At 60% of normal budget, funnel-stage campaign structure doesn't just underperform — it actively cannibalizes itself.
I run paid media across 4 brands doing ₩50M+ combined monthly. Every time budgets have compressed 30-40% mid-quarter, the failure sequence in funnel-stage setups has been identical: retargeting campaigns hit learning phase resets almost immediately because their audience pools were already small. Cold prospecting then absorbs the remaining spend headroom because its short-window CPA looks artificially better. You end up starving the warm audiences you already paid to build. The retargeting campaign isn't failing because retargeting stopped working — it's failing because the structure can't protect budget allocation when the total envelope shrinks.
The post-iOS 14.5 wrinkle makes it worse. In accounts I've audited, retargeting campaigns were serving 40-50% of impressions to people with no detectable prior touch — Meta's model filling audience gaps with cold reach, billed at retargeting CPMs. Under full budget, that's annoying. Under compressed budget, it's structural collapse. Product-line campaigns degrade more gracefully because each campaign still converts on its own margin logic. When you cut a funnel-stage campaign you're betting on which stage matters more. When you cut a product-line campaign you're making a financial decision: this product's CAC ceiling doesn't justify the spend right now. Easier to defend, easier to reverse, and the ROAS held stable through 30-50% cuts in ways funnel-stage setups didn't.
The trap with product-line structure is audience fatigue that hides until it doesn't. I watched a single-product brand running ₩8M-₩12M monthly look perfectly healthy for 6 weeks, then drop 40% in ROAS over 10 days with no obvious external cause. Frequency had been creeping for a month. By the time ROAS moved, the audience was already burned. No funnel segmentation meant no early warning signal.
The structure that's actually held up best across compression cycles isn't a clean version of either approach — it's product-line at the campaign level with a lightweight funnel overlay at the ad set level. That hybrid is what I get into in the full post, along with how Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns interact differently with each structure and the specific account configuration I've landed on.
I wrote up the full breakdown — including the hybrid structure mechanics and where it still breaks — over on themedilog.
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