How do you know if your evergreen funnel is working?

In this quick tip episode of Art of Online Business, I’m sharing another Ask Rick episode. A question I hear from my Accelerator coaching members all the time is how to know if your evergreen funnel is working.

This question can be tricky to answer if you don’t have all of the pieces to the puzzle. It can be overwhelming to look at the entire funnel at once. To make it easier, we need to look at each piece of the funnel and see where the actual breakdowns are.

By collecting the right data and getting the whole picture, you can begin to optimize your funnel to increase your revenue. That is the foundation that you need to scale your business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The importance of breaking your funnel down to look at the smaller pieces
• The foundation of whether your funnel is working or not 
• Why you have to understand your ROI
• What you need your ad agency to do 
• The software I use to get all of the data that I need to get a better picture of my ROI
• The stats I look for with webinars 
• Other numbers you need to know when evaluating your funnel.

Links & Resources:

• Check out Kleq
• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

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And. All right. Welcome to today’s episode of The Art of Online Business podcast. My friends, this is another Ask Rik episode on this quick tip Friday. And as many of you know, I have a four year old daughter, Maya. And one of the things that Amy, my wife and I are trying to teach her is problem solving. And so she’ll ask for help with something. And we’re really encouraging her to try to figure it out for herself. And one of the things that we encourage or ask her is, do you have all of the necessary information or in in her case, a lot of times she’s asking in terms of like whatever she’s playing with and like, well, do you have all the pieces or do you have everything that you need in order to be able to answer that question and a question I get all the time whether just in general, but especially from 

the members of my coaching program, my accelerator coaching program is how do I verify if something is working. And in this particular instance, I was asked recently, how do I verify if my evergreen funnel is working? And because this is such a common question, I wanted to do an episode on this and share how I go about how my brain thinks about answering that, answering this question. Because just like with my daughter is like, if you don’t have all the pieces of information, it makes it that much harder to be able to answer the question.

If we have incomplete information, then there’s going to be gaps in in trying to answer whatever it is that we’re trying to answer. And so when you’re trying to verify whether your funnel is working or not, one of the overwhelming things. Can be that you’re trying to look at the entire funnel all at once. Right. So just like if if if Maya is looking at, I don’t know, her Peppa Pig house and she’s trying to figure out why something isn’t working, well, she might be looking at the entire house to try to figure that out rather than the one specific piece that she’s having an issue with. Right. And so to make things easier. You need to be breaking down each piece of the funnel to see where the actual breakdowns, breakdowns are, if there are any. And so I would encourage my in this case here, looking at her Peppa Pig house is to okay, what is the problem that you perceive there to be and maybe she’ll answer whatever that might be and it’s like, all right, where’s the first place that we can look at rather than looking at the overarching big problem and assume there’s a problem? What is the one specific place that we can start? And the foundation of whether or not my whether my evergreen funnel is is working is simply are you making more revenue than what you are paying to put traffic through the funnel? How much revenue are you making based on how much that you’re that you’re spending to send traffic through the funnel? That is just that is the is are you making is your ROI more than what you’re spending to to put through it? And if you don’t know, if you can’t answer that question then now you’ve got issues, now you’ve got challenges. 

Oftentimes we know how much we’re spending right to put traffic into the funnel. So like in this funnel that that I was asked about, they were running ads into into the funnel, but they had no idea what revenue was resulting from the funnel. And so again, most of us can answer like, oh yeah, we spent whatever it might be 1000 on on ads, but we oftentimes don’t know what the revenue is as a result of that ad spend. And that’s obviously a big problem. We have to know how much revenue is resulting from the funnel. And if we don’t know that, we can’t truly cannot truly verify if the funnel is working or not. And everybody wants to scale, right? We like I want to scale this funnel, I want to scale whatever it is. Well, we shouldn’t scale anything until we have complete insight into whether it’s actually providing a positive return on investment. You know, I’ve been working with somebody in an accelerator now for several months and they were spending a lot of money in the second half of 20, 21, first half of 2022.

