marketing automation
Beyond Clicks and Conversions: Why Full-Funnel Visibility Is the Next Frontier in Ad Automation
Beyond Clicks and Conversions: Why Full-Funnel Visibility Is the Next Frontier in Ad Automation
By Mitsunaga Kikuchi, Founder and CEO of Shirofune
Digital advertising has been dominated by short-term metrics for years, with a heavy focus on clicks, conversions, and other lower-funnel indicators that neatly tie spend to sales. While these numbers are clear and tangible, they only tell a small part of the story.
Much like the rest of the digital world, advertising formats continue to evolve. Particularly, the rise of video and rich display media has led to the re-emergence of brand-building activity as a critical growth driver. Yet many advertisers still lack the tools to measure and optimize upper-funnel performance with the same precision as their conversion campaigns.
That’s quickly changing.
The Rise of the Upper Funnel in Digital Advertising
Upper-funnel (or “TOFU”) marketing is where demand is created. Elements like awareness campaigns, video ads, and brand storytelling all help introduce a brand to new audiences, build familiarity, and shape perception long before someone clicks “Buy now.”
Quantifying this area has historically been difficult. While clicks and conversions are straightforward, measuring mental availability is more complex. How do you even track the likelihood that your brand comes to mind when a customer faces a relevant need? Fortunately, as media channels mature and attribution tools improve, marketers are finally able to bridge the gap connecting awareness efforts to tangible outcomes further down the funnel.
We’ve had a front row seat and watched this shift accelerate in recent years. Advertisers are asking for automation tools that don’t just chase the last click, but help manage the entire customer journey from initial awareness to final conversion and loyalty.
Why Reach and Frequency Matter More Than Ever
Reach and Frequency, two foundational brand metrics, are experiencing a digital renaissance. They’ve long been cornerstones of traditional media planning, but in the performance-driven world of digital, they were often sidelined in favor of direct response KPIs.
Now, as platforms like YouTube, connected TV, and programmatic video mature, advertisers are beginning to rediscover their value. Managing Reach and Frequency effectively means ensuring your brand stays top of mind without overspending or overexposing audiences. This is a balance that’s increasingly achievable through automation and intelligent optimization.
Complementing this revival are attention metrics, which have been championed through industry efforts led by IAB and the MRC/IAB Tech Lab. Attention metrics are becoming a critical new layer of measurement, as they capture the quality of exposure by measuring signals such as viewable time, screen share, and user interactions, providing a clearer sense of whether an ad actually engaged the viewer, unlike raw impressions or simple viewability.
As highlighted in Nielsen’s research on brand building, awareness remains a key driver of long-term performance, and attention serves as the bridge between awareness and actual brand impact. Attention-based approaches are being adopted to qualify inventory, inform bidding decisions, and identify placements that deliver meaningful engagement, particularly in CTV and long-form video environments.
More importantly, attention scoring is evolving to align with modern privacy standards through signal-based estimation and first-party data models. It’s being integrated into automated optimization tools more than ever before so campaigns can prioritize not only reach, but attention-weighted reach, to more accurate reflection of true impact.
These metrics provide the missing context around performance data. Rather than siloing upper and lower funnel campaigns, marketers can now use them to see how awareness efforts influence downstream conversions.
The New Standard: Full-Funnel Optimization
A true full-funnel approach combines awareness, consideration, and purchase stages under one cohesive strategy. Each stage supports the next: top-of-funnel activity builds mental availability, mid-funnel engagement nurtures interest, and lower-funnel campaigns convert demand into measurable outcomes.
Automation plays a key role in making this practical. Advertisers need tools that simplify and optimize digital advertising, ultimately balancing direct response with sustainable brand growth. The right technology will allow them to dynamically allocate budgets, optimize for different objectives across channels, and generate unified reporting that captures both immediate performance and long-term brand impact.
The most successful advertisers will be those who see the bigger picture. Clicks and conversions still matter, but they’re just milestones in a long journey. Brand familiarity, perception, and trust are what sustain growth over time, and they can now be managed and measured with the same rigor as sales metrics.
It’s time to stop treating awareness as a luxury and start seeing it as a performance driver. When automation extends beyond the bottom of the funnel, advertisers are finally able to move beyond simply generating transactions to building lasting brands.
Mitsunaga Kikuchi
Joined CyberAgent, the largest digital agency in Japan, in 2006 as a new graduate and in a few years, became the director of CyberAgent and the representative of a subsidiary (CA Advance). I was responsible for providing the in-house ad management system and operational scheme to hundreds of Ad managers at CyberAgent.
From the experience at CyberAgent, I decided to develop a platform which automates the works done by those Ad managers so that anyone, with the limited knowledge, could get the same results from online advertising as what a professional Ad manager brings.
Fortunately, all the major agencies and advertisers are now on the Shirofune platform and we are very excited to help them achieve even higher performance though our continuous development.
