Peak is won before it starts: Why paid media needs the full funnel now more than ever

Every year as peak approaches, the same thing happens. Budgets get pushed into the bottom of the funnel, brand search and retargeting get turned up, and everyone waits for Black Friday to do the heavy lifting. 

 It works, up to a point. But the way people buy has changed a lot in the last couple of years, and a plan that only captures demand is going to miss more and more of the journey and lead to a stagnation in growth. 

The journey is longer, and it has a new stop 

People are using more touchpoints before they buy than ever before. Recent studies show that the average number of touchpoints before purchase went from 8.5 in 2021 to 11.1 in 2025. That means more ads, more scrolling, more reviews and more comparing before anyone gets near a checkout. 

 On top of that, there’s now a whole new consideration phase that didn’t exist a few years ago. People are asking ChatGPT, Gemini and other LLMs to shortlist products, compare options and tell them what’s worth buying. Shopping-related ChatGPT prompts doubled in just six months during 2025 and nearly one in ten consumers already see AI as their most trusted source for what to buy.  

 This matters for paid media because a lot of the decision now happens before someone types a search. By the time they hit Google with a product or brand query, the shortlist may already be set. If your brand wasn’t in front of them earlier on, you might not be on it. 

Upper funnel is driving more conversions than you’d think 

Since their inception, campaign types like Demand Gen have been treated as “nice to have” awareness activity for many advertisers. They’re good for reach, but nobody expects them to pay their way. 

Our own data is starting to show otherwise. On one of our travel accounts, Demand Gen is not only the most efficient campaign on a key product line, with a 14.5x ROAS, but it’s driving genuine sales volume too. That’s a campaign built to work earlier in the journey, and it’s outperforming the activity that’s supposed to close the sale.  

It’s not a one-off either. With journeys this fragmented, the line between “awareness” and “conversion” is much more blurred than the typical funnel suggests. Activity that reaches people early and keeps showing up is doing more of the commercial work than it gets credit for. 

Creative has to earn its place 

 Channels that can be used to target more of the upper funnel channels like YouTube, Meta and TikTok are passive. Nobody opened Instagram to look for your product. So the creative is doing all the work. 

 That means two things. 

 It has to fit the platform. People want ads that feel like part of the app they’re using. An ad that sticks out like a sore thumb gets scrolled past or, worse, gets noticed for the wrong reasons. Vertical video, native formats and content that looks like it belongs in the feed will always beat a resized banner. 

 It also has to fit the stage of the funnel. Hitting a cold audience with “50% off, ends tonight” is a mismatch. They don’t know you yet, so they aren’t expecting a hard sell and it can put them off. Cold audiences need a reason to care. Warm audiences need a reason to choose you. Hot audiences need a reason to act now. Using one message for all three wastes money at every stage. 

 Good creative early in the journey builds the brand feel that makes the later, harder-selling messages land. It’s not a cost on top of performance, it’s part of performance. 

Prime now, convert at peak 

 This is where it all comes together for peak. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the January sales are the moments everyone is fighting for. Auctions are at their most competitive and costs are at their highest. 

 The brands that win aren’t the ones that turn spend on in late November. They’re the ones that have spent the weeks before building audiences, warming them up and filling their retargeting pools. When peak arrives, they have a bigger, warmer audience to convert at a better cost. 

 Timing matters for cost too. Reach is cheaper now than it will be in six weeks. As peak gets closer, more advertisers enter the auction and costs go up. Building audiences in October and early November means you’re paying less to reach people, and saving your peak budget for converting them. 

 If you’re only running lower funnel activity going into peak, you’re competing for the same small group of people as everyone else, and paying peak prices to do it. 

Structure gives you levers to pull 

None of this works without a clear structure. Every campaign, on every channel, needs a defined job. Is it there to reach new people, move them closer to buying, or close the sale? 

When everything has a clear role, peak becomes much easier to manage. If conversion volume dips, you know which audience pools to push. If efficiency drops, you know where to pull back. You’re pulling deliberate levers rather than guessing. 

Judge it on the right numbers 

 The reason upper funnel gets cut is that it’s usually judged on the wrong numbers. Last-click and platform ROAS will always favour the campaigns closest to the sale. Look at blended performance instead: total revenue against total spend, new customer volume, and whether brand search demand is growing. If those are moving in the right direction, the full funnel is doing its job. 

Peak isn’t the finish line 

 The value of peak isn’t just the sales on the day. It’s the new customers you bring in. A peak driven only by lower funnel search, dynamic product ads and retargeting mostly sells to people who were going to buy anyway, often at a discount. A peak backed by full funnel activity brings in new customers you can sell to again in January and beyond. That’s where the real return sits, in attracting new custom and extracting lifetime value.  

What you’ve always done won’t keep working 

 A lower funnel focus will keep ROAS looking healthy in the short term. But if nothing is filling those audience pools, they shrink. Retargeting lists get smaller, brand search flattens and the efficient campaigns slowly run out of people to convert. 

Short-term efficiency at the expense of long-term growth isn’t a strategy. The brands that come out of peak strongest will be the ones that planned the whole journey, not just the end of it.