No matter where a purchase is made — online or offline — shopping has become an adventure.

Physical stores are turning into cutting-edge showrooms where consumers can learn about products and services using augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) glasses, and other advanced technologies. Retailers claim to have experienced 11% growth in customer visits after integrating automation technology according to a survey by Capgemini.

In turn, e-commerce businesses are making their websites more accessible, appealing, and faster to hook online users, who become more capricious day by day.

According to a survey by Namagoo, US customers consider clear product images, product reviews, and product descriptions, an easy search and checkout process, simple navigation, and a great experience on mobile devices to be the top seven components of a great shopping experience.

Facebook is one of the best platforms for showing what makes customers buy from your store, whether it’s brick-and-mortar or online (or both).

But before learning what the Facebook ads funnel is and how to provide your customers with a fascinating and valuable shopping adventure across Facebook and its family of apps, let’s first learn about traditional sales funnels.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

The concept of the sales funnel as we know it today was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. The history of advertising remembers two prominent figures related to this development: E. St. Elmo Lewis and William W. Townsend.

In The Psychology of Selling and Advertising, Edward K. Strong Jr. writes:

E. St. Elmo Lewis formulated the slogan, “Attract attention, maintain interest, create desire,” in 1898. Later he added the fourth term “get action.”

Later, E. St. Elmo Lewis’s slogan was transformed into the AIDA model that divides the customer journey into four main stages:

Stage 1. Attention (Awareness) — The customer gets familiar with the business, product, or service.

Stage 2. Interest — The customer gets interested in the business, product, or service.

Stage 3. Desire — The customer directs ambition toward buying the product or service.

Stage 4. Action — The customer decides to purchase the product or service.
In 1924, William W. Townsend, in his book Bond Salesmanship, proposed visualizing a funnel based on the AIDA concept developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898:

The salesman should visualize his whole problem of developing the sales steps as the forcing by compression of a broad and general concept of facts through a funnel which produces the specific and favorable consideration of one fact. The process is continually from the general to the specific, and the visualizing of the funnel has helped many salesmen to lead a customer from Attention to Interest, and beyond.

Today, marketers use lots of sales funnel concepts. However, all of them are derived from the AIDA model, including the Facebook sales funnel.

What is a Facebook sales funnel?

What Is a Facebook Sales Funnel?

Also called a Facebook ads funnel, a Facebook sales funnel refers to the way you lead your customers through a shopping journey that’s initiated or finished on Facebook or another platform in the Facebook family.

A Facebook ads funnel contains three main stages. You can see them when you choose a marketing objective for your ad campaign in Ads Manager.

1. Awareness — Brand awareness, Reach
2. Consideration — Traffic, Engagement, App installs, Video views, Lead generation, Messages
3. Conversion — Conversions, Catalog sales, Store traffic 

Does this remind you of something? Clearly, the Facebook sales funnel system is a simplified version of the AIDA model offered by E. St. Elmo Lewis. When you launch ads on Facebook and its platforms, you can create any Facebook ad funnel you need depending on your goals, audiences, and other factors.

How to Create an Effective Facebook Ads Funnel

There are a few crucial things you need to consider before you create a Facebook ads funnel:

Know Your Customers’ Needs and Preferences

If you can detect the ways your audience usually buys your products or services, it will be a great foundation for creating a Facebook sales funnel that shows real insights and accurate statistics.

Track the Behavior of Facebook Users with Facebook Pixel or SDK

If you don’t know the needs and preferences of your customers, you can add Facebook pixel code to your website or Facebook SDK code to your mobile app to fix that.

This code enables tracking tools that allow you to find an appropriate Facebook sales funnel strategy by seeing the actions people take after they interact with your ads launched on Facebook and its other platforms. 

Say you have an e-commerce business and you want to figure out why exactly your customers purchase your products and services. After you create a Facebook pixel and add Facebook pixel events to your online store, you’ll be able to see the full picture of your marketing and adjust your Facebook ads funnel to make it work just as you want it to.

See Cross-Device Touchpoints with the Facebook Attribution tool

When it comes to developing the right Facebook ads funnel, e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses face a challenge — they need to assign credit to steps taken by customers on the way to a conversion. 

More often than not, people use multiple devices and interact with various marketing channels on their way to buying a product or service. In the world of e-commerce, a Facebook sales funnel may look like this: A user visits Facebook via a desktop computer, stumbles upon a product ad, and clicks on it to visit a website and browse the product. Then something makes the user leave the website without making a purchase. In a couple of days, the user goes to Messenger via a mobile device, sees a retargeted ad that promotes the same product, and decides to visit the website again and buy it.

Such situations are typical for any business. And if you want to know how to sort out this mess and how to create a Facebook sales funnel that matches your current marketing strategy, you should take advantage of the Facebook Attribution tool. It will help you understand the impact of your Facebook ads by identifying all customer touchpoints.

Make the Customer Journey More Exciting with AI

We hope we’ve given you enough food for thought to create the best Facebook ads sales funnel for your business at the current moment.

To make the shopping adventure more exciting for your customers, take advantage of the Softcube video ad production platform powered by artificial intelligence. Softcube will help you automatically create a large number of high-quality video ads in a short time and for an image ad-sized budget.