Should I move ad spend from bottom-funnel to a balanced funnel?

[AdamBJ]

I’ve been running conversion campaigns for my e-commerce store, but I’m starting to wonder if focusing solely on that bottom-funnel action is actually limiting our growth. We get sales, but our overall customer acquisition cost feels high and we’re not building much brand awareness to make future campaigns cheaper. Has anyone shifted budget to a more balanced funnel approach and seen better overall efficiency?

[Steven_R]

We tried a 50/50 split last quarter. Bottom campaign still did the heavy lifting on orders, but CAC stayed stubbornly high and efficiency didn't improve as much as we hoped. We did see a small uptick in new buyers who later became repeat customers, which nudged LTV a bit, but it took longer to materialize than we expected.

[Matthew.R]

We moved about 20% of paid budget to upper stage assets—short videos, discovery ads, and educational content—for a couple of months. Lead volume from new signups rose a bit, ROAS dipped briefly, but there were more first-time buyers who stuck around after signup.

[OliviaT]

Do you think the problem is the mix or is there something bigger like product-market fit and checkout friction? I kept chasing budget tweaks until we found a few chokepoints in the checkout that really killed momentum.