The Key Metrics You Don’t Have That Are Killing Your Profits: A Video Interview with Zach Johnson of Funnel Dash

For most businesses, once they get online, it’s all about growing your list, because you can’t sell everybody the first time they meet you. Only a few people buy the first time they encounter your company.

So do you want more profits and sales? Is your funnel efficient? How do you improve it and get more profits?

Once you get into list building, and build funnels that drive those people toward a sale, you eventually get to ask the really important questions:

• What’s the max you’re willing to spend to acquire an email address?
• How fast can you grow your list?
• How can you grow your list faster each and every month?
• How can you do that with more confidence so you can invest in my marketing more aggressively and be confident in your ROI?

And you may have trouble answering those questions.

Zach and I discussed questions like this and his company Funnel Dash in this amazing interview that will change your life, make your stronger, melt away your belly fat, and get you lots more hot individuals of whichever gender you are attracted to (not really, but it will help you with funnels and analytics):

Brian Carter: Hey, everybody, Brian Carter here. How you doing, Brian Carter group, this is actually part of my podcast, which is called Brian Carter’s Brain. Which means you’ve entered a strange place. That’s right, Brian Carter’s brain. Today, I have with me, Zach Johnson of FunnelDash, and FunnelDash … Why did you name it FunnelDash? What’s the dash part?

Zach Johnson: Dashboard.

Brian Carter: Dashboard? Oh, dashboards. I get it. It’s a funnel dashboard. Do you, like, have a dashboard? That’s like the dumbest question I’m going to ask you the whole interview.

Zach Johnson: Way to start it off right, man. I love it.

Brian Carter: Yeah, man. Brian Carter’s Brain is a special place with special people inside of it. All right, so yeah, I’ve known Zach for a long time. I think we’ve interacted multiple times around various digital marketing topics, but I heard your stuff on Rick Mulready’s podcast, and I was intrigued. Because you were speaking my language, which was ROI …

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: … and talking about some key metrics, right? I want to get into some back story in a minute, but first, tell me, give me your pitch. Like, what are the key metrics that people who are doing online marketing don’t know, and why are they in really bad trouble because they don’t know them?

Zach Johnson: Yeah. I think the number 1 metric that I track, personally, when I’m scaling 6, 7 figure a month campaigns, is knowing the value, the lifetime value of a single email address on my email list. Facebook, AdWords, and any paid media manager is going to easily tell you what your cost is to acquire that email opt-in for your webinar, or for your video series, or for your lead magnet, but it’s actually pretty challenging to know how your marketing funnel is doing in terms of monetizing those email addresses, so when … It turned around for me, when I was running marketing at old … Not old, a software company called Leadpages, and before that another Inc. 500 software company called ONTRAPORT, and I had to figure out, what’s the max I’m willing to spend to acquire an email address? Because at the end of the day, it’s all about growing your list. How fast can you grow your list, how can I grow my list faster each and every month, and how can I do that with more confidence so I can invest in my marketing more aggressively and be confident in my ROI?

That’s my secret slash most important metric when you’re scaling big campaigns, is knowing that lifetime value of a single email opt-in, and I’ll share some stories with your people and you, today, Brian, on how a single email address can be worth upwards of $100 over …

Brian Carter: What?

Zach Johnson: … its one-time value. Yeah …

Brian Carter: What?

Zach Johnson: … to your business. Yeah.

Brian Carter: Yeah, well, I mean, so obviously, and for a beginner, you can’t sell everybody, when they first come to your site, so you need leads, right? A lot of people, they struggle even to get leads, right, and then, when you start getting leads, you’re really excited,

Zach Johnson: Yeah, exactly.

Brian Carter: You’re like, “Wow, I’m getting leads, yay!” Then the next step is what you’re talking about, “What are my leads worth,” and then go more granularly, right? Like what am I, so what are my leads worth revenue-wise, and then if you get that realistic figure, then maybe you get a fire under you to figure out how to make your leads worth more, right?

