Everyone has seen the triangle. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom, with arrows suggesting an orderly progression. It is a good model of how buying works and a poor description of how to configure an ad account.
The gap between the two is where most full-funnel ABM programmes fail. Not because the funnel is wrong, but because it is drawn as three content types when it needs to be built as three separately-budgeted campaigns with different audiences and different definitions of success.
What the diagram omits
Three things, each of which is enough to break the programme on its own.
The auction does not respect your funnel. If awareness and conversion ads share a campaign or an unfloored budget, optimisation will move spend toward whichever produces the cheapest instances of your chosen objective. That is almost always the awareness creative, because it has the broadest appeal. Your bottom-funnel ads then never accumulate enough delivery to matter.
Each stage has a different unit of analysis. Top of funnel is measured on accounts reached. Middle is measured on committee breadth. Bottom is measured on named-account actions. If you review all three on the same metric — and most teams review all three on CTR — two of the three stages will look like failures.
Audiences must be built from behaviour, not just from firmographics. A middle-funnel audience that is simply "the same list again" is not a funnel. It is the same ad campaign with different copy.
Stage one: coverage
Job: get every account on the list, and several people at each, to encounter you at all.
Audience: the full matched list, filtered to relevant job functions but deliberately loose on seniority. Excluding non-decision-makers here is a common and expensive mistake — the analyst who reads everything is often the person who brings you into the room.
Creative: a specific problem statement, not a product claim and not a generic thought-leadership piece. The test is whether the headline would make an uninterested person keep scrolling and a person with that problem stop.
Metric: accounts reached, committee breadth, cost per account reached. Not CTR.
Frequency: aim for four to eight impressions per person per month, capped. Below four, recognition does not form. Above eight at this stage, you are spending money that stage two needs.
Stage two: depth
Job: take accounts where one or two people have engaged and get more of the committee involved, at greater depth.
Audience: this is the stage that must be behavioural. Retarget engagers from stage one, then expand to the rest of the buying committee at those specific accounts. That second half is what makes it ABM rather than retargeting: you are not chasing the individual who clicked, you are surrounding the company they work at.
Creative: substance. A document ad with real content, a technical walkthrough, a customer story that names the mechanism rather than the outcome. This is where a long asset earns its place; you are talking to people who have already indicated the problem is theirs.
Metric: accounts moving from one function engaged to two or more. That single transition is the most predictive event in most B2B programmes I have measured.
Stage three: action
Job: convert internal consensus into a conversation.
Audience: small and specific. Accounts where multiple functions have engaged recently, seniority is present, and the score threshold has been crossed. In a 400-account programme this audience might be forty accounts and two hundred people.
Creative: a direct offer. A named demo, an assessment, a workshop, a comparison document. Vagueness at this stage is fatal; the reader already knows who you are and what problem you solve, and an ad that restates that wastes the position you spent two stages building.
Metric: meetings and opportunities from named accounts, tracked at the account level. Conversion rate on this campaign will look extraordinary and it is not a real number — the audience was selected for readiness. Report the count, not the rate.
Budget: small, and capped by audience size rather than by ambition. There is a fixed number of accounts ready to act at any moment; spending past it just increases frequency on people already convinced.
Budget splits that survive contact
A starting split for a programme of a few hundred accounts, to be adjusted once you have your own data:
| Stage | Share | Floor? | Primary metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| One — coverage | 50–60% | Yes, hard | Accounts reached, cost per reached |
| Two — depth | 30–35% | Yes, hard | Accounts reaching 2+ functions |
| Three — action | 10–15% | Capped, not floored | Named-account meetings |
The floors are the important part. Without them, the split is a plan rather than a constraint, and the auction will renegotiate it within a fortnight.
When not to run three stages
Two situations where the full structure is the wrong call.
Your list is under about a hundred accounts. At that size you cannot generate enough behavioural signal to build a meaningful stage-two audience, and splitting a small budget three ways gives each stage too little to escape learning-phase volatility. Run stage one and stage three, and do the middle with sales outreach and email, where a human can carry the personalisation.
Your total monthly budget is under roughly £3,000. Three campaigns, each with a floor, each needing enough delivery to be stable, does not fit. One well-targeted campaign with a frequency cap will outperform three starved ones. Add stages as budget allows, and add stage two before stage three.