'Funnel hack' is a vital skill if you’re a marketer who’s growing your business by building landing pages and sales funnels in your niche. 

Wait. 'Funnel Hacking?' What does that mean?

What is Funnel Hacking – Definition

Funnel Hacking [verb] – “to funnel hack”

The process of strategically investigating the sales and marketing process of your competitors, which you can use to model and test within your own sales & marketing processes. E.g. “I just funnel hacked that guy's website yesterday and he had two up-sells!” or “Man that landing page is sweet! I’m just going to quickly funnel hack it in Clickfunnels.”

Why Should You Know How To Funnel Hack?

Funnel hacking is one of the easiest and most crucial ways to grow your business. You can go deep into your competitor’s sales funnel and reverse-engineer what they’re up to, so you can test their strategies within your very own business. In an online business, this can be anything from split testing their landing pages, price points, email sequences and even retargeting ads.

Split testing various elements of your sales funnel can yield to great results, but testing blindly is a slow and sloppy process.

By taking advantage of the culture of ‘funnel hacking’ and getting into the thick of your competitor’s processes, you can see how successful they have been and start to see similar results in your own business. This won’t happen immediately, but you’ll begin to see trends in what’s working rather than testing floating ideas from scratch which will take a lot more time. 

So Where Do I Start With Funnel Hacking?

There’s no right or wrong way to start Funnel Hacking, but here's a simple road map for you to follow.

Make A List of Competitors

The first thing you’ll need to do is make a list of all of your competitors that you have in your market. These people are your direct and not-so-direct competitors which take a chunk of the market you’re fighting for.

These competitors have concepts which are working in your market in some way, shape or form. 

Screenshot Everything

Since we’re starting from the beginning, you won’t be able to see much on the outside of your competitor’s website. It’s simply a shell for all the juicy, money-generating mechanisms which are happening on the inside.

BUT that doesn’t mean it’s useless.

First, you need to have a screenshot tool which will allow you to easily screenshot website pages (full pages from top to bottom) so you can start saving them to your computer. My tool of choice is called Awesome Screenshot which is a Google Chrome extension. You can also install Greenshot. It has some great screenshot settings you can customize to your liking. Either of those tools will do the trick. 

Create a ‘New Folder’ called ‘[Competitor Name] 1’ and start taking full page screenshots of the pages that you visit and place them into the folder you’ve created for that website. 

Be sure to either create sub-folders or rename the images so you know which pages they’re reflecting from or else, it might get messy and you'll lose track of what’s going on. I generally set up folders along the lines of:

Competitor Research Folder Structure

• Front End Funnel Landing Pages
• Backend Funnel Landing Pages
• Ad Creatives
  • Retargeting Ad Creative
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Other

It chops and changes from case to case, but essentially it’s a nice way to organize.

Start Building Your ‘Funnel Hacking Bible’

Now, it’s time to do some quick evaluations. This is what I like to call my ‘Funnel Hacking Bible‘. 

It’s the notepad/document where I put together all of my ideas, strategies, and notes that I want to implement into my existing funnel. 

Open a Word Document or Notepad and start taking down some of the key homepage/first page trends you're seeing.

Some of which may include:

• What type of copywriting are they using in their headlines?
• What colours are they using for?
• Are buttons located above the fold or below the fold?
• Do they use videos or just text?
• Are they listing benefits or features?
• Do they include social proof?
• Are there any pop ups during exit intent?
• Is the header section of the site fixed?
• Is there a full sign up form or an opt in form?
• How many steps are there in one process?
• Are prices mentioned for their products (if so, what are their price points?)
• How many words are there on the homepage? (Short vs. Long)

And the list goes on….

As you have multiple websites open that are within the same industry, you’ll begin to see the trends in their marketing and be able to contrast what you are doing vs. what you’re not doing. Contrast what Competitor A is doing vs. what Competitor B is not doing. 

Each of these trends should be added into your Funnel Hacking Bible (FHB) and be noted on accordingly.

Strip Away The Technology & Tracking

Now that you have arrived to the first page and can see what’s visually going on, you’re most likely seeing only about 20-30% of the picture. Operating a sales funnel has many different stages, but generally they include:

• Driving Traffic
• Converting That Traffic

It is in these stages that marketers use tools and resources to become as effective and profitable as possible. But which tools are they using in their business that we can also use to help make us profitable?

To find this, you’ll need to download two more great Google Chrome add-ons.

The first is called ‘Ghostery‘, this addon sees the “invisible” web, detecting trackers, web bugs, pixels and beacons placed on web pages by Facebook, Google and thousands of other companies which gather information about your internet activity.

