It has become clear to me that when it comes to web design services, too many of us hyper focus on the "look" and feel of things too soon in the game…

The reason I am putting together this training, and am making a transition (pivot) away from simply being a "web developer" is that I have found that the opinion among smaller sized companies and non-tech companies is that it is “easy” to "use WordPress" or outsource these roles such as Visual design, front-end development, WordPress Websites, and other CMSs.

Therefore the work is somewhat undervalued.

As designers or developers we want to believe that our designs and code are valuable and make a difference, but the truth is that businesses just want a good website/design because they believe that it will make them money.

So, it's important to plan first - and more important to start with really defining our niche and audience. This could be the reason why a lot of us fail to get the results we want, and not produce a positive return for every dollar or hour invested - is that we don't have an awareness of all of the fine details and metrics that can have an impact on the bottom line.

That is the purpose of this Digital Marketing, Product Sales Funnels, & Metrics spreadsheet. It is so that I can demonstrate how this narrative enables a small business owner or digital entrepreneur to easily grasp what kind of results they will need to achieve throughout the digital marketing strategy (funnel), to evaluate performance, and make a profit.

Much of the time, success with a product or service has to do with price. If your product or service is priced right, and delivers value to the right niche, then you should be able to view activities such as buying traffic or paying for design and development as an investment to acquire customers.

And this should also lead to the creation of Standard Operating procedures that are effective, teachable, and shareable for each step in the process so that everyone within a team or organization can understand all of the activities required for development and implementation.

In this video I summarize the 5-6 major points of this worksheet.

1 Operating Costs

Use 'Operating Costs' to list out recurring monthly fees or salaries.

2 Benchmark Metrics.

Start by reviewing sheet 'Benchmark Metrics'. This is where you will define some baseline metrics that will be used on other sheets such as 'Projections'.

3 Projections

Where most of your work will be done. Work from the bottom up on the 'Projections' worksheet starting with target audience size. Currently there are 24 months out and each month carries over metrics from the previous month and accounts for unsubscribes as well as cancellation rates. If your product is a membership there will always be an average cancellation rate, but if you are accounting for a product that has a 1-time fee, set these rates to 0.

4 Scenarios

Once the 'Projections' sheet is complete, then you will be able to see the overall Totals for the 24 month period.

5 GAP to GOAL

GAP to GOAL' will then tell you where you stand today in month 1 and the gap to where you project to be in 24 months. There will also be some formulas on here to determine what your Annual, Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and Hourly goals will need to be to meet the total projection.

6 Insights

Insights' are a place to log your own notes. These are not auto-calculated but rather come from studying the Projections, Totals, and GAP to GOAL and coming to your own conclusions around your pricing, conversion rates, number of signups you need to get per day, etc.

Most of the work is going to be done on the 'Projections' sheet. My main goal here is to give you a big picture view of 40+ metrics that are involved in a basic online sales or membership funnel. This is not an all encompassing, fix all solution so please keep a creative and open mind while you review this.

1.00 Target Audience Size

We need to start with our target audience. The more we know who our target audience is, and how we can serve and help them - the better we will be able to complete the journey ahead.

2.00 Reach %

As much as we would love to get in front of 100% of the people in the world that our product or service will be able to help, it is not likely possible. Here we can define a measurable and attainable % of the total available market we will try to reach.

3.00 Reach

Once we have defined a % of the Total Available Market that we should be able to reach, we will have a potential number to work with.

4.00 Optimum Frequency

Before we begin to run advertisements, we need to realize that over time ads will begin to lose effectiveness. This metric can determine how many times this audience will see the same ad within a period, and how many potential impressions that ad will generate. A good strategy is to consistently advertise your core "Big Idea" but keep it fresh and mix up your ad headlines, copy, and images.

5.00 Impressions

Assuming that Facebook, Google, or other ad platforms are delivering on their promise, and based on the frequency of our ads, this should be the number of impressions that we receive from the reach of our Total Available Market.

6.00 Click Through Rate

Now, just because we have an audience to reach and ads that are being served, this does not mean that everyone is going to take action and click on our ad. Click thru rates can usually be attributed to our ability to capture the attention of the individuals in our potential audience through the message that we are using. It must be timely and relevant for the problem they are trying to solve, or they will not have an interest in taking action. What's in it for them?

7.00 Unique Visitors

If people are clicking on our ads, we should now begin to see unique visitors showing up on our website based on the target audience reach and the click through rate. We do not stop here, because these visitors can cost us money! Some folks are just curious, others click ads and get distracted, etc. So, let's keep moving on.