Zach Johnson: Hey, yeah. Right? Then it all comes back to the funnel, right?

Brian Carter: Yeah.

Zach Johnson: I mean, and some funnels, that my definition of, what is a great … What should a great marketing funnel do, and how do I know if I have a good marketing funnel, so I can go to a guy like Brian and he can ramp up my Facebook traffic. Right?

Brian Carter: That’s right.

Zach Johnson: Like, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.”

Brian Carter: “That’s right, send them to me. Send them to me.”

Zach Johnson: Yeah, yeah, and so a great marketing funnel is one that generates the highest lifetime values in the shortest amount of time.

Brian Carter: Right.

Zach Johnson: One that monetizes efficiently and effectively in terms of both on a click, a lead, and a customer basis, and the … Go ahead. You seem to have a question there.

Brian Carter: Do you look at a, do you look at everything as a funnel? For people, like everybody’s talking about funnels now, right?

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: For people who don’t like, they’re like, “Well, is a funnel that thing Russell Brunson’s talking about? What’s a funnel?” I’m serious, is everything a funnel to you?

Zach Johnson: Yeah, I would say, really, there’s kind of two parts to marketing. There’s lead gen and building your email list; and then there’s closing, last click attribution, like closing deals, doing promotions and getting people to buy. If you kind of just simplify marketing in those kind of two buckets, the first bucket is all about how many marketing funnels can you put people into, and … Not all funnels are created equal, and not all traffic sources are created equal, and not all leads are created equal, and so …

Brian Carter: Right.

Zach Johnson: … part of my inspiration for creating a tool like FunnelDash was so that someone like yourself or someone like myself who’s building on a funnel, or scaling an ad campaign, could come in and say, “This funnel with this traffic source is generating you the best customer.” That could be a webinar funnel, that could be a video series, that could be a survey funnel. You don’t have to take any guru’s word for it. You can basically take a data-driven approach, and you can know what’s best for your business.

Brian Carter: Right, and I need to do this, and I’m not procrastinating, really. I sort of am procrastinating, it’s only because I’ve been so freaking busy, but for example, like, I know I’m getting leads from my lead quizzes quiz for $1.82 …

Zach Johnson: Nice.

Brian Carter: … versus a webinar replay that’s recorded for maybe $6 versus my new webinars that are live, maybe 4 or $5, but I need FunnelDash to tell me how much, what’s the ROI on each of those, because maybe I shouldn’t be as excited about lead quizzes …

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: … and I am. Right?

Zach Johnson: You can go on LinkedIn, man, and you can pay $40 for an email I helped in, if you want. If you’re doing great. Some funnels, you’ll be stoked with that, because maybe 1 out of every 3 of those leads is closing.

Brian Carter: Right.

Zach Johnson: FunnelDash works in a unique way, in that it connects our JavaScript to all your website traffic, with your CRM, and your merchant processing, and your Facebook ad spend, so we’re pulling down on your ad spend, tying into a click. Then, instead of really reporting based off of an inaccurate pixel being fired, which is very frustrating, and JavaScript can sometimes lead to 30 to 50% inaccuracies in your data, we always were reporting off of, “What does Infusionsoft say? What does ONTRAPORT say? What does HubSpot say? What does ActiveCampaign say in terms of my leads? Because those are ones that I can actually email, and what does Stripe say, or what does my ONTRAPORT payment say in terms of revenue, because that’s the stuff that got charged, and that’s the stuff that going into my back account.” That creates, for incredible, accurate, what we call “closed loop” analytics and great reporting.

Brian Carter: Okay. Yeah, because we’ll see, so if we’re … Yeah, when you get those disparities between, like, you’re looking, I’m looking at stuff with a client sometimes and they’re like, “Well, Facebook says you sent 500 people, but ClickFunnel says there’s only 150 people that came to the page.” We’re getting lost in these midstream metrics when we should be concerned about what was the spend, how many people, and then what was the revenue, right?