They were spending a significant amount of money, multiple five figures per month on their ads. But they couldn’t pinpoint they couldn’t tell how much revenue was was resulting in from that ad spend. And so and of course, they want to they want to scale their business. But the first thing we have to answer is like, is the ad spend resulting in a positive ROI? And so, again, most people don’t know that number. And my intention with this is to help you be able to answer that. And so if we don’t know what that number is, you know, or if we don’t know how much revenue we’re generating from the funnel, we have to figure it out. And that was the case with this person who was asking me like, hey, can you can we verify if this if my evergreen funnel is working or not? And as it turns out, they had incomplete data. They you know, and there’s a lot of different ways to be to be looking at this. But they had complete incomplete data. They didn’t know what their. Landing page conversion rate. They didn’t have that landing page conversion rate on in their data, and they happen to be running video ads. And so they had the actual data about the video ads themselves, meaning like, you know, view rate and and click rate and all that stuff. But we had no insight into. All right, we know what the click rate is, but what is the conversion of landing page? What is the landing page conversion rate of the traffic that is coming from the ad to the landing page? And it was going into a webinar, so we knew what the webinar numbers were in terms of show up rate and how long people were watching and so forth.

But we had no insight whatsoever into how much revenue was being generated. And by the way, this campaign was being run by an ad agency and the ad and they’ve been running this campaign for a long time. And the ad agency wasn’t even providing this information. And this is one of those things that drives me nuts when ad agencies are just running ads just to run ads like, yeah, we’ll send traffic. Okay, cool. But like, what is the ROI of the effort that you are putting into? Like, why are we paying you? We’re paying you to run to run ads against a specific goal. And if you are working with an ads manager or an ad agency, you need to be giving them a goal of what you’re trying to do. This is not a case of like, Oh, okay, I’m going to pay you whatever, 4000 a month or five, five grand a month just to run ads to my funnel. Well, no, like we need to be looking at a positive ROI and you give them a goal of the ROI. Now, granted, the ad agency cannot doesn’t have any control over how well your webinar works or how well your funnel works, but they need to be tracking that information so that they can so that you can be working in tandem to be able to improve the specific stats. 

This is one of those things where. I can go on and on and on about this. It drives me nuts that the ad agency wasn’t even providing this information to this person. I was I was talking to and giving them incomplete information and just kind of like going along as if everything’s hunky dory. Well, no, that wasn’t the case. And so anyway, so if we don’t know how much revenue is being generated from our funnel, this is a you know, this is definitely different ways to do that. The easiest thing to do is to create a unique funnel in our landing page software, right? So I use click, click Rick, Walmart.com, forward slash, click, click. That’s my affiliate link. I’ve been using them for a long time now. And you know, so we can set up a funnel that is specific to our ads, everything from landing page to and you can use the same exact webinar that you might be using wherever, but you’re creating a unique funnel for your ads. And so now that the only data that you’re seeing from that specific funnel is coming from your ad campaign, right? And now and I’ve talked about this in past episodes, but you can start comparing that data to what you’re seeing in Ads Manager. 

And then the other one the other way is, and I highly recommend that that you’re doing this now is using Google UTM codes and setting up, you know a dashboard and and data studio to set up unique codes for each UTMB codes for each of the ads that you’re running and running goals setting up goals in Google Analytics to track conversions. Right. And by the way, just a complete side note on Google Analytics this coming July, you need to be migrated over to GA for Google Analytics for as opposed to the universal analytics that we’ve been using for years now. And part of setting that GA four up is treating those goals and the goal is basically a funnel, right? What is the goal of or why am I running this campaign in the first place? Well, I want to run ads to my webinar. And that webinar, the goal is to go into a sale, whether it’s on the webinar or the follow up sequence. Well, that’s what the goal is, is like different goals, like, all right, sign up for the webinar landing page conversion rate and then sales and etc.. So you’re creating a data set that allows you to look at it and say, Oh, my funnel is actually working, or No, my funnel is not working. And then from there, once you have this setup, then you get to go in and break down each part of the funnel and just like going back to Maya and if she’s looking at her overarching, you know, her Peppa Pig house and she’s thinking that there’s something wrong, well, if she’s looking at the entire picture that can feel overwhelming. 

