Learnings from my latest Lean Experiment (this is my 4th experiment…)

During the past six months, I’ve been experimenting across several iterations to improve on a model of driving people to a webinar that leads to a sales close via paid ads on social media. I’ve been implementing lean methodology in this by tweaking my experiments and attempting to improve on each round. To date, this is my 3rd experiment focused on driving attendees to a webinar in which I make an offer. Below, I’ll unpack all of my learnings in this experiment.

Step 1: Testing on multiple platforms.

I had a budget of $1,200 to test across multiple social media platforms: $300 each on LinkedIn, Google AdWords, Facebook, and Instagram. My goal was to use these platforms to drive sign ups for a webinar on GoToWebinar. I wanted to understand which platform performed best and which led to the lowest cost per signup, as a first step (the second step was to understand how much I made in sales off the webinar so I could understand how much each lead cost me versus how much each lead was worth).

I ran simple ads on each of these platforms to encourage people to sign up for a free getting started in Social Entrepreneurship webinar. Here are my results on each platform:

Google:

I had set up tracking in an effort to understand exactly how much each webinar sign up cost me, this was much more important to me than understanding how many people clicked. Here is the Google screenshot for my campaign:

As you can see, I spent $53.07 total, and it appears that the cost per conversion was $2.21, which would be amazing. However, I had set up a back up on LeadPages to ensure that all the Google clicks were driven to a unique page so I could track the result. This is what I found there:

As you can see, something was wrong with the way I had set up my conversion tracker on Google. Rather than $2 per webinar sign up, I was looking at nearly $25 per sign up on Google. I was able to confirm this because I only saw two additional sign ups on GoToWebinar during the time of the Google AdWords campaign. In reality, I was spending $25 per sign up on Google. I knew this was an astronomical figure compared to what I could get elsewhere, so I pulled the plug on this ad.

Then came LinkedIn…

Here’s my screenshot from my LinkedIn ads dashboard:

I could not figure out conversion tracking on LinkedIn, so I depending completely on a unique, LinkedIn only landing page from LeadPages. Here’s that result:

As you can see, LeadPages almost exactly confirms the 17 clicks that LinkedIn indicated, with a 0% conversion rate. So, LinkedIn was already costing me $75 with 0 conversions, I was done with that.

Enter Facebook

Based on previous experiments, I had a track record of getting people to sign up for webinars on Facebook for around $12 a conversion. So, with the guidance of the MilValChal Facebook group, I decided to divert my remaining funds that way. The results didn’t start out well:

Note the ad sets that show a ‘cost per conversion’ are the ones I was running initially. My lowest cost per signup was $18. Not bad, but I knew I could do better. Leadpages also told a similarly bad story at this time:

As you can see, lots of clicks, but no one was signing up. In previous experiments, I had had a 17% (ish) conversion rate, so something was very wrong. I needed to shift course.

Enter the lookalike audience…

I quickly reformatted things and, using the same ad set, created a ‘lookalike audience’ based on my email list. Previously, I had just created ad sets based on people who liked Social Entrepreneurship related items. This time I got very targeted and using the exact same ads achieved a totally different result:

As you can see, lots of conversions at a much lower price of $8.12 per conversion. This meant that, provided I could make more that $8.12 per sign up with what I sold on the webinar, I had a winning model! Here’s what that did to up my LeadPages numbers:

Still not the best conversion rate at 5%, but I was raking in a lot more signups with the new ad set.

The new ad set also caused me to pour remaining funds into the Facebook ads because they were clearly converting at a much cheaper rate than anything else.

A note on Instagram…

Originally I had wanted to track these metrics separately, but came to find out that Facebook runs ads on Instagram concurrently with its Facebook ads. So, I know that Instagram was a driver on the Facebook ad set, but it’s difficult to understand how much.

The webinar:

I had 70 people signup for the webinar across all paid channels. Of those signups, 20 attended. 0 purchased my offering of one on one coaching that was offered on the webinar.

In sum, this webinar cost me $1,200 to promote, but as of yet has not yielded any paying clients.

Update as of 11/18/16:

My sales process post-webinar was getting people on a free one-on-one call with me so long as they felt they were ready to take action on starting a social entrepreneur’s business. When I felt it was a fit, I shared about my paid one-on-one coaching during those calls. These are those metrics:

• From 70 Facebook signups to my webinars, I completed 15 free calls.
• I closed two coaching packages worth $1,437 each.
• To date, I have a total of $1,916 through the door ($958 is out there because I have my last client on a monthly subscription — so I have every expectation of receiving the remaining $958 by Jan 1, but i haven’t counted it here because that coaching is still in process.)
• So, $1,200 to market/70 signups = $17.14. So, $17.14 is my cost per signup in this case.
• I have so far made $1,916 in revenue off the webinar. $1,916/70 = $27.37 is my total revenue per customer.
• If I assume I’ll get that extra $958, then it looks like: $2874/70 = $41.05
• So, rev-expense looks like: $27.37-$17.14 = 10.23 per signup in profit.
• Or $41.05-$17.14 = $23.91 in profit per webinar signup.
• BOTTOM LINE LEARNING: If I change nothing in my process, I have to make MORE THAN $17.14 per person who signs up for my webinar in order to profit.

Learnings:

• My best cost per signup of $8.50 is good by industry standards.
• My overall cost per signup of $17.14 is okay by industry standards.
• What really matters is no matter how much I pay for a sign up, that I have a process to make more than the cost per acquisition.
• I only had a 5% click through to sign up rate. This is abysmal, if I could’ve gotten it up to my average of 17%, my 1,500 clicks would have resulted in nearly 300 signups. I need to figure out a way to leverage my learnings about driving clicks to getting people to sign up.
• My landing page was designed through LeadPages, but looks a bit cheesy and does not match my website. I’m curious is a native webpage could make a difference?
• My sales offering clearly had issues because noone bought. If I had close only two packages at $1,500, I would’ve profited from my ad spend.

In sum:

Lots of good learnings here and the lookalike ad set I created was very powerful. Facebook has been confirmed as the best sign up driver across 3 experiments now.

Next steps:

I need to get more clicks converting to signups, but my most important metric now is to find a sales offering/pitch strategy that will yield more than my $17 average cost per sign up AND/OR reduce the cost of signup while holding my revenue per acquisition. In other words, if I sign up 100 people @ $10 per sign up, that’s a $1,000 ad cost. If I can make a sale or sales that is/are above $1,000 then I’ve profited + gotten free leads from my paid ad. My next experiment needs to take these learnings and ENSURE that my ads are profitable.

I believe that by marketing SPECIFICALLY to the targeted Facebook group that yielded a cost per signup of $8.12, I will be able to reduce my cost per sign up to less than $9. As for my revenue per acquisition, this next round, I will price my one-on-one coaching at $2k+. Provided I keep my same close rate, this will increase my revenue per sign up to $50+. Those are lofty goals, but need to be my focus for this next round.

Which leads me to…my next hypothesis: I believe that by marketing ONLY to the facebook ‘lookalike audience’ that yielded $8 signups, I will decrease my cost per sign up to less than $9.

Another hypothesis I’d like to test after that: I hypothesize that raising my one-on-one coaching prices by 30% will not decrease my close rate. In other words, I hypothesize that for every 35 sign ups I will close 1 coaching client. By saving on my cost per signup and raising my revenue per sign up, I will increase profit.