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Full-funnel marketing — is the bottom of the funnel enough?

Jakub Pytlik Jakub Pytlik | June 1, 2026 | 9 min read
In short The "bottom of the funnel" alone — advertising to people who are ready to buy (Search on specific phrases, remarketing) — works great. But only up to a point. At any given moment, roughly 5% of the market is actively searching for your product on Google; once you exhaust it, every extra dollar buys an increasingly expensive lead. That's the "wall" most conversion-only campaigns crash into. The most dangerous part is what happens next: when you cut the spend "that doesn't convert," you often cut what was feeding people into your converting bottom — and sales drop with a delay you won't spot in a simple report. This article is the intro to a series on the full funnel: I explain when the bottom alone is enough, when it's a trap, and where to start on a small budget.
This is the hub of the full-funnel series Here you get the whole picture in a nutshell. I dig into each thread separately: attribution — why Google, Meta, and GA4 count differently and who to trust, how channels affect each other (synergy and cannibalization), how to build a full-funnel strategy and split the budget, and omnichannel beyond the internet — store, DOOH, hybrid business.
The full funnel: awareness, consideration, decision — and what the "bottom only" sees of it The full funnel — and what the "bottom only" sees AWARENESS · top of funnel creates demand — people get to know you CONSIDERATION · middle warms demand — they pick you DECISION · bottom harvests demand — they buy now "Bottom only" sees just this ≈ 5% of the market ready to buy NOW — and last-click attribution looks here Cut the top → weeks later the bottom starts drying up The bottom harvests demand it doesn't create itself. Without the top, the pool of ready buyers runs out.

What the "full funnel" is (and why the bottom is only part of it)

The funnel is simply the path a customer travels: from "doesn't know you exist" to "buys." We split it into three stages:

  • Top (awareness) — someone is just discovering that your product or your category exists at all. This is where YouTube, Demand Gen, Display, social, and offline even billboards do the work. It's the stage that creates demand.
  • Middle (consideration) — the customer knows what they need and is comparing options. This is where soft remarketing, content, comparisons, and Demand Gen work. It's the stage that warms demand and makes them pick you.
  • Bottom (decision) — the customer is ready. They type a specific phrase into Google or come back from remarketing and buy. This is where Search on intent phrases, Shopping/PMax, and hard remarketing work. It's the stage that harvests demand.

Most small businesses do the bottom only — and that's understandable, because the bottom returns money the fastest. The problem is that the bottom creates nothing. It only harvests what the top and middle prepared. If no one feeds the top, the bottom lives off demand that already existed for a while — and then it starts to starve.

On top of that comes the measurement trap. Default "last-click" attribution assigns all the credit for a sale to the last click — which is almost always the bottom. The top and middle, which actually brought the customer in, look useless in the report. That's why the bottom looks like the only channel that "works." I break this down in a separate article on multichannel attribution.

When the bottom of the funnel really is enough

Let me start with honesty, because I don't want to push you into spending money for the sake of it: sometimes the bottom alone is the right call. There are situations where moving into the full funnel would be premature:

  • You have a small budget and you need cash flow "yesterday." The bottom pays back the fastest. At 2,000–3,000 PLN a month, splitting that across three stages means none of them gets enough data. First harvest the ready demand, build cash flow, and only then add the top.
  • Your category has steady, healthy search demand. A local plumber, a tire shop, an emergency locksmith — people search for these with clear intent every day. As long as you're not exhausting that demand, Search does the job.
  • You're just starting out and testing whether there's demand at all. Before you invest in building awareness, it's worth checking whether the people who are already searching even convert on your site.

The signal that "the bottom only" is no longer enough is concrete: you raise the budget, but leads don't grow proportionally — instead, the cost per lead goes up. That means you're exhausting the pool of ready customers and starting to overpay for the leftovers. That's what the next section is about.

Why performance-only hits a wall

At any given moment, only a small part of your market — roughly a few percent (around 3–5%, depending on the category) — is actively searching for a solution on Google. The rest either don't know they have a problem, or they know but aren't searching yet. The bottom of the funnel only reaches those 5%. And here's the crux: no matter how much budget you pour in — a bigger pool of ready customers simply doesn't exist.

What happens when you raise the budget anyway? You bid more and more aggressively for the same, finite searches. Example: there are 1,000 searches a month in a category. You have a 10% share — 100 leads at 50 PLN each. Want to grow to 20%? The next 100 leads already cost 100 PLN each, because you have to outbid the competition in tougher auctions. You doubled the cost per lead without doubling your results.

This isn't just my theory — it's how the market works. Industry analyses have shown the same direction for years: more and more advertisers report diminishing returns from conversion-only campaigns, and the cost to acquire a customer rises year over year. From my own practice, I see it clearly — the longer an account stands on the bottom alone, the more expensive each additional lead becomes. The bottom of the funnel is inherently reactive — it catches existing demand but doesn't create it.

