[social_warfare]
You know you need to track data to know whether your marketing efforts matter… (I’ve talked about it often enough!)
But, do you know which numbers to track – and WHY?
Too many people gather “all” the data, just to have metrics in the spreadsheet. Too few people understand what those numbers mean + what story they tell.
But here’s the thing.
Every metric you (or your ads agency) track should tell a story about what’s going on behind-the-scenes.
That’s what will point you in the direction of where to focus your problem-solving skills next.
In this episode I’ll explain what I mean by “storytelling” with numbers!
And I’ll walk you through the actual spreadsheet we use to track funnel + ad performance for clients, plus…
- Which numbers matter most
- How to troubleshoot a basic webinar funnel
- And where to focus with a high-ticket funnel
Tune in for an incredibly detailed look behind-the-scenes! And then, get to work creating your own tracking spreadsheet.
If you’re ready to work individually with Team Hirsh, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply!
And if you want even more behind-the-scenes details from my team of Facebook + Instagram ads experts, check out our monthly Hirsh Marketing Report where we share tips + tricks you can implement a.s.a.p. Go to HirshMarketingReport.com to get instant access.
Key Points:
[4:17] Your numbers should tell the story of what’s going on in your funnel
[5:49] Here’s an example with a webinar funnel
[11:20] Let’s say you have a high-ticket funnel…
[13:27] Your numbers point you in the direction you should focus on next
[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Hello and welcome back to the podcast everyone. Hope you’re having an amazing week and an amazing first month in 2020. I am getting ready to have a baby soon, when this episode releases, and really have been diving into a lot of our company. I’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast, but there’s something with having a baby and nesting and what it does to you as an entrepreneur, because it makes you kind of want to get everything in your business [organized], re-look at it all and get it to a [certain] place, because you know you’re going to go through a huge life change. So, I’ve been doing that. January, I’ve been super focused on our ads team, actually. So, Quarter 4 of last year, I was really focused on our marketing and sales. My ads team really runs our delivery without me, but I felt like it had been a while since I kind of went through and personally audited things, so that’s what I’ve spent a lot of January doing.
One of those things that we updated and rolled out in January… this was pre-planned but I had a lot of weight and feedback on it, and we rolled it out to our clients in January… is, updated reporting. And so we re-did all of our clients’ spreadsheets for reporting, and we updated the format, we updated… not what we’re reporting, because obviously we’ve been reporting all the key metrics all along, but we updated the way it looks, the way it flows, and we actually had a quarterly goal. So, for quarter 1, this quarter, [the goal] that we set, which is like, “Get our clients to read their spreadsheets,” because we send out the spreadsheets weekly to our clients, in weekly reports, and a lot of them, I think, read the emails, but then they don’t go into the spreadsheets, because spreadsheets can be overwhelming and numbers can be overwhelming, and there’s a lot of numbers we track, because we don’t just track Facebook.
We track the actual funnel conversion, too. So, we’re tracking a webinar show-up rate, or a webinar completion rate, or purchase conversion rate, and purchases. And so, we’re tracking the whole funnel in a spreadsheet. And so, a lot of our clients would just kind of not look at the spreadsheet, I think, because it was overwhelming. So, our quarterly goal was, “Get our clients to start reading their spreadsheets.” That’s our goal. Meaning, in order to do that, our first step, and what we did in month one of the quarter was, simplify the spreadsheets and what they look like, and make them flow better.
And so, with that is, leading into today’s episode, which is, Let Your Numbers Tell a Story. So, what I did was dive into our tracking, and I had to think of it as, “If someone’s reading this who doesn’t understand spreadsheets, who doesn’t understand numbers, who’s overwhelmed by numbers,” versus, a lot of my team loves numbers. And so we can dig in and figure out numbers, and we talk in numbers. We love data, right? But we’re trying to create this for people who maybe don’t. So I had to look at it from that perspective. We have an amazing girl on our team who does our spreadsheets, and so she can make these crazy, complicated, amazing spreadsheets. But then, if somebody can’t read it or understand it, or know what the numbers mean, it doesn’t mean anything.
