How many people bought your course? Funnel Example, part 6

In this series of posts, we’re breaking down how to create a sales funnel, the decisions to make along the way, how to track what happens, and how to interpret the results. We’re doing all this so that we can better answer the question “Where should I focus my energy the next time I launch this offer?” By now, you’ve:

• Created your offer (an online course, in this case)
• Grown your audience
• Run a challenge to help your audience members get a quick win
• Delivered a masterclass where you pitched your course to dive deeper
• Shared your sales page far and wide

Now, you want to see how many people bought your course!

Layer 4: How many people bought your course?

• How well did my sales page do at speaking to my audience’s fears, desires, hopes, and dreams, to convince them that I have the answer for a pressing concern of theirs right now?

You will also have some people who are already sold on your course. They don’t care what the sales page says, because they’ve already decided to buy. Just as in several previous layers, our numbers are imperfect, because we won’t be able to separate these people out from those who need to read the sales page. But in the real world, we do the best we can with what’s available.

How to track

Again, we’re relying on the integration between your website and your email service to tag those buying your course. Then you’ll be able to check their tags to see how they first came into your world, or which sales page link they clicked.

How much did they read?

One thing you could potentially split out is how much of the sales page they read before clicking the buy button. Most sales pages will have several buy buttons, so you could set up tracking to count how many people click on each one to know how far down the page they’ve read before buying.

Then, you could see if the top of the sales page was convincing enough to bring in most of your sales. Or you could see that most people scrolled all the way to the bottom to click that buy button.

One pitfall with this idea is that they could simply scroll all the way to the bottom, knowing there will usually be prices and a buy button there, and never have read the rest of the page. Or they could read to the bottom, and go back up to re-read something, and then click a buy button in the middle of the page, giving you the wrong idea about how much they read.

When you’re working out what to track, these are the sorts of considerations to make about whether you can get good data to then make good decisions from. In this case, I’d caution you against trying to gauge how much of the sales page they read based on which buy button they clicked. It’s too rife with potential misunderstanding.

However, the tech is evolving all the time, so you may well find another way to track how much of the sales page they read. If you find a reliable way, then you can use it to answer this question.

What were your results?

Back to the example at hand, we’re just after the end result: how many people actually bought your course?

Let’s say you find that, of the people who bought your course:

• 3 were from Instagram
• 28 were from Facebook
• 10 were from LinkedIn

What were your conversion rates?

For this step, you take the people who bought and divide by the number of people who looked at your sales page:

Total: 41 264 = 15.5%

What does that mean?

Weirdly, here, you see that your Facebook audience, which has been so engaged and interested throughout, has not bought your course in the same proportion as your other social media audiences. Once you know that, you’ll want to ponder why that might be. Perhaps more of your LinkedIn and Instagram audience members have ready cash for your course. Perhaps your sales page copy spoke less well to your Facebook audience’s concerns. Perhaps those numbers (especially for Instagram and LinkedIn) are just so small that we shouldn’t read too much into their percentages.

What next?

In the next post, we’ll look at your overall conversion rates. We’ll think about what that means and what to do with that information.

Check out the whole series here.