How To Stop Wasting Money On Marketing Your Online Course

Never waste money on marketing again! It’s a known fact that most of the money invested in “marketing” is not used optimally. In this webinar with Chris Badgett and Tom Libelt, Tom will show you why and how to track your own marketing successfully and to more effectively guide the various marketers you hire.

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How To Track Marketing Attribution For Your Online Course

This webinar breaks down how course creators lose money by trusting broken analytics. Marketing agency owner Tom Libelt of We Track Your Marketing joins Chris Badgett to show why Google Analytics and Facebook conversion numbers can be off by 30 percent or more, how to reverse engineer which channels actually drive sales, and how to find your best converting message before spending on paid ads.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Google Analytics and Facebook usually misreport your real conversion numbers
• How to reverse engineer your traffic to find which channels actually produce sales
• How to test and narrow down your marketing message before spending on ads
• How to define your ideal course customer instead of guessing at your audience
• How heat maps and funnel tracking tools reveal where buyers actually drop off

Key Takeaways

• Install a heat map tool like Hotjar on your sales page from day one, even before you start paid ads
• Test your message on your biggest organic channel first, then carry the winning message into paid traffic
• Track every marketing platform you use so you can kill the ones that are not producing sales
• Ask past customers directly why they almost did not buy, then fix that objection in your sales page
• Re-run a working email sequence every few months instead of writing new emails indefinitely

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Marketing Attribution Matters More Than Chasing The Perfect Headline

Chris Badgett: Welcome to this presentation on how to stop wasting money marketing your course or your training based membership site. I’ve got Tom Libelt here. He’s an excellent marketer and sales professional, and he takes it seriously and does it by the numbers. In order to do the numbers, you have to have proper marketing attribution in place.

Tom Libelt: Marketing is part art and part science, and it’s really both of them working together. I used to say that too, part science and part art, but I recently read a book about the auto industry, about how the scientific types and the bean counters destroyed the company by being too much themselves. So I’m more careful now about leaning too hard into the science side. If you go too far into “give me the fifteen proven headlines,” you come out with something bland that destroys what you’re actually doing.

I’ve been in sales and marketing for a long time, and I’ve owned brick and mortar businesses too, so I’ve seen both sides. Right now I run a course marketing agency, which matters here because I’m in your niche. I know what you’re going through day to day. My agency has worked with over 150 course creators marketing their courses, and we’ve been responsible for a lot of revenue for them over the last 12 months.

The Three Step Strategy Behind Every Campaign

Here’s the strategy and tactics we use whenever we start playing with paid ads, and this presentation works for organic marketing too. I use paid ads as the example because it’s the riskiest thing you can start. It doesn’t cost you anything in the sense that it doesn’t hit your wallet immediately, but once a client starts paying out of pocket, things get real fast.

With every client, we do three things in order. First, we start tracking marketing properly, because 99 percent of course creators simply don’t do it. Second, we find the message that converts, which is usually where we lean on organic channels as much as possible. Third, we do what I call racking the shotgun, meaning we test a spread of platforms, and then narrow and scale into what’s actually working. You could call this the scientific part, because there are so many variables in each step, but it’s the process we follow every single time.

Why Your Google Analytics And Facebook Numbers Are Probably Wrong

We used to track things through just Google and Facebook’s own numbers, and it worked fine until the money got bigger. Once a client started making forty or fifty thousand dollars a month and spending fifteen to twenty thousand on ads, the gap in the numbers became obvious. We had tracked actual revenue through a simple Google Doc, and when we compared that to what Google and Facebook reported, the platforms were consistently off by around 30 percent.

That 30 percent could go either direction. We would think we had 30 percent more sales than we really did, or 30 percent less. The same thing happened with visitor counts to our own pages. Google Analytics doesn’t help much here because it doesn’t follow someone across platforms.

Why Analytics Breaks Down Once You Add Multiple Marketing Platforms

Any course creator who sticks with this for a while ends up using several different tools. You might run your course on LifterLMS, host your webinar on WebinarJam, do outreach on LinkedIn, and run a separate sales page on WordPress. Google Analytics does a very poor job connecting any of that, especially once email enters the picture.