And so, someone who’s really good at that, you have to work on the actual understanding of it, too. So, what I came to was, first of all, I think that a lot of people confuse their reporting and marketing and numbers with, like […] I’ve heard people say this to me, and actually I have a friend who said this, “How do you know the conversion of each page in your funnel?” And my response was like, “Well, that’s not really our goal.” When you say, “I want to see how a funnel is converting,” you’re not looking at, how did each page convert? What you want is your numbers to tell a story. And so you want your numbers… each major step in a funnel has a metric tied to it. And then you have what that metric is, and then you can see where the drop-off is in the funnel.
So what we did in this report, in this new spreadsheet is, we broke out the sections. And so, we’ve got Facebook ad performance, and then funnel performance, and then totals at the bottom. That’s going down the sheet. And then on the vertical, on the columns, we have a total for all of them, and it’s broken down weekly and then totalled for the month. And then we have a goal and a percentage to goal for every major metric. And what this does is it very clearly allows you to, one, look at the funnel stats in order of the funnel, which I’ll talk about in a minute, and then, two, look at where you’re not meeting your goal. And so, I’ll also go into detail about what that could look like, potentially, for you.
So first, let’s use a webinar funnel as an example, and I actually have a Facebook sheet in front of me, so this will be great. So, let’s use a webinar funnel. For example, so, if you were looking at the Facebook ad performance, what are the main metrics that you would need to know from a webinar funnel? You would need to know your total clicks that you’re getting on the ad. You would want to know the cost per click, the click-through rate. You would want to know, then, the total leads that you got, that went to your landing page to opt-in to the webinar, your cost per lead. And then that data would actually give you your landing page conversion, that first page.
So, from that data I would be able to see, and answer questions like, “Are my ads getting clicks? Are my ads getting conversions? Is my landing page converting? Is there a breakdown here?” For example, if I had $1 clicks and $10 registrations for my webinar, I’d have a landing page issue, because I’m getting $1 clicks, and then it’s costing me $10 to get a registration. My landing page is not converting, because I’m getting way more clicks than I am conversions. So that’s the Facebook ad performance. So we have a chunk there, and what we do is, we set a goal like, “How many leads and clicks do we actually need to get, and what’s our landing page goal conversion to get, in order to achieve our goal for the month?”
And then next to that it’s got percentage of goal, so I can easily see where we’re missing, where we’re not hitting the percentage of goal, if I was to look at this sheet as a client. And then we’ve got another section, that’s the funnel performance. And if it’s a webinar, you’re going to look at registrants, attendees, your show-up rate, your completion rate, and then the purchases happening from your webinar. That’s your funnel conversion, right? Because what that does is, it tells you, let’s say we’re hitting our goal for number of webinar registrants, we’re hitting our goal for show-up rate and attendees, but we’re not hitting our goal for purchases. So, that would tell me I need to look at either the way I pitch on the webinar, my messaging in my offer, my follow-up email sequence, or my retargeting ads. Because I’m not getting purchases, but I’m hitting all my metrics up to that point. And so now, my numbers are telling me this story where I know what I need to go focus on, right?
And then we just have totals. So then we look at our total ad spend, and our total sales, and our profit, and our ROI for that whole funnel. So we’ve got that all in the spreadsheet. And that obviously tells us overall performance, but going deeper, we’re able to see what it is, where the gap is. And so, instead of saying… Sometimes people just gather data to gather data, and they’re like, “I need every email open rate, every click rate, I need this.” And those are all good metrics, but your numbers should tell a story.
So pull out a key metric at every spot in your funnel, and then track it, compare it to what your goal was. Because if you’ve listened to my podcast, you’d know step 1 of The Hirsh process, you’d know you’re never starting ads unless you have a goal set up, unless you know what that goal is going into it. So we fill this out beforehand, what is that goal? And then it tells you exactly where it drops off. So, like I said, let’s flip this around and say we are getting really high cost per lead webinar registrants, really low show-up rate. But we’re getting a sale, we’ve got one sale in there. And it looks like we’re halfway to goal. But the problem [is]… we wouldn’t go look at like, “The problem is my offer,” in that situation. We’d look at, “We’re not getting enough webinar registrants and people aren’t watching our webinars, so not enough people are getting pitched our offer.” So where do we go? We go to the first problem, we go to get more webinar registrants at a lower cost and make sure those people show up and watch the webinar.
