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Have you ever wanted to build a waitlist of qualified people who can’t wait to enroll in your offer? Stick around, because you’re going to love this episode of the podcast
Kaity Griffin is here to teach us how she dropped her cost per acquisition by 66% in three months. She’s walking us through how she collects and uses data to inform her decisions, how she experiments with her ad spend budget, and how she uses a mini offer to build her waitlist between enrollment periods.
Kaity Griffin is a Google Ads expert, trainer, and systems geek.
She is the Founder and Head Trainer at specialist Google Ads agency kaitygriffin.com, where she teaches digital marketers, agency teams, and business owners how to cut through the tricky tech and use advanced strategies to create seriously profitable Google Ads.
A leader in the Google Ads space, Kaity’s specialty is taking complex technical concepts and innovative techniques—and breaking them down into simple ideas and practical applications that almost anyone can understand and use. She’s passionate about storytelling through data and numbers and using that insight to make profitable decisions.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What it takes to build the confidence to charge what your product is worth
- Which ads get the best results
- How to create a waitlist of high-quality leads
- How understanding your data and numbers can help you test your process
- The importance of choosing a checkout system that is user-friendly
- How to experiment with your ads budget
- Why you should track how long someone is on your list before they buy from you
- How Kaity gets a cold audience to buy a $2,000 program
- The value of using data to make decisions
Links & Resources:
- The Art of Online Business website
- DM me on Instagram
- Visit my YouTube channel
- The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
- Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
- The Art of Online Business Podcast website
- Check out my Accelerator coaching program
Kaity Griffin’s Links:
*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.
Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!
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Hey, what’s up, my friends? Rick here. Welcome to today’s episode of The Art of Online Business Podcast. If you have ever wanted to build a waitlist, a waitlist of really qualified, quote unquote people that cannot wait to enroll in your offer, whatever is closed, and then you’re going to be opening up enrollment in the future. If you’ve ever wanted to build an amazingly qualified waitlist, you’re going to like today’s episode a lot. Joining me on the show today is a former member of my accelerator coaching program.
Her name is Katie Griffin. Katie Griffin. And she makes Google ads super easy. She teaches you how to use Google ads in your business. And if you’ve ever seen Google ads or heard about Google ads, they are not as intuitively easy to set up and run as, say, Facebook ads. And that’s where Katie comes in and she makes it super, super easy to do it. So she has a $2,000 course where for small business owners and ad managers and she opens up in for enrollment twice a year. Now, in between those two open enrollments, she runs Facebook ads to a $30 mini course, which is also a waitlist builder. So it’s building your waitlist for the $2,000 course in between enrollment periods.
And she’s basically getting paid to build that waitlist. So she reached out to me and said, Hey, for this funnel, I’ve been documenting three key optimizations on the funnel that reduced the cost per acquisition from $120. So she’s paying at that point, she was paying $100, $120 to make $30 on the front end anyway. Right. And it was at that it’s sad about $120 for about a year. And then she made some some key optimizations, her ads and her funnel and brought it down to $40 cost per acquisition within a span of three months, which is awesome. So now she’s paying $40 to make a $30 sale.
But as you’re going to hear today, she’s really building that wait list of people who are super hungry for her $2,000 offer. And it’s working out really, really well. And so I asked her to come on and share with you how she’s doing it, how she’s doing this funnel. Super, super smart person. Just just an amazing person. She brings all the data and all the numbers, which is speaking my language. So without further ado, let’s go hang out with Katie Griffin. So Katie, when we started working together, how long was it like?
That was the start of it was the end of 2019, because remember, we had our retreat and the world was shutting down.
We had that retreat that was like March.
It was literally three years ago. It’s March 10th here now. That’s true.
Three years to the date.
Three years to the day. Yeah.
And it was like, what is this COVID thing that people are talking about? And you were here in San Diego needing to go back to Australia.
Borders were closing.
Yeah. And like.
Yeah, that was two babies at home that need to get back to. And I was, I remember I was freaking out, couldn’t.
Get on somebody on the phone. Like with the airlines. It was just like the longest wait ever. Oh man, you were. You were just starting out sort of like you were you were managing Google ads at that time, but just starting with your online course and and stuff like that. And, you know, we were just talking beforehand before we hit record and like where you are now is just so amazing to see and what you’ve. You know, build this business into you have the you know, you’re split between you’re actually, you know, client management where you’re managing people’s campaigns and then you’ve got the core side of the business. You said it’s about 5050.
Yeah, about 50% of our business revenue comes from done for you. So we managing client accounts for businesses, Google ads, and then about 50% is basically straight down the line is from course digital products revenue.
Love it and it’s a $2,000 course.
$2,000. Yeah. So which when I started with you, it was about $600. So yeah, I remember that in the last three years I’ve raised the price basically each round to $2,000 an hour, which is it feels actually quite like a, it’s a, it’s, you know, pricing is a function of confidence always where I wasn’t confident enough to charge probably what it was worth back then.