Say someone signs up on your opt-in page, gets a thank you email, then a welcome email, then moves through a sales sequence and finally buys after clicking a link in email number eight. Google Analytics has no way of knowing that person actually started on your opt-in page rather than, say, a Facebook ad. At best you might know they came from an email, if your tracking is even that good, but you can’t work backward to see how they got onto that list in the first place. Simple tracking is fine at the very beginning, but it loses its usefulness fast as your marketing grows.

How Inflated Platform Metrics Are Pushing Marketers Toward YouTube

There’s plenty written about platforms inflating traffic and video metrics, but the Facebook one was genuinely alarming. When we went heavy into Facebook video for a few clients last year, we found the platform was inflating view counts by close to 900 percent. For our clients that was one thing, but think about a company like Pepsi or Coca-Cola spending twenty or thirty million dollars on branding and believing they got all those millions of views. You can’t fully trust what these platforms report about themselves.

This is part of why we’ve seen a real shift toward YouTube once people realize Facebook’s numbers don’t hold up. For any course tied to a certificate or passing an exam, I’ve seen creators hit six figures before they even come to me, purely through organic YouTube video. If you’re teaching someone how to pass a specific exam that leads somewhere concrete, YouTube is where I’d start regardless of anything else.

How To Visually Map Your Website Traffic And Find Untracked Sources

Here’s how I track my own site, and it’s actually fairly simple. I can’t show much of my client data, but this is my own funnel map. I can see what percentage of people who hit my homepage move on to other key pages I’m tracking, including my main sales page for our course marketing service. I can see which case studies on that page are leading people further into the funnel, and which ones aren’t performing, along with how many people fill out our consultation form. It’s very visual, and you can do this across platforms, whether that’s your sales page, an opt-in, a webinar, or your email sequence.

One part I really like is that the map shows plus symbols for traffic sources it can see but that I haven’t formally added yet. I can click the plus sign and pull that source directly into my map. For example, I found that a podcast page and an about page I hadn’t mapped were actually feeding a meaningful number of people into my services page. Once I saw that, I could connect those pages together and get a much clearer picture. The tool still tracks traffic you haven’t explicitly told it to track, which is what makes this next part possible.

Reverse Engineering Traffic To Find Hidden Revenue Channels

Some of our clients run affiliate programs, and when they see, say, 200 sales come in, they might only be able to explain where 15 of those came from. Looking at the funnel map, we can often see that a big chunk of the rest is coming through affiliate channels or another source they weren’t tracking at all. Before that, they were just guessing. Once you have a lot of channels driving sales, that guesswork becomes overwhelming, and this reverse engineering approach is how we cut through it.

Here’s an example from the same time period on my own site. Without reverse engineering, I might see 1,500 people show up on my homepage. That number alone doesn’t tell me much, because most of those people never reach the goal I actually care about, which is my consultation form. When I reverse engineer from that goal, I see a much smaller number, around 101 people, who actually took the path that matters.

From there I can see that people who visit my about page don’t lead to the consultation form as often as people who come through my services page. So I know to look more closely at click through rates on the about page and figure out how to push more of that traffic into services, since those are the people who actually convert.

Using Heat Maps To Find Weak Spots On A Page

The other thing we do is set up heat maps, especially on a page like my about page. Two examples stand out. One shows exactly where people click, which is mostly a specific button, and where people fall off in the content, which tells us the page is working reasonably well. The other kind of heat map shows something less obvious. Sometimes you’ll see a big drop off line partway down a page, which usually means one paragraph is killing the read. The fix is simple: rewrite that paragraph.

Sometimes a heat map shows people clicking on a part of the page that isn’t a link at all, just blank space or plain text. That doesn’t make obvious sense, but it tells you something real about how people interact with the page. When we’ve seen that, we’ve put an opt-in or a button right in that spot, and conversions went up, because people were already inclined to click there for some reason. Heat maps are an easy fix once you know where to look, and Hotjar gives you three pages for free to get started.