So, do you see how the numbers should tell you a story? And then you can go deeper. You can go deeper there. If you were trying to get your webinar registration cost per lead down or your show-up rate up, you would be looking at things like, “my ad copy, my images, my targeting, my clicks that I’m getting in the ad.” You’d be looking at, “my reminder emails, to make sure people are watching my webinars. Is there an incentive for them to show up live?” Then you can go deeper right there, but your numbers told you a story, and they told you where to go focus.
I want to use one more funnel as an example, and that would be if you have a high ticket funnel, and you’re trying to get applications and calls. So I have it on the sheet in front of me, I can look at this, so let’s pull it out. We’ve got Facebook ad performance. So we want to know our clicks on the ad, our cost per click, our click-through rate, our total opt-ins, if you had a first step to the application. If you didn’t, then you wouldn’t have that. You would be looking at clicks to the landing page. Then you’ve got your funnel performance, which usually looks like, “Did you get applications submitted and/or calls booked,” and what was the cost of each of those? What was the cost of the application submitted? What was the cost of the call booked? And then you can put in formulas where you’re like, “Okay, what’s the conversion rate of… How many people who fill out an application are booking a call? How many people who are opting in to the first step of the funnel are booking a call?”
And then you’ve got purchases. What’s happening with those calls? Are they selling? Then we’ve got our total Facebook ad spend, total revenue, total ROI, and it’s summarized in there. And you want to be looking at this weekly and monthly, and then have a comparison. So if I was looking at these numbers, and I had a cost per click of $1, and then $1.50, that’s good cost per click, and then I had people filling out an application, but then I didn’t have people booking a call. Where would I go look? I’d go look at my abandoned application ads, my abandoned application email sequence, the quality of the audience. Why would they take time to fill out an application and not book a call? And so, that would tell me a story and tell me where I needed to go focus my time. And each one of these metrics, again, we have a goal, we have a percentage to our goal for the month. We know if we’re on track. You don’t have to wait months and months and months to know if you’re on track with ads. You can see very quickly, “Are we at least on track with our percentage to our goal?” if that makes sense.
So, that’s how you do your ad tracking, and your numbers tell a story and should point you in the direction of where you need to go put more focus. So, if one thing is too high, you put the focus there and you look at, “What is everything that contributes to that step?” So for what I just said, if it was, they’re filling out an application and not booking a call, it’s everything that contributes to that stat of them dropping off… abandoned application and retargeting ads, emails, the way you’re positioning the call. All of those things are what matter to get that stat up, so we go look at all of that.
So, that is how you do your reporting. It shouldn’t be overly complicated. It should be simple. It should tell you a story, it should tell you where to go focus, and it should be centered, also, around your goal that you set before you ran ads. If you want this type of reporting, we have amazing spreadsheets that we rolled out for clients, I’d say some of the best out there. I’m so proud of these spreadsheets and how they tell a story to somebody who doesn’t really even understand numbers. They’re so obvious. You just look at the numbers, and then you follow the process to get it to where you want it, to convert, and then you just keep following it. So, you follow the process of, track your numbers, see where the hole is, fix the hole, do it again until it works! And that’s how marketing always works.
So if you want this type of support, we would love to work with you. You can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with Team Hirsh, go through our application, and go through that process with us, because we really don’t take people who we don’t think we can definitely help. So, we have an in-depth application and screening process to signing our clients. We’ve got over a 95%, last month, client retention rate. [Our] average is 85% for the year, but over 95% last month, because we’re so focused on this, and we are so careful about who we work with. And so, if you want that level of data, reporting, guidance, consultation on your funnel and your strategy, go to HelpMyStrategy.com, apply to work with Team Hirsh. And if not, go fix your numbers. Get this reporting in place. Do not be running ads without reporting! And make sure your numbers are telling a story. I’ll see you all next time.