I recently hired a designer to redo the awful-looking Snip website. My plan was to put up the new site, then point an AdWords campaign at it. In true Jason fashion, I got impatient and spun up an AdWords campaign earlier this month even though the new design wasn’t ready yet. While I was at it, I figured I might as well spin up a PPC campaign on Capterra as well. Also in true Jason fashion, I have yet to set up proper conversion tracking for either of my two campaigns.

Anyway, in the time since I’ve spun up my PPC campaigns, I’ve gotten three trial sign-ups. For a few months, for whatever reason, I’ve gotten almost no sign-ups at all. So even though I don’t have conversion tracking set up yet, it seems pretty safe to attribute those sign-ups to the PPC campaigns. Feeling irresponsible about the no-tracking thing, I created a spreadsheet with all my 8 or 9 funnel steps and the conversion rate at each step. So far I only know the conversion rate for the first two steps, but at least I’ve identified exactly what work I need to do. Part of the barrier to getting this stuff set up correctly is just figuring out what the heck it is I need to do.

Out of my three signer-uppers, 100% of them completed the two steps in my new “setup wizard”, meaning they all provided a) their salon name and b) their stylists’ names. My hypothesis was that if I provided a sequential set of steps to follow, people would comply. That hypothesis seems to be correct. It also seems that once the steps stop, engagement stops. So what I think I need to do is keep feeding the prospect with steps of increasing levels of commitment. One of the steps should probably be “Would you like someone to call you to help you get started with your free trial? If so, what’s your phone number?” or something like that. And no matter how many steps the prospect completes, I should probably have a red banner at the top that says, “For free help getting started, call 1-800-whatever”.

Anyway, what I wanted to say in this blog post is that a thought occurred to me today. That thought was that it probably wouldn’t be terribly unreasonable for me to pour as much money into advertising as I can afford in order to get a batch of “seed” users, even if I’m acquiring those users at a rate that isn’t quite profitable. But in order for that move not to be TOTALLY crazy, I’d want to be pretty confident that my funnel will convert at a rate that registers above “devastatingly low”. So I guess I’d want to do a few of the things I KNOW I need to do to my funnel before paying for traffic to send to it, like the website redesign, and the couple extra setup wizard steps. I don’t think the absence of those things necessarily means I should shut off the PPC campaigns right now, though. There’s a danger in waiting until my funnel is “perfect” before paying to send traffic to it. I’ll keep the spend limits where they are now until at least after the website redesign.