The Core Tracking Tools And What They Cost

For heat maps we use Hotjar. It’s free for your first three pages, which is enough to cover your sales page, your opt-in page, and one key piece of content or your about page, since that’s usually where 80 percent of the real interaction happens. For funnel tracking we use Funnelytics, which normally runs somewhere around fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year depending on the plan. We were one of the founding members, so we’re able to pass on access at a much lower one-time cost, but full price is what most people would pay for it directly.

Test Your Message On Your Organic Audience Before You Pay For Traffic

Before you go paid, or even before you seriously start scaling any kind of marketing, you have to figure out what message actually converts. I asked Chris directly whether he has a message that converts better than anything else for LifterLMS.

Chris Badgett: I know the three goals people actually want are impact, income, and freedom, so that’s the benefit layer. There’s also real confusion in the marketplace about the difference between an online course, a membership site, and an LMS, so part of my job is clarifying what those words mean. Depending on the use case, whether it’s an online course, a membership site, an internal training tool, or education used as a marketing tool, the message has to shift. There’s a lot of segmentation involved.

Tom Libelt: With you, and with a lot of course creators, we’d start with your biggest organic channel, in your case probably your Facebook group or your podcast, and split test different messages to see which one gets the response you actually want, while tracking those links properly. That’s usually where you find your best ideas for later marketing, and you always start with the channel that already has the most reach.

Split Testing Messages Through Your Biggest Organic Channel

For something like a podcast, it’s a little trickier since you don’t always know how people are interacting with it. What I’d do is set up separate landing pages for each message, so you know a visitor only heard that specific message on the podcast, because you haven’t shared it anywhere else. The same idea works with an email list: segment it into groups of a hundred or two hundred people and send different messages to different landing pages, then see which links people actually respond to. That’s the first real signal you need, and it’s exactly why copywriting matters so much.

Why Hiring A Copywriter Early Is A Risky Bet

Hiring copywriters too early is dangerous for a few reasons. A lot of them come in with ego and start telling you what they know instead of asking you what you know, which is exactly the information that produces good copy. Pricing also has almost no correlation with quality. It mostly reflects how confident a copywriter is that they can charge that much, not how good the copy will actually be. For a lot of course creators with a limited budget, spending heavily here is close to a lottery, because there are so many unknowns and it’s genuinely hard to tell a good copywriter from someone who’s simply good at selling themselves.

How To Extract Your Own Sales Message Through One On One Conversations

My advice, and it’s what I do in my own business, is to try selling one on one to a few people first, whether that’s over the phone, LinkedIn, or Facebook Messenger. Talk to a handful of prospects and look for a common conversation. Are you hitting the same points every time that lead to a sale? Are you getting the same objections that stop people from buying? And can you spot any red flags in how the conversation stalls out? Based on those three things, you can write a genuinely strong sales page yourself, one that doesn’t need to be long, since length doesn’t matter nearly as much as hitting the right points with the right prospect.

Why Social Proof And Asking For Objections Both Matter

People need to feel like buying makes sense logically, with no red flags, but the feeling of trust matters just as much. That’s why social proof and reputation, being featured on a known podcast or used by recognizable companies, still helps so much. If someone doesn’t know you yet, that’s the real challenge: how do you earn their trust. Those small trust indicators go a long way toward solving it.

Every good sales organization, including some of the more aggressive ones like timeshare sales teams, does one thing well: they carefully ask people why they didn’t buy, or which part of the pitch turned them off. You might irritate a prospect a little by asking, but that data is extremely valuable, especially if your sales conversation isn’t converting well yet. Even if you’re already doing fine, it’s worth asking at least once what almost stopped someone from buying.

How To Run And Narrow Down A Simple Ad Variation Test

For clients who want to move faster with paid ads, we’ll set up a handful of variations, usually around six different messages, since testing too many at once makes it impossible to tell what’s actually working. A typical test might include two images, three pieces of copy, and six headlines, and we start eliminating from there.

Say out of six ads, only ad one and ad three convert, which happens about 20 percent of the time. Looking at those two winners, we might already see they share the same image, so we know that image works, and now we need to test the two pieces of copy against each other along with two headlines. We run another round, this time with four variations combining copy and headlines while keeping the winning image fixed, and at the end we land on one clear winner and scale that up while killing everything else.