This app is primarily designed to stay hidden from trackers. It’s a great tool to highlight to marketers which trackers and programs are being used on by competing businesses

The second Google Chrome addon is called ‘BuiltWith Technology Profiler.' It allows you to see what a website is built with within a simple click of an icon.

Now that you’ve installed both of these tools into your browser, reload your selection of competitor’s websites and you’ll be able to see all of the tools and tracking which is taking place for every visitor who hits their website. 

This will begin to answer some of your traffic and conversion questions like: 

• Are they using remarketing?
• Are they using Google, Facebook or other platforms?
• Are they using any conversion tracking software?
• Which plug-ins are they using?

And again…the list goes on. Some sites have 5-10 trackers, others I’ve seen may have 40+ scripts running in the background of their websites. 

All of this should go straight into your FHB as you begin to build a web of information for your competitors.

Advanced Competitive Intelligence Tools

So how do we really find out how your competitors are acquiring the traffic in your niche? We want to be able to know specifically which sources will lead us to the golden nuggets in our marketing endeavors.

To find these real game changers, we’re going to need to move beyond plug-ins into some competitive intelligence tools. These tools uncover what’s happening right now in the market:

AdBeat or WhatRunsWhere: These tools instantly show you the strategies of online advertisers in your industry. You can see anything from how many days they’ve been spending money and running a particular advertisement, all the way to the creative and landing pages they’re sending their paid traffic to. Either one of these is a must have tool (which don’t come cheap) but will instantly let you leverage your competition’s ‘wins’ in your business.

SEMRush: While paid advertising is a very important part of any marketer’s funnel strategy, SEO cannot be left out either. This tool gathers paid and organic insights on your competitors. Some of the features include displaying, search positions & changes, ad copy, video advertising, backlinks, estimated traffic expenditure, keyword research and much more.

SimilarWeb: One of my favorite activities that you can see on SimilarWeb is the top referring sites and top destination sites as people flow in and out of your competitor’s website. Additionally you’ll also get information like a breakdown of social traffic, banner ads, other similar websites and more.

Follow: Follow is another great tool which gives you a lot of data for free (also has a paid plan) and lets you identify where the websites are doing a lot of their media buying. It’s a great tool if you don’t have the budget for one of the first two which can give you some really great intelligence on what’s going on.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

So by now you’ve got all the tools you need to see what’s happening on your competitor’s websites.

But there’s just one thing a tool can’t do for you. Do you know what it is?

Make purchases of your competitor’s products and go through their funnel.

So now it’s time to take that $$ you’ve put aside for a rainy day and start buying competitor’s products through their funnels. You want to maximize all the data you get from this stage, because remember, we’re buying data.

The reason you’re spending money with your competitor is to rip apart their sales funnel so you have a complete anatomy of what’s going on behind their closed doors.

This allows you to take as many different variations of the funnel as possible. Take all the upsells, downsells, cross sells…everything!

Got it? This is crucial. 

Because the funnel itself is what’s the heart of this whole operation. The ascension & process from Product A to Product B is what allows the business to buy traffic at the price that it does, add customers to their list at the rate they do and make a profit the way they do. 

And if you’re going into a new market completely cold, this is even more important. You want to see what funnel the advertiser has been sending traffic to for the past 124 days (you’d be able to find this information from one of the competitive analysis tools listed above). 

Everything leads to the funnel, and ultimately this is why funnel hacking is so important.

Re-Building A Winning Funnel

So you're looking at your FHB notes and wondering, when can I start actually using all this? Well, as you now know the look, feel, and core strategy behind the competing sales funnels in your industry; it’s time for you to start building out your sales funnel. 

The Clickfunnels Builder was built specifically with their intention in mind, building and hacking existing sales funnels so you can build a thriving business.

Step 1: Landing Pages & Homepages (Front End Funnels)

First, you’re going to want to start pulling apart the front end of the funnels you’ve been seeing. Clickfunnels has a wide range of templates you can use to get started, but you can also completely customize and build something with the same look and feel of your competitor.

I’d personally start with the 3 sales funnels which look as similar as possible to the competitors page you want to mimic.

Please note that if you’re funnel hacking a homepage or a landing page, the design will be a little different. There’s some great  tutorials on using the Clickfunnels editor which you can watch too. 

This is when those screenshots you saved earlier of the different pages you went through your competitor’s sales funnels will come in handy.

Other elements which you will need to keep in mind when re-building a page include:

• Videos/Video Sales Letters
• Copywriting
• Custom Graphics/Images
• Adding Tracking Codes

If you don’t already have a ‘guy’ who can help you with these areas of your funnel (that is, if you’re not able to do them yourself), you’d be wise to connect/ask individuals in the  Clickfunnels Facebook Group who may be able to help you out (there’s a wealth of talent and resources in that group!). You can also poke your head in the DotComSecrets Facebook Group for great marketing information too.