Growth curve: the bottom alone plateaus, the full funnel keeps growing What happens when you add budget Budget → New customers → full funnel bottom only — plateau wall Past the "wall," ready demand runs out more budget ≠ more customers — cost per lead rises

At some point, the cheapest growth no longer comes from "adding more to the bottom," but from feeding the top — so that more people enter the funnel and, a week or a month from now, become your ready demand. That's the whole idea of the full funnel: not instead of the bottom, but so the bottom has something to live on.

The trap of cutting budget "blindly"

This is where people make a mistake that can hurt a few weeks later. You look at the report (usually with last-click attribution), you see that the awareness campaign on YouTube or Demand Gen "has no conversions," so you turn it off to save money. From the spreadsheet's point of view — logical. In reality, you've just cut off the supply to your converting bottom.

The effect is delayed, and that's what makes it treacherous. For 2–3 weeks nothing bad happens — the bottom lives off the demand the top built earlier. Then it begins: searches for your brand drop, the remarketing pool shrinks, Search on generic phrases gets more expensive because fewer people recognize you. Last-click will never show that the cause was turning off the top — it will only show that "the bottom is suddenly performing worse."

What I see in practice With one client (a service with a longer decision process), we cut the awareness-building activity because it "didn't convert" in the report. After about 6–8 weeks, brand searches and direct visits dropped noticeably, and the cost per conversion on Search went up — even though we changed nothing in Search itself. Turning the top back on rebuilt the bottom over the following weeks. A classic example: you cut "what doesn't convert," but in reality you cut what feeds what does convert.

The takeaway isn't "never turn anything off." It's: before you cut something, measure its real impact, not the last click. Incrementality tests are made for this (e.g., turning a channel off in some markets and comparing results) — I expand on this in the article on how channels affect each other.

Where to start with the full funnel on a small budget

Full funnel doesn't mean "launch everything at once." On a small business's real budget, that would be a mistake — you'd scatter the money so thin that no stage would gather enough data. The order I use:

  1. The bottom first — Search on intent phrases + (for a store) Shopping/PMax. It harvests ready demand, delivers a fast return, and — importantly — the conversion data that all the other campaigns need later.
  2. Then the middle — remarketing — this is the cheapest "upgrade" in the entire funnel. People already know you, and you come back to them for pennies. Usually the first step beyond the pure bottom (more in the piece on remarketing after the cookie changes).
  3. The top last — YouTube, Demand Gen, Display. You add it once the bottom starts showing signs of saturation (rising cost per lead at a flat result), starting with 15–25% of the budget.

A common rule of thumb for a mature account is roughly a 60/40 split — 60% of the budget on the top and middle, 40% on the bottom (a rule popularized by Binet and Field's research on brand building vs. sales activation). But that's a goal for a business that already has a stable bottom and wants to keep growing, not a starting point for someone with a 2,000 PLN budget. A small business starts with the bottom dominating and shifts the center of gravity gradually.

One thing that's easiest to trip over: don't measure the top of the funnel with the same metric as the bottom. Don't expect direct sales "today" from an awareness campaign — its job is to grow your reach and searches for your brand. How to align goals and budget, step by step, I lay out in the article on full-funnel strategy.

The full series on the full funnel

This article is the map. I break down each thread separately, in plain language and with specifics:

Summary The bottom of the funnel alone is great at harvesting ready demand — and it can be the right choice on a small budget or in a category with steady search demand. But the bottom creates nothing: once you exhaust the pool of people ready to buy (roughly 5% of the market), every additional lead gets more expensive and growth stalls. The full funnel doesn't replace the bottom — it feeds it, so it has something to live on. And watch out for cutting "blindly": by turning off what "doesn't convert" according to last-click, you often cut off the supply to your converting bottom — and you won't see the effect until a few weeks later.
Not sure if your bottom is already starting to starve? — a free opinion, no strings attached Send me a link to your site and 2 sentences about what you sell and roughly how much you spend on ads. I'll get back to you quickly (usually within 24 hours): whether your funnel stands on the bottom alone, where you're losing growth, and where I'd start feeding the top — with concrete reasoning. This isn't a sales pitch, it's an honest opinion. Write to jakub.pytlik@jp-ads.pl or use the contact form.

About the sources: The mechanics of demand saturation and "a few percent of the market ready now" — including Ruler Analytics (an attribution-tools vendor — a platform perspective). The 60/40 budget-split rule between brand building and sales activation — research by Les Binet and Peter Field (IPA, "The Long and the Short of It"). The direction of diminishing returns from performance-only and the examples marked "from my practice" are based on accounts I have run at JP Ads — distinguish them from hard research.

Keep reading in the series
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