Most marketers are familiar with the traditional funnel. Awareness at the top, conversion at the bottom, and a straight line connecting the two. But the reality of the customer journey rarely looks like that. Users get trapped in what Google first coined as “the messy middle,” the complex and non-linear path shaped by choice overload and competing signals.
The consideration stage sits at the heart of this problem. Whilst the awareness and conversion stages offer concrete markers of success, the consideration stage is optimised towards imperfect proxies such as video engagement or site traffic. Until now, the only choice available has been optimisation towards these platform KPIs rather than metrics that represent genuine consumer mindset shifts. Failing to navigate this stage correctly, advertisers run the risk of stagnant growth and a diminishing demand pool.
TikTok’s Market Scope and Consideration Ads are the first tools we’ve tested that directly address this. We ran them on a beauty client earlier this year, and the results weren’t incremental. They were decisive.
The numbers first – our Strongest Brand Lift Results To Date
Before walking through the methodology, here’s what the campaign produced.
Audience growth from before to after the campaign:
Brand Lift Study results, benchmarked against industry norms and similar activity:
These are our strongest brand lift results to date. Favourability, intent, and preference moving off a flat benchmark matters. It means the campaign didn’t just reach people, it shifted how they thought about the brand.
What made this different
Our strategic partnership with TikTok gave us early access to Market Scope and Consideration Ads while still in alpha. The campaign ran three layers in parallel: a Top View placement for broad reach, a Focused Views campaign for sustained engagement, and a Consideration campaign to pull users toward purchase intent.
The Consideration campaign is what changed the dynamic. Rather than optimising toward a single platform KPI, it draws on eight behavioural signals simultaneously: view-throughs, shares, likes, comments, clicks, product card interactions, searches, and 6-second video views. The result is a much richer picture of consumer 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 funnel stage and let us compare them directly against competitor benchmarks. We used it to identify where the consideration pool was thin, which content was driving engagement in the beauty vertical at that moment, and which audience segments to activate in targeting. That real-time data shaped how we set up the Focused Views campaign, anchoring it to what was actually resonating rather than what we assumed would.
Together, these tools gave us visibility into the consideration stage that platform-standard reporting simply doesn’t offer.
Why this matters for the messy middle
The consideration challenge has always been that consumer mindset shifts don’t show up in click data. Someone moving from vague awareness to genuine purchase intent leaves almost no measurable trace in a standard campaign report. The tools available forced advertisers to pick a proxy and hope it correlated with something real.
Market Scope and Consideration Ads change that by measuring behaviour patterns that collectively signal intent — not a single action, but a cluster of them. The 5,000%+ growth in our consideration audience wasn’t a reporting artefact. The Brand Lift Study confirmed it: those people genuinely shifted in their stated intent and brand preference.
That’s the unlock. It’s not that consideration-stage measurement is now easy. It’s that for the first time, there’s a credible signal to optimise against.
Bottom line
The messy middle isn’t a creative problem or a budget problem. It’s a measurement problem. Brands get stuck in it because they’re trying to navigate a complex consumer journey with tools that were built for simpler tasks.
Using our scientific approach, these results give us confidence that Market Scope and Consideration Ads can do what proxy KPIs never could: tell you whether your mid-funnel activity is actually working. We’re rolling this approach out across our client portfolio, specifically for brands where the path to purchase is long, considered, or category-competitive.
If that sounds like your category, it’s worth a conversation.
