contributor, proving its worth directly.

PPC Features Supporting This Tactic:

• Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) for Lead Generation: While often seen in ecommerce, an advanced use case is to apply it to lead generation campaigns. By assigning monetary values to different lead types, you tell the system the ROAS you want, and AI bids to meet it.
• Maximize Conversion Value Bidding: This bidding strategy tells the AI to get the highest possible total conversion value within your budget. This requires a proper setup where you assign different values to each mid-funnel conversion action in your account. Without those values, the system can’t differentiate between the worth of different conversions.
• Offline Conversion Import: This is a secret weapon! By importing your customer relationship management (CRM) data information about which leads converted to sales into your ad platforms, you teach the AI which mid-funnel actions are most likely to result in a high-value closed deal, allowing it to optimize bids efficiently.

Ready To Make The Mid-Funnel A Strategic Priority?

Rethink your approach to the mid-funnel, where valuable engagement opportunities often go untapped.

By using AI-driven strategies like those discussed, you can reconnect with high-intent prospects and guide them toward conversion.

For CMOs and senior marketers, optimizing the mid-funnel is a strategic opportunity to grow the customer acquisition pipeline.

More Resources:

• How To Weed Out Less Qualified Audiences From Your PPC Campaigns
• Layering Success: How To Target High-Intent Users In Google Ads
• Winning At Retargeting: Tips To Reconnect & Convert

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