This is the most comprehensive guide to sales funnel metrics… ever. In this guider you’ll learn everything you need to know about the data your sales funnel provides you with.
Things like:
- Conversion rate
- EPC
- Recurring sales count
- Lead acquisition
- CPL
- LTV
- and much more…
Will all be covered in this guide.
In fact, I have used these metrics myself to figure of that I had funnel that was performing awfully (as you’ll see later in this guide).
The question is: Do you know what to do with the data your funnels provides you with? Well that’s where this guide comes into play.
Data From Different Software
Before we get into this guide, I want to say something first.
I am a ClickFunnels user and have been for many years now…
That’s why most of the data you see here is taken from some of my own funnel which I have built using their platform.
This also means that most of the data you see in this guide is the once provided by the ClickFunnels software.
There are of course other funnel builders out there as well, and from what I’ve seen they all seem to provide a data set similar to this.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the first part of this guide: Opt-in funnel metrics.
Opt-In Funnel Metrics
Opt-in funnels are in general pretty simple and are most of the time used for lead generation.
Therefore, the data here will be limited to:
- Page view data
- Conversion data
Some more data can be useful here, like acquisition costs, but that will be covered later in this article.
Also, a funnel that sells products will still have data on this.
Because even though it’s a sales funnel, contact information will still be collected every time someone makes a purchase.
So don’t worry, the data is always there no matter what funnel you use.
Page views Data
All Page Views:
If you want to know your total number of page views, this is the metric to look at.
The data here will increase by one when someone visits the page no matter what the IP adress might be.
Every page view is counted.
Unique Page Views:
Unlike the “All Page Views” data, this will display unique page visits.
That means that only page visits with a new IP address will be counted.
So one person could be visiting your page multiple times, but it still only counts as one visit if it comes form the same IP.
This is why your “Unique Page Views” data almost always will be lower than the “All Page Views” data.
Opt-in Data
All Opt-Ins:
This metric displays the total number of opt-ins the page has received.
A word of advice is that sometimes when you’re using “Test Mode”, opt-ins made by “test customers” will also be counted here.
A simple way of fixing this is to set the date filter to the day after you’re done with the testing.
Doing this ensures that the data isn’t skewed by test metrics.
Sure, the best fix for this would be for the funnel software to exclude all traffic when “Test Mode” is enabled. Yes, some do this, but just as many don’t.
Opt-In Rates:
This is the conversion metric for the page. It’s what you would normally would refer to as the conversion rate.
I’m not going to go deep into this one since I’ve already covered this topic in detail in an earlier post.
So, if you want to learn more about sales funnel conversion rates, I suggest that you check that article out.
Sales Funnel Metrics
Once you start using funnels for selling you products and services, you get even more data feedback.
Unlike a lead generation funnel, a sales funnel relies on more data to give you a accurate view of how the funnel is performing.
Now you get 6 different metrics to look at:
- EPC
- Gross sales
- AVC
- Sales metrics
- Recurring sales metrics
- Earnings per pageview
Why this amount of data compared to the lead funnel?
Well, mostly because you need to know how much you’re spending and how much your earning. Since product sales usually involves marketing costs and such…
So you get all of this data to ensure that you are running a profitable campaign.
EPC – Earnings Per Click
EPC is one of the most valuable pieces of data you can have, especially it you’re an affiliate marketer.
It can help you determine whether or not your product is worth investing more time, money and energy into.
Because sometimes, a product we think will perform amazing, simply don’t.
For example, some of the images you see in this post is from one of my own funnels. One that was performing exceptionally bad. (That does happen from time to time, even for me).
That one had an EPC of $0.0047, which is terrible to be honest.
The data pretty much told me that my offer wasn’t working and that I needed to make some major changes to my funnel.
Speaking of calculating, here’s how you calculate EPC:
Take your ‘Gross Sales’ value and divide it by the number of unique page visitors, the result is your EPC.
So if we take my funnel again as an example:
I made $7.00 from it and I had 1,481 unique page visitors over the time I ran that campaign.
So my EPC was: $7.00 / 1481 = $0.0047. (So low that the data won’t even show up).
Gross Sales
This one is really simple…
‘Gross Sales’ is the total amount of sales recorded in the funnel (including upsells and downsells).
This means that the more sales coming from that particular funnel the higher the ‘Gross Sales’ will be.
So, you want this number to be as high as possible.
ACV – Average Cart Value
ACV is one of the most important sales funnel performance indicator. It’s also a very useful when you want to understand your customers purchasing habits.
Like with most metrics, ACV can be tracked over any period of time, but most track this metric on a monthly basis.
But what is ‘Average Cart Value’?
To put it simple, it tracks the average amount spent per customer.