8.00 Cost Per Click

Largely out of our control, the cost per click we pay for each visitor will be based on the platform we use and the level of demand and competition for our audience. This cost alone can vary from day to day and should be paid close attention to because it is a major factor in our profitability and dollar for dollar return on ad spend. Keep in mind that just getting "cheap clicks" are not our objective.

9.00 Ad Spend

It's time for our first bill from Facebook, Google, etc. If we have set up our campaigns using the cost per click model, then based on our unique visitors multiplied by the cost per click we will have a fee to pay. Don't fret too much about keeping this number down quite yet because if we do it right moving forward - we should be happy to be spending money on ads.

10.00 Email Conversion Rate

Rarely do visitors purchase on the first visit to a website. The first requirement for us to be satisfied with spending money on ads to send visitors to our website, should be email opt-ins. When a percentage of unique visitors that visit our website from an advertisement decide to take action and subscribe to our email list in exchange for a valuable tool, or piece of content such as an ebook or guide, it gives us more control over how we follow up and communicate with those individuals over time rather than being dependent on the ad platform and getting a sale on the first visit. By following up with more valuable content, and building trust with our list subscribers, it increases our chances of them actually taking us up on offers.

11.00 New Opt-Ins

Our goal is to build this list with as many highly responsive email subscribers as possible. Email lists are known to generate as much as $1 - $3 per email subscriber per month. Large unresponsive lists are not our goal here but rather a list of subscribers that are engaged and want to hear from us. If people are not joining our list, then we will want to make sure that our lead magnets are valuable, that our landing pages clearly articulate the value of joining our list, and that our ad messaging is congruent with the messaging on our landing pages and lead magnets.

12.00 Organic List Growth

Subscribers may not always come from paid ads. Perhaps we get a surge of visitors from an article we publish, or some friends share a video we posted, or content on our website finally gets recognized by Google as having some authority. Organic subscribers are icing on the cake.

13.00 Unsubscribe Rate

With every growing and active list, a certain percentage of subscribers will decide to leave every month. It sucks to see them go, but it's nothing personal. Or is it? There will always be a small percentage of people who leave your list because the content is not for them, but if you are losing large numbers of subscribers you may want to take a look at your email marketing approach.

14.00 Unsubscribes

Too many people leaving? Are you interesting? Are you offering value before you send offers? Or are you constantly bombarding your list with offers to buy now, huge discounts today only (every day), etc.? No one wants to stay on boring lists that waste people's time and constantly send annoying promotional offers. Your goal is to keep this number down.

15.00 Non-Member List Size

On the first month, this metric will not be applicable. As the months come to pass, and you begin making sales, the number of non-members on your email list (people who have not purchased yet) will become larger, however the segment of this list that HAS purchased will be excluded from this particular offer. This metric can also change or be ignored if you have multiple product offerings.

16.00 Cost Per Lead

Many people get excited once they begin to grow their email list, however it is important to know exactly how much it is costing you to obtain those leads. This has a direct impact on the profitability of your list. Your Cost Per Lead is will be calculated by dividing the amount you have spent on ads by the number of opt-ins (leads) that you added to your list.

17.00 Conversion %

Finally, we get to a metric that we care about. Conversion Rate of the leads that have opted-in to our list. 1.5% is a realistic goal. 5% is great, and 10% would be phenomenal. The success of this metric will have a lot to to with the quality of the leads on your list and the pain of the market. If your offer is a good fit with your target market, then the chances of success will be higher. The conversion rate may also be improved by adding additional layers into your email marketing, and follow up touch points such as webinars, pre-qualification or interview calls, or remarketing ads.

18.00 Conversion Amount

Straightforward - this is the number of customers that you acquire based on the conversion rate of your leads list.

19.00 Upsell Rate

This is also a metric that can be ignored if you don't yet have a backend product. However it is something to consider. Do you have a bike shop and sell services? Then think of additional services that will increase the lifetime value of your customer. Maybe a new bike? Or do you have a basic online course or membership that you sell that can be upgraded to a higher level of access or coaching? Sometimes having a lower priced product on the front-end helps improve the conversion rate of your higher priced offers on the back-end.

20.00 Upsell Sales

Again - straightforward. This is the number of customers that purchase your upsell product based on a percentage of the customers that purchased your frontend product.

