Funnel Hacking and How to Analyze the Funnel of your Competition 

The truth is that all of us in marketing like to embellish terms and give them a “cooler” name. But the reality is that funnel hacking is only based on analyzing what sales strategies your competition carries out.

It is essential to have a good starting point and to be able to analyze what actions are being carried out and in which channels the most investment is being made.

Therefore, in this article, I am going to tell you how you can do an analysis of the sales funnel of the competition.

What is Funnel Hacking?

Funnel hacking is a process that is based on analyzing the sales funnels of the competition and collecting those elements that can improve your funnel. (Obviously without copying).

That is to say, in the end, it is a technique through which it is based on analyzing what the competition is doing to increase its sales.

Advantages of Funnel Hacking

One of the main advantages of funnel hacking is that due to the research, you will be able to extract all this information from your competitors. Information like:

• main sources of traffic.
• advertising channels they are using.
• the structure of the sales page and the landing pages for capturing leads.
• Types of lead magnets that each competitor has.
• The content they use at each stage of the sales funnel.
• The email marketing sequence and its sending frequency.
• Investigate what automation they have.
• Analyze their creatives, ad copy, and target audience.

In short, it investigates the entire sales process and incorporates the best elements or strategies into your funnel.
 

How to do Funnel Hacking and Spying on your competition’s sales funnels

1. Know who your competition is

It may seem obvious, but most of the time we do not choose the competition well.

In fact, it may even be that a client is not clear about which companies they are really competing against. Therefore, I always recommend that you classify the competition into these three levels:

Competitors at the keyword level:
Companies or projects that are positioning for the keywords that interest us but that do not have the same income streams as us.

Competition at the business model level:
These are the ones we really care about because they are all the companies that are really offering the same products or services.

Referents
It is an aspirational competition. Where we would like to be but due to budget, resources, or time, we are years away from achieving it.

2. Analyze your traffic sources

Through tools like Similarweb, Ahref, or SEMRush, you will be able to know the visits to a web page and its traffic sources.

Only with that image, you can already know in a general way what may be the possible channels on which this competitor is focusing.

In this case, it looks like organic traffic is the main source of visibility and can be the first starting point.

The next step will be to know the pages with the most visits and their main positioned keywords and then move on to the other channels.
 

3. Analyze competitive ads

One of the main functions of digital tracking is to do an advertising audit. This audit is internal (the client’s advertising account) but also external (competitor’s ads).

In this way, you will be able to extract all this information from other companies:

• What products are they promoting?
• What is your promise?
• What is the copy they are using?
• The type of creatives: images, nuggets, videos, GIFs, etc.
• Ads depend on the phase of the funnel.
• The keywords for which they are bidding.
• At what times of the year do you invest more?
• The temporary campaigns they do.
• What products are promoted throughout the year?

4. Analysis of organic traffic

When we talk about organic traffic, we can refer to both traffic from search engines (Google) and social networks.

In any case, from the organic traffic you will be able to know:

• Positioned keywords.
• Positioned sales landing.

While in terms of social networks you can analyze:

• The social networks that carry the most web traffic.
• The frequency of publication.
• The type of publication and the ones that are working best for them.
• The videos with the most views.
• The posts and videos with the most comments.

To do this, you can use tools like Metricool that allow you to do an exhaustive analysis of the competition in social networks.
 

5. Analysis of the lead capture and sales pages

Once we know how it sends traffic, you must analyze what the landing pages are and how they are structured. If your strategy is to capture leads, then the traffic will go to a Squeeze Page.

From this you will be able to analyze:

• The value proposition.
• The owner.
• The subtitle.
• The CTAs.
• The about me.
• Testimonials.
• The content of the lead magnet.
• The mockup, image, or video.
• The reinforcement of the promise.

But it may also be that they directly promote the sales page. In either case, I recommend you use the free “Go Full Page” Chrome extension. In this way, it will take a screenshot in PNG or PDF of your competition to be able to analyze it later.
 

6. Email marketing strategy analysis.

By subscribing to the competition database you will be able to extract all this information:

• What is the delivery sequence of the lead magnet?
• The welcome sequence.
• The sales sequence.
• The type of newsletter.
• The frequency of sending.
• The structure and type of email.
• What products do you promote?

To do this, you can create only one email to sign up and not fill in your personal email. I also recommend making a table where you collect information about the different types of lead magnets and the product they later promote.
 

7. Analysis of sales funnels

Once you have investigated all the elements that are part of the funnel, you will be ready to sketch the funnel. In this way, you will know in a very visual way what sales strategy they are using.

There are different types of sales funnels and depending on the type of business your competition may be using one or the other.

To do this, you can use tools like GERU or Funnelytics. But if you can’t invest in them, you can also do it in PowerPoint or just draw it on your tablet or sheet of paper.

TIP: Something that I advise you to do is visit the sales pages several times in case any automation is activated.

I also recommend you complete the process of the funnel whenever you can buy the products of your competition to see the entire process.