For a sales funnel to be effective and efficient, it needs to be carefully tracked and measured. In fact, tracking and measuring is the most important thing you’ll do in your entire sales process. When you monitor each part of your funnel, you can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t, and what areas of the funnel need to be tightened up.

Traffic Sources

The entry point of your sales funnel is your landing page and its success depends upon traffic. You need to know how much traffic you are getting and where it’s coming from. Traffic sources could be social media, SEO, paid ads, or referring sources. Always monitor your traffic statistics. When a source isn’t pulling its weight, tweak it or drop it. Try to focus on sources that are bringing in a great deal of traffic compared to the time and money you spend on it.

Your Opt-in Conversion Rate

Your opt-in conversion rate tells you how many of the visitors to your page who see your offer actually take you up on it. This is an important statistic, because it tells you whether or not your landing page is working. If the conversion rate is low, consider spicing up your offer by improving the copy, offering something better, or making it a one-time only or limited-time offer. Start with tweaking your headline before you change anything else.

Testing Landing Pages

A tried and true method to tweak landing pages is to split-test. This means creating several different pages and seeing which one performs best. You can then analyze the best performing page to figure out why it works and apply this information to future pages as well.

Start by testing just one element on two or more different versions of the same page so you can be sure to compare apples to apples. Otherwise, you won’t know what is actually working.

Site Activity

Monitoring your analytics will tell you what people are doing when they hit your site. You can discover how much time they spend on each page and what they click on. Bounce rate is a statistic that tells you how many visitors hit your site and when they leave it. When people don’t spend much time on your page it could mean the copy isn’t compelling enough to keep them or that your traffic sources aren’t relevant to your offer. For example, you don’t want an article you’ve written on mastering social media to lead to a landing page for a guide to blogging.

Sales on Back-end Offers

Keep tabs on sales figures for your back-end offers. If they’re not selling like they should be, something may be wrong within your funnel. Identify the spots where you’re losing prospects. You may also need to add more small ticket offers throughout the funnel to better qualify your subscribers.

Email Conversions

You can monitor conversion rates for your email promotions as well. If you are offering your subscribers the relevant products that they want and need, you should have a healthy conversion rate. Whenever you try out new offers, drop the ones that aren’t converting. Look for areas in the funnel where there are many unsubscribes.

Tools to Help You Monitor

There are a number of tools available to help you monitor the effectiveness of your sales funnel. One of the most comprehensive is Google Analytics. This is a free program that measures traffic sources, time spent on site, bounce rate, and a whole host of other stats.

Professional landing page or sales page themes should offer other data as well. Some even have split-testing options build-in. In addition, there are specific tracking software tools you can install and use to create separate tracking links for different campaigns.

For email analytics, autoresponder programs offer a wide range of stats to tell you how well your email marketing is going. They measure open rates, sign-ups, demographic information, and unsubscribe rates.

Social media measurement tools, such as Hootsuite, monitor your traffic and activity on social media. They can help you search and analyze discussions, as well as gather data on your followers. A good social media tool offers a dashboard where you can manage all of your different profiles at once.

Your Monitoring Routine

Monitoring is an ongoing task that must be done regularly. Divide your monitoring tasks into categories based on frequency; for example, you might have daily monitoring tasks, weekly monitoring tasks, monthly monitoring tasks, and so on. Every few months, set aside an afternoon for in-depth monitoring over a longer period of time.