Every Player Has a Position
No coach sends eleven players onto the field and tells them all to do the same thing. The quarterback throws, the lineman blocks, the receiver runs routes. Each position has a job, and the team works because everyone knows theirs. Paid advertising is no different — yet plenty of accounts are full of campaigns with no defined role, all vaguely told to go get results, all bidding the same way regardless of what they're supposed to accomplish. That's a roster of players standing around in the wrong positions.
The fix is to match each campaign's bid strategy and targeting to a specific goal in the funnel. Get that alignment right and every campaign earns its spot. Get it wrong and you're paying full salary for players who don't know the play. Let's break it down by position.
First, Name the Goal
Before you touch a bid setting, answer one question: what is this campaign for? Broadly, every paid campaign plays one of three positions on the funnel.
- Awareness — get in front of new people who don't know you yet. Top of the funnel.
- Consideration — bring interested people deeper, get the click, the visit, the engagement. Middle of the funnel.
- Conversion — close people who are ready to act. Bottom of the funnel.
Pick the position first. Everything else — the bid strategy, the targeting, the way you judge success — flows from that one decision. Skip it, and you're committing the Rule 15 foul, Paid Without Purpose: spending real money with no defined job for the campaign to do.
Match the Bid Strategy to the Position
Bid strategies are just instructions to the platform about what to optimize for. The trick is that the right instruction depends entirely on the position you're playing.
Awareness campaigns
Up top, you're buying eyeballs, so you bid for reach and impressions. Strategies focused on maximizing impressions or cost-per-thousand-views fit here. Judging an awareness campaign by immediate sales is like benching a lineman for not scoring touchdowns — that's not the job you gave it.
Consideration campaigns
In the middle, you want engagement and qualified traffic, so you bid toward clicks and visits. Maximize-clicks or target-cost-per-click strategies move people from aware to interested. Here you watch click-through and the quality of the traffic landing on your pages.
Conversion campaigns
At the bottom, you want actions — purchases, leads, signups — so you let the platform optimize directly toward them. Strategies like target CPA (cost per acquisition) or target ROAS (return on ad spend) tell the machine to chase conversions at a price that makes sense. These need conversion data to learn, which is exactly why your tracking foundation has to be clean before you lean on them.
A bid strategy isn't right or wrong on its own. It's right or wrong for the job you gave the campaign. Match the instruction to the position.
Match the Targeting Too
Bid strategy is half the play; targeting is the other half, and it follows the same funnel logic. Awareness campaigns target broad — interests, demographics, lookalikes built from your best customers — because you're fishing for new fans. Consideration campaigns tighten up — people who visited your site, engaged with content, showed a signal. Conversion campaigns go narrowest — cart abandoners, high-intent searchers, your warmest first-party audiences. Broad targeting on a conversion campaign wastes budget; narrow targeting on an awareness campaign starves it. The targeting has to match the position just like the bid does.
How to Audit Your Account Monday
Pull up every active campaign and write one word next to each: awareness, consideration, or conversion. If you can't, that's your first problem — a campaign with no position. Then check two things per campaign: does the bid strategy match that goal, and does the targeting match it too? You'll almost always find a conversion campaign bidding for clicks, or an awareness campaign judged by sales. Realign them. Give every campaign a position, the right instruction, and the right audience — and judge each one by the goal you actually assigned it.
The Ref's Call
Clean play when every campaign has a job. Name the funnel goal first, then match both the bid strategy and the targeting to it — reach up top, clicks in the middle, conversions at the bottom. Run that lineup and you stay clear of Rule 15 — Paid Without Purpose. Put every player in position, and the whole offense scores.