It’s the same thing for a funnel. You want to break down each part of the funnel. We have to look at, you know, again, what’s your landing page conversion rate from your ads? Well, why is that important? Because if you have a low landing page conversion rate, your ad costs are going to be higher. There is some sort of breakdown, a discrepancy between the consistency between your ad and the messaging and the landing page. Right. And if people are getting to your landing page and bouncing, it’s telling the algorithm from whatever platform that you’re using, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or what have you, that it’s not a good user experience and it’s going to hurt you in terms of running your ads. If if you’re doing a webinar. In this case here, the person I was helping was doing a webinar. I don’t really take a ton of stock into how many sales are being made on the actual webinar. What I do want to see from the webinar is how long, how long are people staying on the webinar? Because if you’re when you’re tracking that and you see there’s a total drop at 35% into the webinar, well you get to go look at the webinar and say, All right, what’s happening at this time? Know 35% in the webinar, like what am I doing? What am I talking about? What’s happened up to that point? And so if there’s a huge drop, a consistent drop in your evergreen webinar at that point, while you get to make changes to it and again, it’s using the data to make a decision.

And then also how many people that are signing up are actually watching the webinar. But again, the bigger stat that I want to see is what is the lead to sale conversion rate? What is the number of sales that are happening from your funnel in relation to the number of leads? And you just take number of sales divided by number of leads. Also, what is your earnings per lead? So you take your total revenue. So for example, if you take a 30 day window to look at, let’s just say you look at the month of February, how much money did we generate from the funnel in the month of February and then divide that by the number of leads that you put into. A funnel. And so let’s just say that your earning per lead is $30, and your cost per lead that you’re paying is $5.67. Well, that’s a pretty good gap, right? That’s a pretty good discrepancy between the discrepancy is in the right word. 

A gap is a better way to say it, between $5.67 and $30, the bigger the gap, the better, because you’re paying $5.67 per lead. And the earning per lead that you’re bringing to the funnel is $30. The idea is to stretch that gap even bigger. And so it’s like, okay, how do we increase our earning per lead and decrease our cost per lead? And you can do one thing at a time, obviously, but these are the types 

of numbers that we need to know. What are your email open rates, you know, during your quote unquote card open period are your open enrollment period after the webinar, after your evergreen, what are your email click rates? And I understand that it’s all subjective, right? Because the rates are higher than what they normally are because of, you know, automatic clicks and opens and all this other stuff. But at least you’ve got benchmarks. And so you have to know these numbers. If you don’t know these things, it’s okay because you can only change things going forward. But the idea is to start. Collecting and tracking these data points so that you can start by verifying whether your funnel is actually working or not. And then when you have all of the data, when you have the complete picture, then you can start optimizing from there. And as it turned out, when I was helping this person answer the question, Hey, can we verify whether my evergreen funnel is working or not? We had incomplete data. 

We had no idea about the specific revenue. Being attributed to the ad campaign. Now, she had overall revenue in her business, but there was traffic coming from organic social media and email list and that sort of thing. So it was all kind of grouped together. We had no insight into, Oh, I can directly correlate this much revenue from my ad campaign. And again, ad agency needs to be able to guide that conversation with their client. And again, they’re not responsible for the actual funnel performance and stuff like that, but tracking it and like, hey, this is the ROI from what we’re running here. That’s basic stuff, right? So you need to be able to have all the data to be able to answer the question, Hey, is my can I verify whether this is working or not? Do I know what my ROI is? Do I know what my revenue is coming from this specific ad spend coming into my funnel? What’s my earnings per lead? What’s my lead to sale conversion rate? And so these are this is just one example of the types of things that I really help people with when I’m coaching them inside of our accelerator coaching program, because we’ve got to know the numbers first and make sure that we’re tracking everything cleanly before we scale. And that’s just a common thing I see every single day from all different types of of businesses. So if you’d like some help with that, if you like coaching from me to be able to help you grow and scale your business. 

And because when you dial this thing in, when you dial in a funnel like that, for example, then you get the funnel doing the heavy lifting for you in the business, and then you can start the process of working less in the business. And that’s one of the big things that we help you do when I’m coaching you inside of our accelerator coaching program. So if you want to learn more, go to Rick Muller Ford Slash Accelerator. It’s a short application right there. Fill out the application and look forward to reviewing that application. What additional questions do you have when it comes to breaking down your funnel where there are things that I didn’t cover today that you have questions about, You know, feel free to send me an email. Rick at Rick Muller That’s my direct email. Shoot it over or shoot me a DM on Instagram. I’m at Rick Moretti on Instagram. All right. This is the key here, my friend. Having the data to make informed decisions and using that data to make the decisions, not emotion. That’s the key to getting things squared away and the foundation before we scale anything. Thank you, as always for tuning in today. I hope this was helpful for you. I appreciate you. Until next time, be well and I’ll chat with you soon.