Why You Need A Clear Definition Of Your Perfect Customer

Once the message is dialed in, the next step, and the one people skip most often, is figuring out what other platforms your ideal client actually spends time on. My first question to anyone who isn’t selling well is simple: describe your perfect client. I’ll often hear something like “a man or a woman who works,” which could describe literally anyone. That’s not specific enough to be useful.

Chris Badgett: My perfect client is a course creator with at least two years of WordPress experience, who is already making at least thirty thousand dollars a year from their own expertise and wants to turn that into a course. They’re already comfortable creating content and aren’t afraid of a video camera. There’s a second type too: agencies and freelancers who build these kinds of high value custom LMS sites for other clients. So I actually have two perfect clients, the creator and the builder.

Why Course Creators Switching Platforms Are A Hidden Audience

Tom Libelt: That second answer leads into something important. People already on WordPress are relatively easy to find. You can look for coaches, authors, and speakers, since authors usually write books specifically to get on stage and then have nothing to sell once they’re there. But there’s a whole other group of people on Udemy, Thinkific, and Teachable who eventually outgrow those platforms. I call that group the switchers, alongside creators and builders. If I were you, I’d think seriously about how to help your builders market to the switchers, since a lot of WordPress experts building their first course site for a client don’t fully know how to reach that audience yet.

There are a handful of places worth looking for these people. Facebook and YouTube are the obvious ones, and on YouTube you can even target competitors’ videos directly. Pinterest is trickier. It’s worked for niches that shouldn’t logically work on Pinterest at all, so it’s a genuine wild card.

Why Pinterest Can Be A Surprising Wild Card Channel

I had a client who helps therapists build private practices, a fairly dry subject, and he grew that business to almost half a million dollars a year working three days a week. His main traffic source turned out to be Pinterest, and even he didn’t fully know why. You have to test assumptions rather than trust them. Something highly visual, like Instagram, seems like an obvious fit, but the platform itself has weakened significantly compared to a couple of years ago, so it isn’t automatically a safe bet either.

Twitter tends to work well for a narrow set of topics, roughly food, fitness, dating, and similar high engagement subjects, since that’s most of what actually circulates there. LinkedIn is strong for B2B specifically. Google Ads can work even in competitive niches, but it depends heavily on the offer. A course helping someone pass a specific licensing exam, for example, might be too expensive on Google Ads to make sense, but very reasonable on YouTube instead.

Why Rising Ad Costs Mean Your Offer Has To Get Stronger

Facebook ad costs have climbed steadily. Clicks that cost seventy or seventy five cents back in 2015 can run several dollars now, and webinar opt-in costs have risen just as sharply. That means your offer has to get stronger over time to keep the math working. LinkedIn organic outreach is essentially free, but LinkedIn ads run considerably higher per click, high enough that most course creators here probably don’t have an offer that justifies it yet.

We usually start by testing three or four platforms at once with a small amount of budget on each, tracking everything closely, then eliminating what doesn’t work. Once you’ve narrowed to one platform that’s clearly working, you scale that first before spreading into a second, rather than trying to run everything at once. Purely organic growth can realistically take a course creator to six figures on its own. Getting to your first six figures is mostly about hustle and getting your message right. Past that point, growth becomes more of a systems problem, and past seven figures it usually takes multiple platforms and multiple channels working together, including affiliates.

A Real Example Comparing LinkedIn, AdWords, And Facebook Results

Here’s a real test where we ran essentially the same message and the same amount of effort across three platforms for a client. LinkedIn drove 52 people to the opt-in page, Google Ads drove 38, and Facebook drove 463. The client actually expected Google Ads to outperform LinkedIn, but the data said otherwise. That’s the value of testing rather than assuming: track everything, keep entering the data, and shut off any platform that isn’t producing.

For paid Facebook and Instagram campaigns, we typically start with remarketing and custom audiences before layering in lookalike audiences. Facebook’s targeting has gotten smart enough that, given a strong enough seed audience, it often finds better prospects than you could manually select. That said, I still put constraints on it based on what I already know converts, like a specific age range, rather than letting the algorithm run completely unchecked, since Facebook and Google’s incentive is always to spend as much of your budget as possible.