ACV is calculated by dividing the ‘Gross Sales’ by the numbers of sales on the order page.
Example: If the ‘Gross Sales’ for your funnel for a given month is $3670, and there were 19 sales on your order page, then the ACV would be $193.15. ($3670 / 19 = $193.15)
Why is this good to know?
Knowing your funnels ACV helps you evaluate your overall marketing efforts as well as pricing strategy.
It also serves as a bench mark for customer behavior and it helps you to set goals and strategies. With ACV you can also easily evaluate how well those strategies are working.
Because sometimes marketers focus to much of their energy on increasing website traffic, when it would have been better to focus that energy on increasing ACV.
For most, increasing traffic is the logical way to more revenue, and although true to some extent…
Increasing traffic usually means a bigger hole in your wallet, while increasing ACV doesn’t cost a dime.
So why not try to increase the cart value of those who already knows you and buys from you, instead of only bringing in new traffic.
Sales metrics
Sales Count:
Here you can see the total number of purchases recorder on your sales steps.
Each step where someone can buy something will display a sales count.
Yes, this also includes if you’re using one-click upsells and downsells.
Sales Rate:
This number displays the sales rate for the steps where purchases can be made.
It’s calculated by dividing the ‘Sales Count’ with the ‘Unique Page Views’ number, multiplied by 100 (to get percentage).
Example: You have 19 sales and 475 unique page views.
19 / 475 * 100 = 4% sales rate
Sales Value:
This displays the total value of all the sales made on your individual sales steps.
Here, each step that encourage a sale will show a unique set of data for that single step.
This makes it easy for you to see how much money your front-end-offer is making as well as how much revenue your upsells and downsells are generating.
All of these sales steps values will then be added together to crate the ‘Gross Sales’ number.
Recurring sales metrics
When you’re selling products and services with ClickFunnels you always get to choose between ‘one-time’ and ‘recurring’ payments in the setup phase.
Usually when you set up a subscription based product (like a membership site), you also want a recurring payment plan.
And when you set up such a product, you also get unique data for it.
Meaning that you now can separate one-time sales from your subscription sales and get a better understanding of the numbers you see.
Recurring Sales Count:
This displays the total number of subscription based product sales on your order page.
Again, this will ONLY be displayed if you have any subscription products added to the order step.
Recurring Sales Value:
Here you can see the total product sales for your subscription product.
Earnings Per Pageview
Unlike the EPC value which is a funnel wide metric calculated with ‘Gross Sales’, these numbers are calculated for each individual sales step.
All Pageviews:
This number shows the earnings per all the pageviews for any single sales step.
It’s calculated by dividing the ‘Sales Value’ with ‘All Page Views’. The result is then how much you earn per pageview on that step.
Example: If you make $140 in sales with a total pageview count of 183 then you have a EPAP of $0.765. ($140 / 183 = $0.765)
Unique Pageviews:
Here you can see the earnings per unique page views for the sales step.
It’s calculated by dividing the ‘Sales Value’ with ‘Unique Page Views’. The result is then how much you earn per unique pageview.
Example: If you make $140 in sales with a unique pageview count of 114 then you have a EPUP of $1.228. ($140 / 114 = $1.228)
Other Important Sales Funnel Metrics
Besides all the data you get inside all of your funnels when you’re using ClickFunnels, there are also other important sales funnel metrics that can be beneficial for you.
These metrics can be useful when you are running paid adverting campaigns or just want a deeper understanding of your traffic sources and funnels.
Lead Acquisition
I’m going to say it, leads are pretty much what got you into sales funnels in the first place…
Was I close to being right?
Yeah, I figured that was the case.
This is why it’s so important to track all the metrics that is associated with your sales funnel.
The data that your funnel provides you with can be used to optimize almost every part of your sales and marketing campaigns.
I’m fairly certain that you love leads, and the volume of leads entering your funnel is one of the simplest things to track.
However, you need to think bigger…
Don’t just look at the volume of leads, look at the sources and how you acquire new leads:
- Where are they coming from?
- How many are coming from a specific campaign?
- What devices are they using?
- Where are they located?
- What organic sources are most popular?
This deeper analysis of how you acquire leads gives you a better understanding of your audience and customers.
And once you get the hang of all this data, you can easily identify opportunities to improve the efficiency of your top-of-funnel activates.
CPC – Cost Per Click
CPC is a metric used when running paid advertising campaigns and generally speaking you want this to be as low as possible.
When your using let’s sag Google Search Ads and someone clicks on your ad, a charge will occur, that is pretty much what PPC is.
The problem here is that you will be charged no matter what the outcome of that click is. So you could be paying for clicks that doesn’t generate any sales or sign-ups.