But yeah but you are now and you sell it. Yeah, correct. I love it. And so it’s cohort based, right? You open it up a couple times a year. Yeah. And what are you teaching in in the course? Because this is going to, you know, lead us into what we’re going to be talking about here today in the funnel and to the waitlist and so forth.
Yeah. So the course is all about how to run profitable Google ads. So it’s a Google ads specialist course teaching our predominant audience or student is either a digital marketer with a specialty, like a complementary specialty, like Facebook ads or SEO or copywriting. And they’re looking to expand their service offering to Google ads. But they kind of you know, they’ve watched YouTube videos, they’ve done a couple of free courses, but it’s not quite clicking. And the other student is the business owner or the service based business owner that’s been through the wringer with agencies. They trusted an agency a couple of times and they’ve been burnt.
They haven’t got results and they’re looking to take things on themselves. So it’s really it’s actually the way the easiest way to explain it is it’s our internal ads management process distilled into a course, but not in a static way. It’s that if we, you know, like Facebook, Google ads is changing all the time. And so distilling testing out those new features, implementing them on our clients and then creating a repeatable process that we can execute inside the course and that students can then implement. So it’s really designed to be a continuous portal of, Oh my God, Google’s release this change, How am I going to roll this out to my clients? I’ll go check out the course and we’ll have kind of done the hard work for you. Yeah.
Or if you’re doing it yourself, you’re staying up with all the changes.
Correct. And. And. The the $2,000 price point is often like especially during really tough economic times is is can be harder to get across the line. But if you’re a client manager, you sign two clients for one for one month each and you’ve made back the cost of the course. Or if you’re doing it yourself, you take same. You don’t outsource for two months and you’ve made back the enrollment price. So it really is easy to establish ROI against the value of the course because you can replace either replace an expense if you’re previously outsourcing, or you can create a revenue stream.
And you’re teaching. It’s you know, when you say Google ads, it’s YouTube ads, I assume also.
Yeah. So we did on retweets. Yeah. We predominantly teach our bread and butter is search shopping and a little bit of YouTube. But our our priority is the search and shopping network being that that’s where in my eight years of experience with Google ads is going to be where you’re going to get the ROI. Because the difference with Google ads as opposed to Facebook is Google ads. People are on Google searching. The strength of it lies that they’re already searching for it. When they’re on YouTube, they’re not searching necessarily for a result. They’re searching for content. Same with on Facebook.
They’re browsing, they’re on they’re in a different frame of mind on a social media platform. So the benefit of search and shopping network, which is when you’re typing something into Google, is that you are searching for a solution. So that is where you will see the best. In my experience and in my specialty, there’s other people like Tom Breese that really specialize in like YouTube ads and things like that. Mine is search and shopping and performance Max and all that sort of network. But yeah.
So you’re also pretty good at Facebook ads as well.
I am the only internally in my own business like I’m now. I used to dabble a bit in client management with that, but now I’m like, you know, that’s my main channel of how I get people across to my course. I’m a Google ads expert that doesn’t use Google ads for own business.
But why is that?
Again, people haven’t realized that they need to enroll in a Google ads course yet. And if they are on Google searching for it, it’s really hard to discern between are they searching for a YouTube video or a $2,000 course. So at a search term level, I can’t distinguish that. So it’s really hard to convert people. Whereas on Facebook I’m able to show an ad when they haven’t realized that this is what you need. So it’s a different frame of mind.
And you don’t have to at this point.
You don’t really have to run ads for the client management side.
Correct? I’ve never had to do that.
Yeah, correct. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So, you know, speaking of ads.
So you you and thank you for giving that background the context to what we’re going to be talking about here is really important because since it’s cohort style, you run it twice a year. There’s a lot of time in between.
Like once.
You know, one cohort is done, there’s going to be a time period, obviously, between the next between then.
And the next.
Cohort. So you create a wait list and you’ve.
Been.
Creating a wait list of really qualified, quote unquote. People and buyers through this funnel that you’ve got going using Facebook ads. Talk about what the funnel is.
Yeah. So the. The funnel initially came to mind when back in 2021, I was about to go on maternity leave and there was going to be about 14 months between one cohort and the next, and I wanted to come back and have. A list of people that I could have on the wait list to sell my course to essentially without having to be online during that period to build that wait list. So I developed a $30 mini course, which is in essence a lot of module one of my course. A lot of the theory based concepts inside module one.
So and package that up as a $30 mini course. A couple of reasons behind that was one, it gave people an introduction to the exact same learning style that they’re going to get through the bigger course because obviously there’s a big jump between $30 and $2000. Right? That’s that’s a big, big gap that I’ve got to bridge. But it’s not a big as big a gap as a free opt in. So to a $2,000 course. So what I really wanted to get across was this is the teaching style, this is the learning format.
This is me as an educator. Do you like my style, essentially? And then at the end of that, say, if you want to go further, we’ve got the wait list. This is the bigger course. So I that really was developed to run Evergreen Facebook ads towards that, to build that wait list essentially. And for the first year of running that. So from May, about May 2021 to May 2022, it worked successfully as a loss leader in that the price point was 30 bucks.
