How To Get More New Customers In Meta Ads in 2025

If everyone in the world woke up tomorrow and saw your brand first thing in the morning, you’d instantly be the most popular company on the planet. People would search for you, click through to your website, and sales would skyrocket—simply because your brand was put in front of them. While that scenario may sound impossible, it’s exactly what happens when you run the right campaign structure on Meta Ads.

In today’s fast-changing digital advertising landscape, scaling an e-commerce brand requires more than just a strong product. It requires building awareness at scale while keeping acquisition costs low. That’s why one specific campaign type—the Top of Funnel (TOF) engagement campaign—is the single most important strategy for generating new customers in 2025. Not only does it expand your reach, but it also improves performance across other channels like Google Ads.

This blog will break down exactly why the TOF campaign is so powerful, how to structure it, and how it directly impacts your new customer acquisition cost (NCAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and overall brand growth.

Why Top of Funnel Engagement Campaigns Drive Scalable Growth

When most brands try to scale, they lean heavily on purchase or traffic campaigns. On the surface, that makes sense—you want sales, so why not optimize for purchases? But here’s the problem: without feeding Meta’s algorithm with new, cold audiences through engagement, your purchase campaigns eventually hit a ceiling. Costs go up, ROAS declines, and NCAC spikes.

A Top of Funnel engagement campaign solves this problem by continuously introducing fresh, cold traffic into your ecosystem. Here’s why it works:

1. Engagement Objective > Reach or Traffic

   • Reach campaigns prioritize cheap impressions, often targeting low-quality users who never buy.

   • Traffic campaigns flood your site with clicks but dilute your pixel with low-intent visitors who bounce after 10 seconds.

   • Engagement campaigns, however, optimize for people who actually interact with your ads—watching videos, liking, commenting, or sharing. These micro-engagements train Meta’s AI to find the most relevant prospects.

2. Meta’s Algorithm Loves Engagement
   With advancements in AI, Meta knows more about user interests than ever before. Its core mission is to keep users scrolling by showing them highly engaging content. By creating videos that cold audiences want to watch, you’re aligning with Meta’s objective—and Meta rewards you by putting your content in front of the right people at the lowest possible CPM.

3. Building a Warmer Audience Pipeline
   Instead of relying only on expensive purchase campaigns, you’re constantly generating engaged audiences who can later be retargeted with conversion-focused ads. This warms up cold prospects, making them far more likely to buy once they hit your website.

4. Boosting Google Ads Performance
   An overlooked benefit: TOF campaigns massively increase branded search volume. As more people engage with your ads on Meta, they later search for your brand on Google. And as every media buyer knows, branded search traffic has the highest intent and the lowest cost per conversion.

In short, running a TOF engagement campaign is like constantly priming the pump. You’re always introducing new audiences, which keeps your scaling campaigns from hitting a growth ceiling.

How to Structure a Winning TOF Engagement Campaign

Now that you know why this strategy is essential, let’s break down exactly how to set it up.

1. Campaign Setup

• Create a Top of Funnel campaign with the Engagement objective.

• Avoid Reach or Traffic objectives, which waste spend on low-quality clicks.

2. Ad Set Settings

• Use broad targeting (Meta’s algorithm is smarter than any manual targeting).

• Add strict exclusions: website visitors, add-to-carts, past purchasers, and customer email lists synced via Klaviyo. This ensures only true cold audiences see these ads.

3. Creative Format

• Videos only—no images. Meta measures engagement through watch time, and video always outperforms static posts.

• Launch 3–5 distinct video variations, each designed to capture cold attention while introducing your brand story. Focus on experiences, transformations, or emotional hooks that resonate with first-time viewers.

4. Optimization & Scaling

• Don’t expect immediate sales—this is a customer acquisition engine, not a conversion campaign.

• Track GA4 analytics to confirm bounce rates improve and engaged sessions increase compared to traffic campaigns.

• After running TOF consistently, you’ll see improved conversion rates in your purchase campaigns and higher branded search volume in Google Ads.

5. Long-Term Benefits

• Reduces NCAC by continually feeding new audiences into your funnel.

• Raises ROAS on purchase campaigns since you’re retargeting warm, engaged users instead of cold strangers.

• Skyrockets brand awareness, leading to stronger search intent, repeat buyers, and long-term growth.

The beauty of this approach is its simplicity. One campaign, one ad set, and a handful of videos can transform the trajectory of your e-commerce brand. It’s the same structure Elite Brands has been running successfully for years, and in 2025—with new iOS privacy updates making cold traffic more expensive—it’s more critical than ever.