How To Structure Google Ads From Specific Keywords To Broad Match

With Google Ads, we work from specific keywords, to phrase match, to broad match, in that order. A specific keyword might be exactly “course creators.” A phrase match might be “how do I make an online course.” Once you move into broad match without careful controls, Google will start matching nonsense queries like “why do course creators suck,” and you end up paying for traffic that will never convert. Broad match traffic is smaller in volume but tends to deliver the best results once you’ve cleaned out the nonsense.

Sometimes keyword research hands you your next lead magnet directly. In the private practice niche, we noticed people were already searching for a “private practice checklist,” so we told that client to build exactly that as his lead magnet and target that specific search phrase. It worked immediately, not because it was clever, but because it matched what people were already looking for.

Hijacking Competitor Videos And Channels On YouTube

On YouTube, we initially like to target specific competitor videos that are already getting strong traction, running ads directly against that one video before expanding to the whole channel and finally to keyword targeting, which is the trickiest to get right. If someone has already built a large audience on a competing platform or plugin, you can put a banner on the side of every one of their videos and a pre-roll ad in front of them, so viewers see your message roughly as often as they see the creator’s own content.

A Case Study Where The Obvious Channel Was Not The Real Channel

We had a client running cold Facebook traffic, Instagram messages, older Facebook ads from before proper tracking, some retargeting, and organic posts. On the surface it looked like cold Facebook traffic and Facebook retargeting were performing best, and Instagram messaging looked almost as strong. In reality, Instagram messaging produced zero actual sales. Without reverse engineering the numbers, we would have kept pouring money into a channel that looked promising but wasn’t doing anything, so we cut it entirely and doubled down on retargeting and cold Facebook traffic instead.

Even an ad that performs well can stop working after six or seven months, so you always need something else ready on the back burner. You can often bring a retired ad back a year or two later once people have forgotten it. Testing never fully stops, even if you’re not chasing a constant hustle mentality about it.

Why Re-Running The Same Email Sequence Works For Years

People’s attention spans are shorter than most course creators assume. One client had a three-email sequence and, based on data from a different client in a similar niche, we found people were still signing up more than a year later. Instead of writing an eighteen-month sequence, we simply reran that same three-email sequence every three months indefinitely. We didn’t get a single complaint about repeated emails, even after nine months of the same sequence looping.

The reason repeated sequences still generate sales later is the same reason trust builds in general: people online are used to brands showing up and disappearing. Simply being visible and consistent for a year or more is often what convinces someone you’re not going anywhere, and that alone is enough to earn a sale, independent of any change in messaging.

My own approach with email is to remove people from my list quickly if they clearly aren’t going to buy, since there’s no point paying to keep emailing someone who isn’t interested. For everyone else, I’m comfortable nurturing them for years, because for a course specifically, the core transformation you’re selling usually doesn’t change much, so the same touch points and sequence can be reused over and over.

Split Testing Colors, Images, And Product Photos

Once your messaging is solid, there’s a layer of smaller tests worth running: colors, images versus plain text, and even color versus black and white creative, since people notice the pattern interrupt when something looks unusual compared to everything else in their feed.

Another useful test is showing the person using your product versus showing the end result itself, essentially the transformation versus the tool. You can pull a lot of this directly from your one on one sales conversations, including which specific questions people ask about what the product will or won’t do, and then turn those answers directly into ad copy.

This comes up a lot in physical training niches, where someone sells a tool, like a recovery device used after exercise, alongside a course teaching how to use it. One client I’m working with now helps trainers who are required to give industry presentations, and we’re currently testing whether people care more about the course teaching them how to present, or the ready-made slide materials that save them the work of building a presentation from scratch. It’s a genuine open question we’re still testing.

Why You Cannot Improve What You Do Not Track

I’ve watched people test endless small details, like whether a button should be red or orange, without tracking whether any of it actually moves sales. Tracking is the thing that makes every other test mean something.

Chris Badgett: Honestly, I’m not bad but I’m not great at this either. I’m using Google Analytics, the Facebook pixel, and ActiveCampaign for tracking, but I don’t have the kind of full funnel view you’re describing that actually connects all of it together.

