How To Find the Leak in Your Sales Funnel

Before we tackle this topic, you should know – most funnels don’t work when you launch them. Even if you’re a pro, it may take two, three, four, or ten tries until you get it right (just ask Russell who had to change his funnel for Clickfunnels six times before it converted). People who don’t launch their funnel because they are trying to get it perfect are deluded. Seriously. You’ll never know if it’s perfect until you launch it anyway, so put it out there – even if it’s ugly, boring, or lame.

That said, once it’s out there, how are you able to troubleshoot where the issues are when they come up? Here are some of my top tips for deciphering where your funnel might be leaking.

The Landing Page

There’s a super easy way to know if your landing page is converting. Look at the stats in your funnel. You want to see that number at 20% or higher. And it’s good if you can get at least 100 people to hit the landing page before you take that measurement. If 100 people hit the page and you have 20 email addresses, you’re running industry average. Anything higher is super cool, anything lower means there’s a problem.

Most of the time, the problem is with the offer. It’s just not good enough or sweet enough. I know no one wants to hear that, but it’s the most common issue. If you KNOW your offer is incredible, the next issue to look at – is copy. Copy is the second most important part of a funnel and so if you’re a professional copywriter, get thee to FunnelScripts right away!

If your offer is amazing and your copy is incredible and your landing page conversion rate is less than 20%, then your problem is simple:

The Traffic

If you’re using Facebook Ads, this means your audience targeting stinks or your Facebook Ad graphic and copy is misleading the people who are clicking. If you’re using something like Solo Ads, they might just be crappy leads. If you’re using something like a podcast or social media to get traffic, you could have a crazy offer that’s amazing, but it’s not speaking to your people. You need to spend a bit more time with them!

I’ve had people who’ve launched funnels to their list (so warm and hot traffic) and it converted REALLY well, but then on the ads – nada. That means the offer was great for people who know you well and already have built trust with you, but cold traffic needs more help before they trust you enough to buy.

Facebook Ads

So I want to make something clear here first. Facebook Ads are the chum you’re throwing in the water to attract the sharks. If the issue is with your Facebook Ad, it’ll be really obvious because no one will be clicking, or the cost per conversion will be super high. If no one is clicking, it really just goes back to the SAME problems that your landing page has. Because your FB Ad is advertising your landing page, the offer and/or the copy is usually the problem. And if both those things are dialed in, it’s audience targeting.

So as you can see, it’s pretty easy to diagnose this part of the funnel. People get so hung up on headlines and colors and all the tiny little adjustments that change a conversion rate on the page, but the moral of the story is – get your offer right, and write darn good copy.

In the order of importance, diagnose your funnel this way:

1. Check to see that the offer is AMAZING. One way to do this is to look at your free offer and price it as a product. Then sit with it. Would you pay money for what you’re giving away? If you wouldn’t, then it’s not good enough.
2. Get the copy right (this means the message and position. How are you positioning it?).
3. Adjust the audience targeting – this is pretty simple to do. Keep trying new audience targets until you get one that converts.

The Tripwire or Intro Offer

Alright so your landing page conversion rate is 40%. Your ads are doing well. But NO ONE is buying. This means there’s an issue with the tripwire sales page. How do you know if it’s not doing well? Go by the industry average. You want to see a buy rate of 1-5%. I’ve seen higher (6-10% to cold traffic). So once 100 people opt in, you want to see a MINIMUM of 1-5 sales. A couple really critical things to note:

1. If your Facebook Pixel and/or ad account is new, it’ll take longer. So give it time. Facebook needs to figure out who likes your stuff!
2. You have to consider the buy rate of the people that actually SEE the offer (so your subscribers), not the number of people that have hit the landing page.

If 100 people have hit the sales page, and you’ve got no sales, guess what? It’s most likely – the offer or the copy. I’m going to sound like a broken record here but it’s the same issue over and over again. You simply use a little math and stats to see where the drop off is, and then go after OFFER first, copy second.

The OTO Offer

If you’re running a funnel with an OTO and it isn’t converting, first make sure you know what is normal. I’ve seen anywhere from 2-10% of people take a well-placed OTO. Again, that number has to be calculated based on how many people SEE it. So if you’ve got 100 people hitting your landing page, 40 people opting in and seeing the tripwire offer, with all the industry averages, there may not even be a person who’s SEEN the OTO yet! So again, time is definitely a factor. You need enough people through the funnel to make it statistically significant. Let’s crunch some numbers.

• 500 people land on your landing page
• 40% of people opt in – 200 new subs
• 3% of people buy tripwire – 6 purchases
• 10% of people buy the OTO – .6 of a person

See what I mean?! Now let’s run 5000 people to your landing page.

• 5000 people land on your landing page
• 40% of people optin – 2000 new subs
• 3% of people buy tripwire – 60 purchases
• 10% of people buy the OTO – 6 purchases

As you can see, if you can INCREASE traffic to your landing page, or at least the conversions on your landing page, the OTO issues usually solve themselves.

If you can’t get conversions on the OTO even though the rest of the funnel is working well, most of the time it’s because you’re not creating a good solve/agitate cycle. What this means is that your OTO doesn’t match the tripwire. One of my client’s funnels, she sells a brand course, and then upsells a web course. They work REALLY well together. But if her OTO was MORE branding, people would be less likely to buy because the tripwire has already satisfied the appetite for branding.

The price difference might be too high as well. If your tripwire is $27, I wouldn’t try to sell an OTO any higher than $197 MAX.

Webinar Funnels

Okay, for those of you running webinar funnels, you might feel like it’s harder to diagnose the problem. You’ll use the same metrics for the landing page, and in terms of HOW many people should watch your webinar, it’s somewhere between 30-50% of people should show up. EMAIL sequences are HUGELY important in webinar funnels, so don’t skimp on those.

If you’re getting a decent opt-in rate and show up rate, and you’re not seeing between 5-10% of people buy off the webinar, then it’s the webinar script. And the webinar script is DIRECTLY tied to the offer. So again, offer and copy.

If you’re a new funnel builder, try not to get distracted by the tech and design. To get a working funnel, the offer and the copy are the two most CRITICAL components of ANY funnel. And if those are right, ugly or not, a funnel will convert once you get it in front of the right audience.