Zach Johnson: Yeah, and also, reporting a lot of that stuff off of a Facebook pixel … A Facebook pixel could, Facebook will tell you that they made a sale. They’re greedy, man. They’ll just say, they have this view through pixel thing, right, where if they view your ad, but you don’t know … No one ever clicks on it, and then later, you have a custom audience uploaded, they see your ad, and you send an email, and they close, Facebook’s still going to take credit for that sale and that pixel being fired, because they saw your ad.

Brian Carter: The view-through versus the other, the regular conversion pixel?

Zach Johnson: Yeah, the regular … Yeah, basically click-through, right?

Brian Carter: Yeah. Yeah.

Zach Johnson: I personally don’t want to give Mark Zuckerberg that money. I’m like, “No, you didn’t deserve that sale. You didn’t close that sale. I closed that sale.”

Brian Carter: “You showed up at the sales meeting but didn’t say anything, somebody else made the sale … ”

Zach Johnson: Yeah. That’s great. Exactly.

Brian Carter: … and that’s kind of like, “You were sitting there at the table. You didn’t do anything.”

Zach Johnson: Right.

Brian Carter: Okay.

Zach Johnson: Right, right.

Brian Carter: Yeah. Well, so, okay, so I got another question about FunnelDash, because we have a, I did get a client over to you that’s one of our clients who has some … Like, he’s got a lot of weight loss supplement products, and I’m like, “Okay, your stuff’s really complicated. We need to … ” One of those things that FunnelDash does is, I think, is going to help them sort of simplify. The big picture, right …

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: … but is it just that … One of the things I’m seeing already that is helping them and us do is make sure that we’re tracking everything. Right?

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: Because if you aren’t tracking everything, FunnelDash can’t work, right? You know what I’m saying? Like if you don’t have your UTM … If you don’t have your UTM parameters in it, it can’t, FunnelDash can’t work, right?

Zach Johnson: Yeah, so how it tracks stuff is, once you put the JavaScript on your landing pages, and on your Google tag managers, you have to have UTM parameters … Which, if you ever go to a website, and you click on a Facebook ad, and then it’ll have this long string of URLs, you can, that’s … Those are UTM parameters, and those are identifiers to tell our JavaScript, and Google Analytics, and all your tracking scripts: Where did the click come from? What was the audience that they clicked on, and what was the creative that they clicked on, and what’s the funnel that they’re going to? We actually can hook your people up with a free Chrome extension, if they go to funneldash.com/chrome, you can get a UTM builder Chrome extension for free on us to help …

Brian Carter: Cool.

Zach Johnson: … you create UTM links on the fly, and then, when they go in and submit the email address, we’ll be logging all that data, so inside of FunnelDash, you’ll know, “What was the first click that they clicked on before, when they entered into my world, and what is that click worth, and where did it come from, and what was the audience, and how valuable is that to me as a business today, a month from now, 90 days from now?” We had a client that we were doing this pre-FunnelDash, right, where they had never really done any Facebook ads, and they really kind of had a bunch of sales pages, but no marketing funnel, and … Hey, you’re going to build a webinar funnel, you’re going to do live webinars every week. They engaged FunnelDash.

At the time, we were just doing funnel management services with this data-driven approach, and we were doing it all manually in spreadsheets, and the work was taking us forever, and we built their … Have the funnel, even $1,000, just with … Every single month with this funnel, it’s … Just yet, and so we said, “Hey, we’ve been tracking all this stuff, and … ” It’s a complete no-brainer, and we, when we broke it down to them, in that kind of simple way, it kind of took the scariness out of scaling an ad campaign past maybe 5 grand a month or 10 grand a month, and ramping it up to 30 to 50 grand a month. Then, a year later, they kind of find out that an email address is worth even more, it’s worth, like $101 …

Brian Carter: Wow.

Zach Johnson: … and so, then they’re like, “Yeah, let’s keep spending money on Facebook,” right? Like, “Yeah, it’s working for you.”

Brian Carter: Nice. Now, was any of that … We are going to go into your backstory, did you already … What was that, or did you already do it?

