For years, many standard Facebook ad structures were built around a simple idea: different stages of the buying journey deserve different campaigns. Top of funnel got one campaign, middle of funnel got another, and bottom of funnel got a third. Each had its own budget, its own targeting, and its own creative strategy. A new prospect might see a founder story first, then a product demonstration once they'd shown some interest, and finally a customer testimonial when they were close to buying.
It was a logical system, and for a while it worked well. The problem is that Meta has moved on.
The platform's delivery has shifted toward an AI-driven system where most targeting inputs are treated as suggestions rather than hard rules. Meta's algorithm decides where your ads go, and it's increasingly good at that job. The old campaign structure assumed you could manually steer people through a sequence — but that's not really how it works anymore. Meta determines who sees what, and trying to force a rigid funnel on top of that just creates friction.
So the question becomes: does funnel thinking still matter?
Yes.
The marketing logic hasn't changed. Someone who's never heard of your product probably isn't ready to buy it the first time they see an ad. They need an introduction, then some evidence that what you're offering is worth their attention, and then a reason to act. That sequence still maps to real human behavior — it just doesn't need to live in separate campaigns anymore.
What I've shifted to is consolidating everything into one campaign and one ad set. The difference is that I'm still building ads with funnel stage in mind — I'm just not structuring campaigns around it. Within a single ad set that might have 20 or more ads, some are what I'd consider top-of-funnel material: founder-led content, origin stories, the "why we exist" type of creative. Others are more mid-funnel: product demonstrations, in-depth explanations, content for someone who's already curious. And then there are bottom-funnel ads: customer testimonials, strong calls to action, the ads designed to push someone who's already warm to finally convert.
Meta sees all of them, and it figures out the sequencing itself.
You can actually watch this happen in the ad account data. In businesses where the purchase decision takes more time — higher price points, services that require some thought, anything where people don't just impulse-buy — some ads will consistently get spend without producing many conversions. The cost per lead or cost per sale on those ads looks terrible. The instinct is to turn them off.
That's usually a mistake.
What's happening is that Meta is using those ads in a top-of-funnel capacity to introduce people to the brand, and then using other ads to retarget those same people and actually close them. The ad that "isn't converting" is doing real work — it's just doing it upstream. If you kill it, the ads that are converting will get worse, because they're benefiting from the warm-up work the other ad was doing.
This is less visible in lower-priced e-commerce, where people can decide quickly and the funnel compresses. If you're selling a $30 product, someone can see one ad and buy it. But when the ask is larger — a service, a high-ticket item, anything that requires a real decision — the sequencing becomes more pronounced, and more important to understand.
The structural change, then, is really just about consolidation. Instead of splitting things across three campaigns with separate budgets and targeting, you put your funnel-aware creative into one campaign and let Meta allocate. The added benefit is that you're also getting real creative diversity from having so many different ad types in one ad set, which feeds the algorithm more signal to work with.
What hasn't changed is the underlying creative thinking. You still need ads that introduce, ads that educate, and ads that convert. You still need to think about where someone is in their relationship with your brand and what they need to hear next. Meta handles the logistics of sequencing, but it can only sequence what you give it. If all your ads are bottom-funnel CTAs, there's nothing to warm people up with, and performance suffers.
The funnel is still doing its job. It's just not living in your campaign structure anymore.