Most marketers are familiar with the traditional funnel. Awareness at the top, transformation at the bottom, and a straight line connecting the two. But the reality of the customer journey rarely looks like that. Users are trapped in what Google initially coined as the “dirty middle,” a complex and unwieldy path formed by specialized loadings and competing signals.
The subjective phase is at the heart of this problem. While the awareness and conversion stages provide tangible markers of success, the consideration stage is geared towards imperfect proxies such as video engagement or site traffic. Until now, the only option available has been to focus on these platform KPIs instead of metrics that represent actual consumer change. Failing to navigate this phase correctly, marketers risk stagnant growth and low demand.
TikTok’s Market Scope and Attitude Ads are the first tools we’ve tested that address this directly. We used them on a beauty client earlier this year, and the results didn’t improve. They were deciding.
Numbers first – Our Strongest Brand Promotion Results to Date
Before going through the process, here is what the campaign produces.
Audience growth from before to after the campaign:
Brand Lift research results, benchmarked against industry trends and similar work:
These are our strongest product elevation results to date. Likeability, purpose, and likability from a flat bench are important. It means that this campaign not only reached people, it changed the way they thought about this product.
What makes this different
Our strategic partnership with TikTok gave us early access to Market Scope and Cognitive Ads while still in alpha. The campaign had three layers in parallel: Top Views placement for a wider reach, a Focused Views campaign for sustained engagement, and a consideration campaign to drive users towards purchase intent.
The campaign of imagination is what changed the power. Rather than focusing on a single KPI platform, it draws on eight behavioral signals simultaneously: views, shares, likes, comments, clicks, product card interactions, searches, and 6-second video views. The result is a much richer picture of buyer intent than any single metric can provide.
The second tool, Market Scope, gave us something we didn’t have before: a live intelligence layer that showed audience sizes at each stage of the funnel and let’s compare them directly to our competitor’s benchmarks. We used it to identify where the consideration pool was thin, what content was driving positive engagement at that time, and what audience segments to work on targeting. That real-time data shaped the way we set up the Focused Views campaign, basing it on what actually felt better than what we thought would happen.
Together, these tools give us visibility into a level of consideration that standard field reporting doesn’t.
Why is this important in a dirty environment
The assumption challenge has always been that changing consumer sentiments are not reflected in click data. Someone moving from vague awareness to actual purchase intent leaves almost no measurable footprint on a typical campaign report. The tools available have forced marketers to choose a representative and hope that it is associated with something real.
Market Scope and Conceptual Ads change that by measuring patterns of behavior that collectively reflect a purpose – not a single action, but a collection of them. The 5,000%+ growth in our target audience was not a reporting artefact. The Brand Lift Study confirmed it: those people have truly changed in their stated intent and brand preference.
To open that. It is not that the measurement of the stage of consideration is now easy. That for the first time, there is a reliable signal to improve against.
Bottom line
The middle ground is not a creative problem or a budget problem. It’s a balancing act. Brands get caught up in it because they try to navigate complex consumer journeys with tools designed for simple tasks.
Using our scientific approach, these results give us confidence that Market Width and Attitude Ads can do what proxy KPIs can’t: tell you if your mid-funnel activity is actually working. We roll out this approach across our client portfolio, especially brands where the path to purchase is long, predictable, or competitive with categories.
If that sounds like your category, it’s worth discussing.