We’re paying probably about $120 to get someone to buy. But. We also had a self-study offer during that mat leave time, the maternity leave time where people that had gone through the boot camp were actually without us. We didn’t have that available on the front end of the site or funnel, but they were proactively asking, Is there a way to enroll in profitable promotion, which is my big course, before Katie gets back from maternity leave. I think we had about 40 grand go through self-study, which bumped that up to be a profitable funnel like it was more than profitable while on maternity leave.
So were you. So and this was cold traffic, right?
Completely cold targeting.
Yeah. So cold traffic was costing you at first about $120, but you got it down to about $120. So talk about that, because some people listening right now would be like, well, that. What are you talking like? It’s a $30 offer and you’re sending directly to offer. Right. You’re sending direct to sale. So you’re optimizing for the sale. And you know, for some people listening like, well.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, Katie, you’re paying $120 to make $30 on that front end. Was it the plan all along to.
Offer a self.
Study? Like sort of in the middle there.
It wasn’t necessarily. It was that I said to Caitlin, who’s my who’s my who’s my head of ads? And she was taking care of things sort of in charge while I was on mat leave. And I said, Look, we’ve got this on self-study. I don’t there’s something really special about our live intake. So we didn’t want to dilute that. But if someone is proactively. So we didn’t want to publicly offer it. But if someone is asking to go further and they don’t want to wait until May 2022 because they could be buying it in July 2021, so nearly a year away, then feel free to offer this via an email. Like if someone inquires, feel free to send them to the checkout link. And. Yeah, I’m looking at my numbers here and we got 35 grand through that, which was about 17 enrollments at the time. 17 or 18 enrollments at the time.
So it was even offered in your email follow up sequence, correct?
No, it wasn’t. So I knew it was working to get people intrigued because at the end of the course, I’ve got one little lesson that says, If you want to learn more, here’s a walkthrough of my course.
Oh, gotcha. Okay, so.
I had a lesson at the end saying, Yeah, here’s my big course, profitable promotion, and I walked them through the modules. And if you want to find out more, join the waitlist. But then people inevitably would say, look. I don’t want to wait until May. Do you have anything in the meantime? Is there any way I can do it? In the.
Meantime, were you letting people know that you were.
On maternity leave and like, the next.
Cohort wouldn’t be until this, you know, whatever. Yeah.
Wouldn’t be until May 2022.
Okay. All right. So. Everybody always wants to know.
So, number one, this was a mini course.
Right? What, like what? What did it what did it look like? What were what were people learning?
How long does it.
Take someone to go through that?
Yeah. So probably had about five hours worth of video content and mostly slide deck and slide deck videos about that were a lot of repurposed content from module one of the course. So going into a lot of the fundamentals, you need to know about attribution, conversion, tracking, how Google ads work, really giving a really good grasp, first of all, to let people know. This is how Google ads works. But this is also it won’t be for you if you don’t meet X, Y, and Z. So it was actually pre qualifying people as well.
So it was a really great decision making tool for the student because we were finding that in the previous cohorts we might have been getting people that weren’t necessarily the best fit. So we needed to do some work around that at pre-qualifying them Okay, about teaching who Google ads is for and who it’s not for. So it was a lot of that. It also had some systems stuff for client managers about because there’s a lot of different accounts when it comes to Google ads. Like you’ve got Google tag manager, Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center. How as a business, we request access to these different client accounts. So it had a bit of template, like some templates and systems for client managers to follow as well.
Okay, gotcha. Okay.
So it had some resources in there.
So I.
Mean, and for.
The for the people that were reaching.
Out about the course, I mean, you know that.
They’re serious because they got to the end of the course. They got to the end.
Of the mini course.
Yes. Because that’s when you’re mentioning it. Did you deliver.
It.
Like they purchase and you give them a login to where.
Yeah, it’s on teachable. Okay. We’re the same. And that’s where my promotion is hosted is teachable. So it was just a mini course. Teachable had about five email follow ups just with content based tips and tricks, which really could be improved a lot. I was looking through it the other day. I was like, Oh, I’ve got to do some work on this. But yeah, it was it was really a self-study mini course that was developed because I needed I needed to build a waitlist between cohorts. And it was I really want to be clear that it was because the.
I think this is the strength of understanding data and numbers, which I’m such a data geek like track everything, probably too much, but it was never designed to be a profitable endeavor on the front end. It was really designed to actually because when you think about it, when you’re running ads to a lead magnet, you’re not looking at how much revenue you’re getting back from that, right? So I was actually seeing the revenue I was getting back from the mini course as being a win. If anything, I was getting some money back rather than none. Sure. Yeah, it was really just a paid paid lead magnet with a lot of value in it. Yeah.
And I just want to for.
For everybody listening you all like this, this is the, this is.
A point that’s.
Really, really often.
Lost.
When we are like, even if it’s like lead magnet to, you know, to an offer on the thank you page or what have you.
And it’s not converting.
As as well as you’d hoped. The idea with these types of offers, as Katie is saying, is like if you’re making money.
