Cold Warm Hot Funnels

You can get a direct response from a ‘cold’ audience – but this tends to most successful with low AOV impulse purchases (like gadgets, beauty products etc) – you’re unlikely to get a cold conversion on a purchase that is high consideration and therefore need to build up the cold/warm parts of the funnel.

However…

Be mindful that Meta’s Machine Learning is now so good, that you can sometimes ‘piggy back’ on another businesses warm funnel.

So let’s say you sell tents – and you’re targeting a cold audience – yes that audience is cold to your business, but Meta is probably showing them your ad because it already knows they have been looking for tents! So they may actually already been in the warm/hot part of the funnel at this point.

A friend of mine who runs ads, once accidentally duplicated a hot funnel ad with the message ‘Are you still looking at XXX?’ into a cold audience, and a few days later discovered to his utmost surprise that it was performing exceptionally – it seems Meta had shown that ad to people who were actually already looking for that product, and because the prospect couldn’t remember which websites they’d visited, just assumed it was the same business they had already browsed previously!