Tom Libelt: That’s extremely common, and it’s usually the email side that breaks down first. If someone only has one opt-in, attribution is simple. Most course creators have twenty different opt-ins feeding into overlapping email sequences, and once that happens, it becomes genuinely hard to know which original opt-in actually led to a given sale.

What The Uneven Traffic Numbers Really Revealed About Channel ROI

A question came up about one of our funnel map slides, where Facebook drove the most raw clicks to an opt-in page, 463 out of a pool of about 1,169, while LinkedIn and Google Ads both converted 100 percent of a much smaller pool. What that first view only tells you is which channel is sending the most volume to that one page. To really understand return on investment, you reverse engineer from the thank you page backward, tracking which channel actually produced people who went on to buy, not just people who clicked. In that particular case, LinkedIn ended up outperforming Facebook once you followed the money all the way through, even though Facebook had sent far more raw traffic.

How Funnel Tracking Tools Generate Trackable Links Automatically

Chris Badgett: One of the things that slows me down as a marketer who wants to do more tracking is always having to build unique links, especially for social media. Is there an easier way than a Google UTM link generator?

Tom Libelt: Yes. Once you connect a property inside Funnelytics, you can create ads for it, label each one something simple like “lead magnet one” or “lead magnet two,” and the platform generates the trackable link automatically. You just copy and paste it wherever you need it, and tracking is already active, unlike a manual UTM setup where you build the link externally and then have to remember to use it consistently.

Why Conversion Goals Should Be Cleared Bottleneck By Bottleneck

Chris Badgett: How should people think about a conversion like an opt-in or a webinar registration versus the actual sale? I see a lot of beginners fixate entirely on the sale.

Tom Libelt: With a client who doesn’t have a big budget or a lot of data yet, I always want to confirm the earlier steps are working before spending on the later ones. First we check how many people are even reaching the sales or opt-in page. Once that’s healthy, we check how many of those people actually opt in. Once that’s healthy, we check how many open and click through the follow-up email that shows them the sales page. Only after those steps are solid do we really focus on the sale itself, because otherwise you might be building data on top of a broken earlier step.

This is the same idea as a manufacturing bottleneck. If a factory puts quality control after a part is already made, it wastes time and material fixing defects that already happened. Putting quality control earlier, before the bottleneck, catches the problem before it compounds. Fixing your funnel works the same way: solve the earliest bottleneck first.

Should You Build A Community Before You Market To It

A question came in about whether starting a Facebook group early to build pre-launch buzz is worth it, and whether that kind of tribe-building effort should be tracked the same way as cold marketing.

Chris Badgett: Building community is more than building an email list, and if you’re willing to put in the work, it’s a great idea. I have a Facebook group with about 7,000 members now, but it took roughly five years of daily effort to get there. The first four hundred people weren’t especially engaged. It took real, sustained work before the group took on a life of its own. If you’re willing to commit to that, and to keeping quality high, including removing people when necessary, it’s worth doing.

Tom Libelt: I hear this a lot: someone starts a Facebook group to support their launch and then says they’re hearing crickets. Like Chris said, you’ll keep hearing crickets for a while before it snowballs. It takes sustained hustle to build that momentum. I’m personally big on control in my own businesses, because I’ve learned that if a platform like Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn controls your foundation, you don’t really own your business. It works great until the day it doesn’t, or the day it’s taken away from you.

What Makes A YouTube Pre Roll Ad Stop A Viewer From Skipping

A question came in about whether the pre-roll seconds before a video, or a banner ad beside it, is the bigger opportunity on YouTube.

Tom Libelt: The placements that have worked best for us are either the few seconds right before the video plays, or the banner on the right hand side above the suggested videos, roughly the same dimensions as a standard Google display ad. To actually hijack all the ad space around a specific video, you need to target all three dimensions Google gives you: the side banner, the banner below, and the pre-roll spot. Give YouTube all three and it will place your ad across all of them.