Off, it’s just.
Gravy. It’s like, that’s a bonus.
That’s not the.
Goal. The goal is exactly what Katie’s talking about here.
And you’re trying to.
Qualify people for something.
On the back.
End. In this case here, it’s Katie’s $2,000 course that she opens up a couple times a year. Now you’re able to get that CPA down, if I’m not mistaken. And like $40.
Yeah, it’s about sitting about 45 at the moment. Yeah. So it was running for about a year at 120. So a lot. That’s a consistent data. It was pretty much sitting there pretty consistently. Yeah. And we stopped running it for a few months because need to rework a lot of the content and started running it again in October 2021. So what’s that six months ago now? Five months, 5 or 6 months. And over that period, over a three month period, I was able to take it from 120 to 45, which basically breaks, you know, it breaks even nearly on the front end, like it’s sitting at about a 95% return on investment on the front end. Now, wait, this.
Was October 20th, 22.
Sorry, 2022.
Correct. Okay. Got it. Okay.
Which is is at a time like, by the.
Way, where everyone is saying.
That ads don’t work.
That the costs are so high. But here you are taking you’re actually improving over that time.
And the campaign had been off for a while.
Yes. Yeah, it had been off for May to October. So had been off for.
Yeah. Five months. Yeah. And so what prompted the drop?
Like, how did you get it to a point where it went.
From where you were getting 120 bucks.
Cost per acquisition down to down to basically break even?
Yeah. So there were three main changes that we made. And before I talk about those, I also just want to say that the reason I was willing to run things as a loss leader is because I’m really confident in my. Email sales process when it comes to launch time. I know that when someone’s on my list. I have a really good chance of getting like the know like and trust and building that. I’m really confident in that. So. Yeah. Like I said, the goal was never for this funnel to make money. It was to make money. Six months later when I came to open doors or whatever it was. Yeah.
But the three main point here in a second, which I want, I want to talk about like, all right, yes, you’re losing money up front, but and then we’re going to talk about how you made that money up on the back end.
Yeah. So the three changes were that had the checkout system on WooCommerce. So the and we were just facing it was clunky. We’re facing problems with it. So we switched to Thrive Cart and making that one change reduced the CPA from 1 to 20 5 to 81. Wow. That one change literally month on month.
Okay. So I want to stop right here for a second. You all this is something.
That.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with people in Accelerator about this exact topic. They’re they’re using a checkout on another platform, and it’s very clunky. It does not look good. You know.
I can keep going on that. And one of the first things I like.
All right, number one, what is the data telling you? But then it’s like, all right.
What if you and and.
Thrive cart happens to be one of the ones I you know I like recommend that people go over to even though I’ve never used thrive cart myself.
I know.
A ton of people a lot of my.
Students it’s clean. It’s cetera It’s great.
All right. I bought a pre-made template for 30 bucks that made my checkout look beautiful.
Go like, try a different checkout process.
And see what it does.
And look, it’s a pain in the ass switching, right? We know that it’s not. You got to switch your tech up, your automations, your tags. You got to have everything all your ducks in a row. Yeah, but the conversion rate before switching was 4.5% and it went to 7% immediately. Month. Huge.
Yeah. And you dropped it from you said 120 down to like 80 something.
Yeah, 80. Give or take that one change. One change.
Great lesson there. Cool. What was the second thing?
The other thing did was the reason I just want to change was on WooCommerce. There wasn’t the functionality to offer PayPal on a per product basis. So I didn’t want to offer PayPal on my course because recurring payment plans. Paypal is a pain and it’s really annoying. So I was able to add PayPal as well. So there was a combination of adding, of changing checkouts and offering PayPal, but the payments were still skewed towards Stripe. So it wasn’t like everyone went to PayPal. Yeah, but that was the same, the same change switching platforms and added PayPal. Was that reduction. November. No change. That was in October. November, no changes were made and it remained. Second month of data remained exactly the same $84 conversion rate, 7%. So steady data saying that this change has worked to reduce that.
And this is the second. So really, that’s one change, right? Switching checkout platforms, I call it two because of the PayPal as well. The second change, second or second or third big change that was made was that I went through visual brand refresh. I’d been doing, you know, janky D.I.Y. branding myself for years. You know what it’s like? You’re like, I’m an ad person. I’m not a data, I’m not a visual person, so I can look like crap. So I went through this brand identity, you know, and so good, great. It’d be something I’m putting off for ages. She designed brand new ads for me. I’d always been using, you know, my DIY canvas stuff. She designed ads for me that change the conversion rate remained steady. So we know that the conversion rate steady. So it’s got nothing to do with the checkout. Again, the metric I’m looking for there is like basically the cost per click. How much is it costing me to get someone across? So the CPA went from. 80 say let’s say 82, 46 within a month.
Wow.
And so the cost per click reduced from $9.50 to $4.40. So halved. More than halved. So more so just steadily. People were seeing the ads, but was just getting more people to click through, which caused the CPA to go down because I was getting bang for my buck on the ad side of things.