Your Cost-Per-Click data gives you great insights into how effective your ads are.
Therefore, by optimizing for a low CPC, you get more clicks per dollar spent on ads.
This is why you want a low CPC, because it means that you are paying little for a lot of traffic to your page.
If you’re using ClickFunnels like I am, then you get help calculating this right inside your funnel.
There you can enter how much money you’ve spent on driving traffic to your funnel and get the CPC calculated right away.
If you still want to calculate this by hand, here’s how you do it:
CPC = Total Costs / All Page Views
Example: Let’s say that you’ve spent $500 on a campaign last month, and you got 1390 page views.
This means that you got a CPC of $0.36. (500 / 1390).
CPL – Cost Per Lead
There is also metrics for calculating how much it costs you to get someone to convert inside your sales funnel.
This metric is called Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) and is very useful when using a lead generation funnel. Since the goal is to get new leads not sell stuff.
It’s pretty similar to CPA but this time you can calculate how much it costs you to acquire one new lead.
So instead of looking at page traffic, you look at the conversion data to calculate this.
Like with CPA, ClickFunnels can help you calculate this right inside your funnel.
But if you still want to use your trusty calculator here’s what you need:
CPL = Total Costs / All Opt-Ins
If we stick with the example above, we can see that with $500 spent and with 117 opt-ins, we get a CPL of $4.27. (500 / 117).
That means that it costs you $4.27 to generate one new lead.
This data can be very useful when determining the budget for your next PPC campaign.
CPA – Cost Per Action
If there is one rule to follow it’s this one…
All the metrics you track inside your sales funnel should be focused on increasing your revenue.
This means that you need to put some of your efforts into analyzing and controlling your costs.
But first thing first, what is this metric?
Cost Per Action or CPA is a metric that shows how much it costs for a lead to take action – such as buying a product.
In simple terms, this data shows how much it costs you to get a single customer down your sales funnel, from first point of contact to conversion.
Now, do you know how much it costs you to acquire a new customer ?
Your CPA can be one of the more hard to define metrics, but it’s also one of the most important once.
Here’s how you calculate CPA:
Divide your total campaign costs by the numbers of customers acquired from that campaign.
Or even simpler: CPA = Costs / Conversions
Here’s an example using the same data as above, but this time you spent $500 and got 117 new customers.
Using the formula above: $500 / 117 = a CPA of $4.27.
As you can see, the value we got is exactly the same as the CPL, but there is a difference.
With CPA, the metric applies to leads that are further down the funnel. Meaning that they’ve made a purchase from you not just become a lead.
ROI – Return On Investment
Return On Investment (ROI) is a metric that refers to the amount of money you’ve made after investing in a marketing strategy, or in this case your sales funnel.
As you might know, business is tough, and having a healthy ROI is key.
Think about it like this – A good deal is always a matter of investing money to make more money. The same goes for your sales funnel.
If you have a good ROI, then you’ll be making more money than you’ve invested (also known as making a profit).
Since this is one of the most important metrics of your sales funnel, it’s important that you know your ROI. That way you know right away if your funnel is profitable or if you are loosing money from it.
And here’s how you calculate it:
ROI = (Total Costs – Sales Value) / Total Costs
Using that formula on my terrible funnel I mentioned above, I spent $500 and only made one sale of $7.
Which meant that I had an ROI of $-0.99, which made it obvious that I was loosing money. To be honest I spent more than $500 on that funnel, so the ROI was actually even worse.
LTV – Lifetime Value
LTV (or lifetime value) is a metric that shows the average revenue that a customer will generate over its lifespan as a customer.
This data can be useful when you are making long term financial decisions for your business, like setting up marketing budgets, resources, and more.
The Lifetime Value is also a very important metric in subscription based business models, just shy of the MRR metric (Monthly Recurring Revenue) which is at the top.
LTV can be calculated in many ways so for the sake of keeping everything simple, I’ll use a subscription based business model as an example.
The simplest method here is to take the expected average monthly income from each customer and divide it by your churn rate. Churn rate is the rate at which you loose customers each month.
LTV = exp. monthly income / churn.
An example of this would be:
You charge $200/month and your churn rate is 6%, then your LTV for a new customers is $3.333 (200 / 0.06 = 3.333).
In this example a customer has a expected lifetime of around 17 months.
Another thing you need to know is that different types of customers can have different LTVs.
This is especially important to know if you have different pricing tiers for your offers.
Conclusion
In this guide, we looked at what I feel are the most important sales funnel metrics to know about. From conversion rates, to sales rates, to how to calculate ROI and more.
Now it’s your turn: Which of these metrics is most important to you?
Or maybe you have other metrics you use inside your sales funnel that I didn’t cover here.
Either way, leave a comment below to let me know.