On messaging, the goal in those first few seconds is the same idea as interrupting a scrolling social feed, except here you’re interrupting someone who’s already watching. You need a question or statement unusual enough to make someone pause before reaching for the skip button. The cheap version of this trick shows up constantly in airport bookstores, with titles built entirely around a shock phrase. It works the first time someone sees it, and then it gets played out fast, so don’t lean on a gimmick alone.

What A Reasonable Starting Budget For Paid Ads Looks Like

Chris Badgett: If someone is just getting started with paid traffic, and they’re already validated organically with real conversions happening from SEO or their network, what’s a reasonable use of a limited budget, and what’s a reasonable starting monthly amount?

Tom Libelt: If the messaging is already validated, the next question is whether you’re testing the whole message or just a headline, or just the copy. We’ll usually run small tests, often around twenty to thirty dollars a day, and we make sure each test spans both weekdays and a weekend, since people behave differently depending on the day. A Thursday-through-Monday window, for example, captures both patterns. Aim to get to roughly a thousand impressions before drawing conclusions, since that’s usually enough exposure to know whether something is actually working.

How To Know When You Have Outgrown Basic Analytics

Chris Badgett: I spend a lot of time helping people with basic best practices, like installing Google Analytics on day one with a simple WordPress plugin, just to build the habit of tracking even before you need it. How does someone go from a beginner tracker to someone who’s genuinely serious about it?

Tom Libelt: The shift happens the moment you start testing your messaging, because that’s already a step up. Early on, if you’re just putting something out into the world and hoping it converts, basic WordPress analytics is genuinely fine. The moment you start testing lead magnets across multiple emails, that’s when you need something more like Funnelytics, because analytics alone only shows you a slice of the picture. You’ll see people arrive at a lead magnet, disappear, and reappear later on a sales page, without a clear line connecting those dots.

Even a tool like ActiveCampaign has real limits here. You can see that one headline is outperforming another based on click-through rate, but it can’t tell you whether that difference is actually leading to a sale. Once you’re running sixteen or seventeen lead magnets, all funneling into the same welcome sequence, you genuinely lose track of which lead magnet produced which sale. That’s the point where you need dedicated funnel tracking rather than patching together analytics from separate tools. If you’re still on a single sales page or a single lead magnet without multiple email sequences, basic analytics is completely fine for now.

Why You Should Add A Heat Map From Day One

But from day one, even at that early stage, put a heat map on any sales page you’re sending traffic to. Hotjar is free for your first three pages, and it gives you real feedback instead of guessing why a designer wants to change your layout.

What A Property Means Inside A Funnel Tracking Tool

A question came in asking for a concrete example of what counts as a “property” inside a tool like Funnelytics, since it can be a confusing concept.

Tom Libelt: A property is essentially a tracked destination, and it doesn’t have to be a full domain. Three separate domains would be three properties, but so could a single webinar, or specific pages within one website. I had a client recently who was using WordPress for lead magnets, a separate webinar platform, ClickFunnels for the entire upsell and checkout process, a separate tool just for payment processing, and Teachable for the actual course platform. That was six or seven different platforms stitched together, probably the messiest setup I’ve ever seen. In a normal setup, about five properties covers most course creators’ entire marketing footprint.

How Ghost Lines Track A Sale Back To Its Original Source

Chris Badgett: Is something like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit itself a property?

Tom Libelt: No, it isn’t, but it is still tracked. Funnelytics does this through what it calls a ghost line. If someone signs up through a thank you page tied to a lead magnet, Funnelytics creates a ghost line from that thank you page through the entire email sequence that follows. If that person clicks a link anywhere in that sequence, even months later, the platform still knows they originally came from that same thank you page. That’s what makes it useful. Someone could sign up today, ignore your emails for seven months, and then click through and buy while you’re running a completely different campaign, and the ghost line still traces that sale back to where it actually started.

Closing Thoughts On Persistence And Building Trust With Your Audience

Tom Libelt: Good luck out there, and be persistent. That’s really half the battle. Building trust with your audience comes down to simply staying in front of them long enough for them to believe you’re not going anywhere.

Chris Badgett: That was an awesome presentation. I’m walking away with a lot of value and new ideas to put into action on the tracking side. Thanks for coming on and sharing all of this with the group.