So what? Like what what did the ads mean? What were they how are they different?
Well, designer well though professionally designed.
Like they weren’t like my own janky style ads. So those let’s call them three changes PayPal Thrive cart and new ads which and I want to reiterate, the targeting was exactly the same. No change was made on targeting side of things. I was using the same targeting that I was when the CPA was $120.
So another point. You all that I want to drive home here.
The creative is the, I’m going to say the new targeting, but it’s been this.
Way for a long time.
Creative is king on Facebook.
It’s not the targeting. The AI is so good on. The algorithm is so good.
Running that’s running behind.
The scenes of the ads. It is the creative.
And Katie just shared.
A perfect.
Example of all right.
Change out creative, made them look better.
And saw a massive difference. Most people would go in and say, oh, my, my, my targeting is off.
And it changed my.
Targeting.
Or Facebook ads is broken.
Yeah, exactly. Or this doesn’t work. But it’s, you know, did you.
Change up your messaging at all? No, no.
Same copy, same landing page did then get a new website made with the visual identity, but that didn’t really have an impact. Yeah, that the CPA remained pretty steady after that new website was rolled out because it was the same copy. It was just a different color scheme. It was really the ads and the thrive cart that made mean a huge difference. And the return on investment from the funnel now is sitting at 95%. So for every dollar spent on ads, I get $0.95 back on the front end. Yeah. Without waiting for the stuff I get on the back end through enrollments to my profitable promotion course.
So what’s the conversion rate.
Now on the.
Sales page?
It’s down a little bit. At the last month or two. It’s probably about 5% now. So it peaked at seven and then it went down to five. But I’m not concerned about that because I, I to me, that’s because the ads are working really well. They’re getting a lot more people. So naturally, I’m going to see a lower conversion rate on the on the sales page. So initially with the same ads, I was getting a lower click through rate. So the conversion rate was going to be a little bit inflated. So I was willing to take a hit on the conversion rate side. Yeah. For more people hitting that page.
How much are you spending a day?
I’m spending about four grand a month, so 120 probably a day, 110, 130.
Not huge.
Not huge. But that was that was I was spending on average probably about 2500 before any changes were made. But with the increase in the funnel performance, because I didn’t want to go too wild when it was $120, just I wanted to make sure I’ve got sure the data is backing it up, but now I’ll start to I have had it off for the last couple of weeks because I’ve been in launch mode, so haven’t wanted to be cannibalizing it with other sales, but I’ll probably go up to 5 or 6 grand, probably $200 a day. So I was able to scale the spend from two and a half to four grand and the CPA still went down.
Which is not normal. No. How did you scale it? That much and then not affect the CPA.
Well, I could see that the ads, the new ads were working and the CPA was. So it was just a matter of seeing that this data was telling me the new checkout process, the new ads are working. Let’s just put more money behind it and see what happens. So like I said, I’m willing to take a reduction in the in the. Conversion rate because as I start to scale it, I will see I might see it creep up to maybe 60 bucks again. But if I’m able to scale it higher, yeah, I’ll take a hit on this a little bit. Yeah.
Are you just adding are you just adding budget at the ad set level or are you running? I was going to say CBO. Yeah. How much are you cranking up the budget? When when?
When you were incrementally going up? 1500 bucks on the ad spend? How much everybody always wants to know, like.
All right, how much do I.
Always say to my budget?
I’m like, it’s an odd a science. You test it and you see what happens and then you react from it. So don’t think there’s a one size fits all approach. It’s I’m a really aggressive ads manager because ads is my thing. Like, yes, on the Google side of things, but I know how to read data. So I’m not concerned with making changes and then evaluating what happens. I know how to read it, so I’m pretty aggressive when it comes to changes in that I’m just like, I’ll take a hit for a day or two and it might go not great, but then the more you spend, the faster it learns. So I’m pretty well versed in that. Yeah. So I don’t know. I probably just chucked it up 50 bucks straight away. I probably didn’t even jump it up in increments.
I’d love to know what is the campaign setup? Is it super simple? It’s pretty basic.
Yeah, it’s super simple. It’s probably two ad sets I’ve got I’ve got it split out between two campaigns because one targeting. Are you in NZ? I like to separate them out, particularly also since we use different spelling and not to be rude, but Americans always get hung up because in role is spelt spelt differently in Australia. So we’d have all these Americans commenting on spelt in role wrong. Oh no, it’s one L You missed an L Oh that’s right too. Yeah. So yeah. So I’m like, Oh God. So I’ve got to have different ads for you guys. Yeah, because of the spelling. But yes, super simple. Probably two two ad sets in each, maybe targeting lookalike up to a 5% lookalike of my email list and traffic. Yeah. And then like a marketing type targeting people, people interested in marketing type. Yeah, it’s pretty simple. Yeah. So it’s not overly advanced.
Again, I want to, I want to just hone in on that, that point.
Katie’s campaign is nothing.
Nothing. How many how many ads do you have in each ad set?
Three now.
Testing. Yeah. So, yeah.