21.00 Upsell Price (One Time Offer)

For calculation purposes this will be a one-time non-recurring purchase that is added to the membership in addition to the recurring monthly fee. So for example a member could pay $37/month but if they took us up on the one-time offer it would be an additional 1 time fee of $XX for some extra feature or benefit added to their membership. We are calculating this way to to make the retention calculations easier for phase 1 of the membership offer.

22.00 Upsell Revenue

The amount of revenue generated from the price of your back-end product(s) multiplied by the number of sales.

23.00 New Revenue (Total)

New Revenue is the total of front and backend (upsell) sales multipled by the price of each product.

24.00 New Members Acquired (N)

Each month we will have new members join. Our goal is to retain as many recurring customers as possible.

25.00 Members End of Prev Period (E)

At the end of each period we will have a percentage of recurring members carry over into the next month.

26.00 Retention Rate

The percentage of recurring members (customers) that we carry over into the next month and rebill, is "Retention Rate".

27.00 Cancellation Rate

Unfortunately not all members will stick and rebill month over month. If we are offering only a one time membership fee, or a flat rate instead of monthly billing, then this number will be 100%. If we do bill month to month, and we have a high number of cancellations, then we need to work on improving our product.

28.00 Cancellations

The number of members who cancelled (decided not to continue) their subscription and will not be rebilled.

29.00 Customers at Start of Current Period (S)

After we account for cancellations, retained members, and new members/sales for the new period, we have "Customers at the Start of Current Period".

30.00 Gross Revenue (Total)

After we account for cancellations, and arrive at "Customers at the Start of Current Period", we can multiply this number by our product price to arrive at the amount that will be rebilled, and add one-time upsell revenue to arrive at our gross revenue for the new period.

31.00 Refund Rate

The possibility exists that a percentage of customers will not be happy with their purchase and will request a refund. Our goal is to keep this number at 0 if possible and do the best we can to provide an amazing product, or messaging that discourages refund seekers from purchasing from the start.

32.00 Refund Amount

The refund amount is the percentage of our gross revenue that will need to be deducted to arrive at our net revenue.

33.00 Chargeback Rate

The possibility exists that a percentage of customers will have provided Credit cards that bounce or a declined. Our goal is to minimize this amount as much as possible by prequalifying our customer.

34.00 Chargeback Amount

The chargeback amount is the percentage of our gross revenue that will need to be deducted to arrive at our net revenue.

35.00 Gross Revenue (Total)

This line is simply a duplicate of line 15 and is here to show gross revenue vs. net revenue

36.00 Net Revenue (Total)

Net Revenue equals Gross revenue minus the refund amount and chargeback amount.

37.00 Cost Per Acquisition

Similar to CAC, our Cost Per Acquisition is what it costs us in AD SPEND to acquire each customer. When we first start out and are targeting cold traffic, this number will be high. It is our goal to lower this number as our list of leads grows and we are more in control of how we are marketing to our audience.

38.00 Return on Ad Spend

Dollar for dollar we are looking for a return on ad spend (ROAS). Anything less than 100% and we are losing money on our ads. Anything less than a 3x or 4x return on our ad spend is not going to be worth our time unless we are processing a high volume of sales.

39.00 Operating Cost

You can accomplish a lot with a laptop and a wifi connection, but to really make an impact or a high quality product or service you will probably need to level up and build a team. This is where your salary as an owner, staff salaries, contractors, software, hardware, computers, office space, etc. all come into the picture.

40.00 CAC

Our Customer Acquisition Cost is the total of all of our ad spend plus our operating costs, divided but the number of customers we acquired. This important metric tells us how much we can expect to spend to acquire each customer through one or more channels and gives us a clear picture of what we should charge for our product or service.

41.00 LTV:CAC

Customer Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio. Optimum is 3. Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is better, but a ratio of 3+ is best for scaling and growth. At ratios of 4,5,6,etc., we should be reinvesting.

42.00 Customer Lifetime Value (Price)

Our customer lifetime value is the going to be the price of our product or the total value of our customer over their lifetime. Pay close attention to this number because your product needs to provide enough value to demand a price high enough to cover all of your costs and create a healthy Lifetime value to Customer Acquisition Cost.

43.00 Monthly Profit

We've arrived at the deciding moment. This is the most important metric to consider if we want our business to grow, thrive, and provide us with an income stream to support ourselves and our families. This formula for Monthly Profit equals our Net Revenue - Ad Spend - Operating Costs.