How To Spy On Your Competition’s Funnels

We already know that optimisation should be a continuous process. We should never rest on our laurels, after all. In this day and age when marketers get creative in order to stand out among competition, what works for your now may be a thing of the past tomorrow.

This is why updating and optimising your funnels is always the right thing to do.

And what better way for optimisation than to research on your competitors? Analysing your competitors to gather insights on what works for them and what you can implement in your own funnels and make those strategies tailored to your marketing needs is a great process in optimising your sales funnel.

Here’s are some quick tips should you want to personally do a competitor analysis and “spy” on your competition’s funnels.

Use Tools

One of the many things you can do, and quite useful at that, is to research your competitor’s organic keywords and keywords from paid search.

Tools such as SemRush, SensorTower or AdBeat are good examples of tools to use if you want to run a search for your competitor’s top organic and paid keywords, for example. Most of these tools are paid services so it’s always best to choose the one which fits your needs.

Most research tools can be used for site audit, competitor keyword (organic and paid) research, backlinks research, ad campaigns, and more. Not only can you use them on your competitors, but you can also use such tools to audit and analyse your own website and marketing efforts. This is a great way for you to set up a chart and create comparisons especially if you are doing poorly on a particular element and would like to see what your competitor is doing right.

Screenshot Ads and Visit Websites to Be Retargeted

Most of the time, if you do a search on search engines with the specific names of your competitor, the search results would include their ads. If that doesn’t happen, you’ll need the help of website research tools like the ones mentioned earlier.

What you do is to take screenshots of these ads for documentation and clicking these ads to visit the landing pages so you can also study the structure and layout of every ad campaign’s landing page (if there are more than one ad campaigns). Also, visit your competitors’ websites especially the product and services pages to be retargeted. Properly document retargeting ads you get through social, email and throughout the web.

Buy Their Product and Go Through Their Sales Funnel

There’s nothing as direct as going through your competition’s sales funnel and buy their product. Take note of how they present their pricing strategy, their pop-ups (if available), their payment gateway, their forms and the number of fields in the form, their email campaign strategy and so on. That way, you’ll be given a first hand experience of what a user goes through as they move along your competition’s sales funnel.

This is also a good chance for you to take note of their layout and design in terms of user experience. Determine if going through their sales funnel is a lot easier than yours and what you can glean from this experience to improve your sales funnel’s UX (user experience).

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is their sales copy compelling?
• Are their marketing messages aligned to their sales goals?
• Did you have an easy time going through their funnel?
• How about the buying process? Were you able to complete transaction without a hitch?
• How is their after-sales service? Do they check up on their customers for feedback?

From the answers above, see how your sales funnel compares.

Document Their Price Points, Upsells, Downsells, Etc.

While you’re going through your competitor’s sales funnel, do take note of their price points and analyse them. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What makes their price packages effective?
• What added value is apparent as the package tier goes up?
• Do the upsells and downsells add more value to their existing pricing points?

Aside from the questions above, it would be best to document all of these to enable you to study it thoroughly. You’ll have to take note of the similarities in your price points, upsells, etc. and determine if how they present all of these is effective, engaging and effective in converting their visitors into buyers.

What’s Next?

Researching your competitors and knowing what works for them is no easy feat. After all, you’ll have to analyse your findings and device an optimisation strategy from the insights gathered from your research. But daunting a task this may be, you’ll find that it is also rewarding in the long run.

Be careful of implementing strategies that work for your competitors from the get-go because they may not work for you. Always remember that it is important to improve on it and optimise it for your brand. Aligning your sales, marketing and branding and making the strategy your own is always important. It’s not about knowing what works for your competitors and copying their strategies.

The point here is to know what your competition is doing and plan to be a step ahead of them.

Another thing to take note, when implementing your sales funnel optimisation strategies, is to always test the steps in your sales funnels, especially if you have different variation for every step (i.e. landing page, sales page, order page, etc.) It always pays to test and determine which of the variation is the best choice to implement.

Because ClickFunnels is all about letting marketers experience a seamless marketing setup process. It lets you test your sales funnel step with ease. All you have to do is to Login to your ClickFunnels account > Choose the sales funnel you want to test > Choose the sales funnel step you want to test the variations of > Click Create Variation. Easy, right? You can test with up to 2 variations aside from the original.

What strategies do you have in place to “spy” on your competitors?

Share us some of your insights by commenting below!