Three ads. Two ad sets at 120 bucks a day. And this is how it’s going. All right. So now I want to get to. How is how are those people converting? As the $2,000.
Course.
Buyers.
Yes. So a tip is that I have my massive course enrollment spreadsheet. And what I do is everyone that enrolls in the course, I get my VA to go and check where the first entry point was in ConvertKit. What did they first come through? And then we can segment out and clearly see that the first point they came on was my paid $30 bootcamp, my mini course and extrapolate that to mean it was a Facebook ad if they if naturally if that’s usually the way that they got onto my email list. Yeah. So from the first entry point, I’m able to attribute an additional I’ve had. So I’ve had three launches since the mini course has been running and I’m able to attribute an extra 90,000 in course enrollments where that’s not people that have bought the bootcamp.
That’s only where people have bought the bootcamp as their first entry point. So there’s other people involved in the cohort that have maybe signed up to a free opt in. But I’m not counting that directly from the Facebook ads. Yeah, but directly from first entry point onto my email list is 90,000 additional revenue from the paid bootcamp. So all up I’ve spent in the last 18 months ish. Oh no, it’d been nearly two years now. Yeah, nearly two years. I’ve spent 83 grand on ads. And revenue wise, including direct revenue on the front end and attributed revenue from the cohorts is 180 grand. So it’s about 100 grand profit, nearly a hundred grand profit from that mini course.
And again, this is also what people often lose sight of. Just because they haven’t purchased yet doesn’t mean they’re not going to purchase.
Yeah. See a snowball effect like someone might we actually run stats on how another thing I do is I get my VA to check when was their subscription date and ConvertKit. How long between subscription and purchase date? Yeah. So I know that someone on average needs to be on my list or someone on average is on my list for around about eight months before they enroll in promotion. Yeah. So there’s always going to be a snowball impact of that mini course is that we will see someone that’s purchased today not sign up till next year. Yeah. So tracking those numbers, I can see that I’m not concerned if only ten people signed up from the boot camp on to this cohort because I know. Well, yeah, the numbers are telling me that someone’s going to be on the list for about eight months before they enroll. Yeah.
And notice again what Katie just mentioned there.
She has a.
Va go into ConvertKit. It’s very simple to see when did this person you know you’re a cross referencing all right here are the customers go into ConvertKit when did they first become a customer and just fill in the column on the spreadsheet?
So are you not are you not? And then by the way, just going back to finish that point.
Katie, saying, oh, on average people are on my list for about eight months.
Now.
Or eight months before they purchase.
Most people don’t even want to see that. Meaning like, wait, they did purchase during my enrollment period.
Or my.
Launch.
Ads are a failure.
And it’s you’re playing the long game.
Which is what I wish more people would do.
And the same thing is true. So during we just literally just cut closed cut two days ago and this is so my evergreen strategy is that $30 product. My launch strategy is running ads to a free challenge, which is similar, similar to the you know, that’s my pre-launch and then open card. Yeah. And I mean I go aggressively during ads on that period I. I spent 28 grand this time in a two week period for those ads. And again, I can directly attribute how many people that signed up for this challenge. I count them as bonuses if they signed up for the course, because I know, again, they need to be on my list for eight months. They’ll sign up to next. They usually need to go through 2 or 3 challenges.
We call them. The lead up to the launch is our challenge. They usually need to go through 2 or 3 challenges before they sign up to the course. And we know that because I’ve got the data, I’ve got the data on like again, where was their first entry point? And for this March cohort, 14 of our challenge members signed up. So that you would call that a failure if you spent 28 K on ads, right? That’s the first entry point. But we had an additional 11 people that had been from previous challenges that just needed to go through the the launch funnel a couple of times. Yeah.
But you if you spent.
If 14 people joined from like from 28 grand and spend, you’re breaking even on.
That out of two grand.
Which is. Yeah. Which which is great.
And that’s only 14 that are again first entry point. Whereas they they we probably had maybe 30 people overall that were in the challenge but had just been on my list for a while. Yeah. So directly I can attribute from that 28 grand ad spend. Probably about 35 K has covered it, but the overall launch value is about 180 K So yeah, like you said, I’m playing the long game. I’m looking at the data, I’m evaluating where can I spend my money? I’m okay to drop 30 grand on ads because I know that I’ll cover that with this enrollment, with this cohort signing up, but I’ll also cover it because next time I’ll be grateful because another probably ten will sign up next time.
So you’re taking quite.
A big percentage of people from cold within two.
Weeks.
Purchasing in $2,000 program. Yeah, people are going to want to know how.
Like, what are you doing to do.
That? Yes, you have a challenge, but like what’s what’s your secret sauce in there? Because it’s not an easy thing to do.
I think. From reading the intake surveys that students who join the challenge for the first time. So they only have known me for two weeks. Three weeks? Is that. A I’m very transparent at the beginning of the challenge that I will be opening doors to my paid course in in on this date. You will be in the funnel for that. Essentially you’re going to get emails about that. Yeah, don’t try and hide that. I’m like, I’m not running a charity. I’m not going into this challenge to deliver all this amazing free content and then get nothing on the back end from it. My goal is to get some of you to enroll, and I’m very transparent about that. And on live sessions, I’m also so I also am very clear on I don’t think this course is the right fit for you. You it’s a great fit for, you know, I’ll answer individual like personalized questions about, hey, this is my situation.
Do you think it’s the right thing for me? Look, I don’t actually don’t because I appreciate that $2,000 is a big leap of faith for someone. And I actually it’s you probably know what it’s like if you’ve got someone in an accelerator that you’re like, I probably shouldn’t have let them in, is that it actually makes your job harder as a course facilitator or as a mastermind facilitator because. You know that your program, your course works for the right people. If you’ve got the right business, if you’ve got the right offer, whatever it is. Yeah. I don’t want to dilute the power of the cohort by letting someone, not letting someone in because anyone can join, but by not being direct about that. So I’ve gotten to the point in my business two years ago, anyone that would want to join, I’d be like, Yes, please. But now I’m confident enough to be like, No. And someone actually said that on the intake survey. The thing that got me across the line was that you said no to someone. You said it wasn’t the right thing. And.
And you’re doing that publicly.
Publicly? I’m saying I don’t actually think you should join. Gotcha.
Okay, cool. Yeah, I like that.
On the live sessions. Yeah, because I don’t I’m not going to and I’ll do an audit of their site and say, I think you actually need to focus on these areas first before joining. Come back and see if you’re right for the August cohort. Yeah. And and since since I’m more confident in that and more transparent about the whole and really settled into my own sales process. You know, when I first started out, I was trying to copy this person and this person. I felt I didn’t feel like myself. And now I sale sell like I am me. I’m confident in my sales process. I’m confident in my course. I’m confident in the results behind the course. And so I’m confident enough to say. To to be up front and say, you know, this is my course.
This is my offer. It’s not for everyone. I’m confident my price point. So it takes a while to get to that. Three and a half years into having a course and it takes a while to get to that point. But people often are like, I like that you weren’t, you know, the typical things, bro marketing, trying to sell me something that wasn’t a good fit for me. You were authentic, transparent. The secret sauce is just really being yourself and making sure that your target market. Knows that you’re in it for the right reason. Like I’m actually not trying to con someone into. Enrolling. I know that if the right person enrolls in the course, the value is tenfold. Yeah.
Go figure. Right.
I love it. I love it.
Anything we didn’t talk about.
On the funnel weight? I do have a question.
That I meant.
To ask you.
A couple of things.
Yeah. Are you not using, like.
Utm codes or anything to.
Track?
I mean, I do, but I don’t. I don’t evaluate the data. Like, I need to. That’s my that’s my 2020.
This from a Google person.
I know. I’m like, no, I’ve got all the UTM parameters in that turned on. Yeah I’m, I’m a Google ads girl. I’m not an analytics girl, so I track my own data in my own way. But you know, I yeah, I will get more advanced with doing actually using the UTM tracking and stuff like that, but I have it turned on. So the data is there if I want to evaluate it.
But I love it because for, for so many people they’re.
Like, oh, I don’t want to do, you know, UTM tracking or anything, even though.
It’s something I do recommend. Like people a lot of people are like, Oh, I don’t want.
To learn it, I’m not technical or.
Whatever, even though you don’t need to be like, I don’t want to.
Learn it.
You’re hearing exactly how.
And we’ve talked about that.
On the on the.
Podcast. You know, I’ve mentioned that.
Quite a few times over, you know, over a long while now is like there are ways to track the, the how effective your ads are doing.
Based on purchases which you.
Ultimately obviously.
Want.
Doing simple things like Katie’s.
Doing.
So yeah, and I think also having. I. I do need to get better at tracking. You just made me remind me about that. But, like, I think I know. I know so much about my. My funnel and my daughter and my stats that. I haven’t needed to go that far. I know the ads are working. Yeah. Yeah, because I’ve got other. Other things to back it up.
Yeah. And it’s also hone in on the point. Everybody is. Everybody always asks and I always talk about this. Everybody always.
Asks.
How much should I spend on my ads?
How much are they working? You know, your data.
String, it.
Tells the story.
In that I mean, I get that question all the time. Like, how long is a piece of string is really difficult. It depends like, is it working? Spend more, Is it not working? Spend less. Like it’s a it’s a really it’s a what’s it called? It’s a spectrum. Yeah. It’s not a there’s no one size fits all approach because if you know your numbers, you know, you have that information. Back to what we didn’t ask about the funnel, the things that I will be focusing on now, now that I feel like I’ve got the ad side of things dialed in with getting people in there. Sure. Is that the I’ll be improving it in the next few months by adding an upsell. It used to have an upsell but that that feature in Google ads was wasn’t as applicable anymore.
So I took it off the market. But knowing stats, 40% of people took up that upsell. So that’ll bump up the AOV, which will make the funnel profitable straight away essentially. Yeah, totally. So that will that’s the that’s the one thing I’ll be focusing on. The second thing is to improve the onboarding sequence, reviewing that, making sure that’s all dialed in and then improving the transition between the boot camp, the mini course and the full course. So there’s things that I’m always can tweak to improve that. That will improve the that won’t improve the CPA. Well, yeah, it won’t improve the CPA, but it’ll improve the AOV and the attributed revenue. Yeah.
So when you say the, the transition, if you will, like basically the emails.
Yeah, I can do a better job at probably transitioning or I feel like at the moment the sequence probably is like, oh by the way, here’s my course by like it’s, you know, it probably isn’t giving it enough justice, doing it enough justice. So I can improve that, definitely. Yeah. But that’s the thing.
Like everything in my business, I look at it as a chance to optimize how can I optimize my launch process, how can I optimize my funnel? Like optimizing isn’t reserved just for ads. It’s like tweaking things all the time and it might not work, but I’m really okay with that. It could not work, but I can revert back. So I just look at everything as like I’m just my job in my business is just to continually like tinker away and tweak and improve and you know, there’ll be always things that I can do.
I’m like, leaning back right now. Like, this makes me so happy. This is what? This is what it’s all about, y’all. Like, this is like. Katie is just literally using the data to make decisions, you know, and and just to kind of highlight.
One one thing you said before about testing is like, all right, you test it, you put it in a new checkout.
And you.
Immediately.
Saw an.
Increase in conversion rate.
Then you added, you know, you changed out.
The images that you were using.
And you didn’t see a.
Change in your conversion rate.
But you did see an increase in.
Click through rate. Traffic going.
Through. It’s like you’re changing one element at a time and.
Testing for whatever. That change you just did is supposed to affect.
Yes, correct. You have to know the metric that’s trying. You’re trying to move. I’m not trying to increase my click through rate by a checkout change because that’s not going to increase it. So you have to look at the metric that is the problem metric. In my case, I had a few problem metrics, so I had to do a few changes. But if your conversion rate is awesome, your problem metric is probably just getting more people to the page. So yeah, look at the ads or the targeting or the budget like. I always say, like when it comes to running Google ads, is this a problem that Google ads can solve? If your conversion rate is crap, Google ads can’t solve that problem. We can get you more traffic that will just make you pay more for a crappy conversion rate, right?
So always be looking for the metric and that can take a while to wrap your head around, but. You. You have to understand, what lever am I trying to pull? How can what what can I optimize that will change that? And back to what I was saying about there was expenses attributed to this, like changing checkout thrive cart has a cost attributed to it. Hiring a designer has a cost attributed to it. I make three sales and I’ve covered those costs. Yeah, of my big course I should say I make three sales. So I also look at everything that, you know, I might hire a copywriter that’s $6,000 to do my to review all my sales copy because I like to write all that myself, but have someone tweak it and optimize it and make it better. Sure. And that’s an expense. But if she tweaks that and I get three more enrollments from that, it’s net net it’s it’s coveted.
Everything is profit after that.
Correct. So yeah I like to look at things not as. Same with ad spend. It’s not an expense. It’s really an investment in building the business, which is it’s really a mindset shift that you need to. Get to when you’re running ads. Yeah.
I love it.
Thank you for breaking all this down. People are going to want to connect with you. They’re like, Hey, how do I get this?
Where can they.
Go to connect with you?
Well, you can come to my website which is Katie griffin.com that’s Katie griffin.com. And I mean you can check out the course that the mini course that this is about is forward slash course so you can check out the sales page have a look through I’ve got a couple of opt ins on the page I think one opt in on the website if you want to go there. Yeah. Dm me on Instagram I’m at Katie Griffin underscore. So.
Wait. Katie Griffin then underscore.
Yeah underscore because Katie Griffin. There’s some squatter that’s on that account not using it. Oh really.
I know, I know. It’s the worst.
God damn them. And tell them to give the handle to me.
Katie Griffin underscore it’s.
Katie Griffin.
Griffin underscore shooter DM on Instagram.
Let her know that you heard her on the podcast here. Thank you so much for breaking this funnel down. Like I had to look down at the time. I was like, we could chat for hours on this because this is like, this is my sweet spot.
I love it.
So thank you for breaking this down. Thank you so.
Much for having me.
It’s a joy to be on the podcast. Thank you so much.
All right. I hope you enjoyed that one with Katie. Make sure to reach out to Katie as either Katie griffin.com, Katie griffin.com. Check out her course there you can.
Get that $30 course right.
There on her website also and join the waitlist for her next enrollment. Also reach out to her on Instagram like we talked about and let her know that you heard her on the podcast here. Also, if you’ve not yet subscribed to the podcast, click that subscribe button there on Apple Podcasts or follow button. If you’re listening on Spotify or any other platforms, that’s super helpful. So you don’t miss any episodes here on the show. Also, it’s still really helpful. I know that we used to talk about it a lot a while ago.
But it’s still really helpful to leave.
A quick rating and review for the podcast over there on Apple Podcasts. Thank you in advance for doing that. It’s super helpful for the show here. Until next time my friend, be well and I’ll chat with you soon.