Zach Johnson: No, I mean, you know, I … Yeah, buddy.

Brian Carter: All right. Well, no, I mean, like, so yeah, so why FunnelDash, and where did it all come from?

Zach Johnson: I mean, It came …

Brian Carter: Was that, did you already answer that one?

Zach Johnson: It was … I mean, a little bit.

Brian Carter: Yeah.

Zach Johnson: It was, yeah, a little bit.

Brian Carter: A little bit.

Zach Johnson: We can dive into it more, though, I can talk about it all day.

Brian Carter: No, we’re not going to do that. Give me the 2-minute version. Well, when did you know, like, “Okay, no, I want to start a company based on this?”

Zach Johnson: Oh, man. Well, it was right when I left Leadpages, and, you know, we had explosive growth when I was managing the marketing there, and the first thing I did was, I created dashboards for everybody on the marketing team. I figured out, “How much is a lead worth from affiliate traffic, from organic blog traffic, and Facebook ads? When I know how much those are worth, I’m going to take surefire bets and invest the marketing dollars here and here, and try to ramp up lead gen here, so that I don’t fail. I can’t afford to fail,” right? Like, a month goes by, you don’t hit your revenue goals, you’re like, “Peace,” you know? I asked Clay what the, kind of the most valuable thing was that I did at Leadpages, during my time there, one of the things is like, dashboards? It’s like, “Oh, my gosh,” it’s like, “It’s such a pain. Go build a dashboard company.”

I knew at the time that I wanted to do it, but I felt like it was a little bit early, and this, kind of, whole data-driven approach, and people geeking out and mastering their marketing metrics wasn’t really super hot a couple years ago like it is now. I sat on it a little bit, and I kind of built out the services side of the business, and we started doing funnel management, I said, “I really want to validate this idea. I’m going to go work with 6-figure business owners, 7, 8-figure business owners, build, optimize, and scale their marketing funnels, and I’m going to try every tool out under the sun to try to get these reports and data that I need,” and I couldn’t do it, so I was like, “I got to start. I got to build this myself.”

Brian Carter: Nice.

Zach Johnson: Yeah, so that was … I guess.

Brian Carter: That’s great, that’s like, I think it’s what … Hooked? In “Hooked,” have you read Hooked?

Zach Johnson: No, no. It sounds like a name …

Brian Carter: It’s a good book. I don’t recommend a lot of nonfiction books, and I’m not, you know, I’m not a big … I’m not a big business book reader, I’m really not, but when I read a few, and I love them, and that’s one of them, and one of the things he said was, “The best way to build an app is to solve one of your own problems,” you know?

Zach Johnson: Yeah, totally.

Brian Carter: To make sure that it’s really something somebody would use. That sounds like what you did there.

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: That’s a good one. What else? Tell me some other awesome …

Zach Johnson: Tell you some other, some awesome stuff?

Brian Carter: Other awesome case study stories, yeah.

Zach Johnson: Yeah, well, let’s see here. You know, even just for this other client that … They were savvy guys, but before working with us, they didn’t even have a marketing funnel, and they didn’t know what they were going to sell, they wanted to launch a … The thing really came down to, “How do we build the marketing funnel as quickly as possible, and how do we invest in Facebook ads as quick as possible?” I was, like, within 30 days, we had the funnel built, and we were scaling traffic, and we knew exactly how much an email address is worth. Many people are stuck in this, like, funnel-building purgatory, or spreadsheet hell, where they’re building funnels for 6 months, or 12 months. I’ve made this mistake myself, but, hey: Get the funnel live, get feedback, figure out the numbers, and then iterate and improve from there. You’ll be light years ahead, you know, 30, 60, 90 days into it, profitably spending money, and iterating and tweaking off that …

Brian Carter: Nice.

Zach Johnson: … off that funnel.

Brian Carter: Right.

Zach Johnson: Now, this guy spends between 30 and 50K a month on Facebook, and they’re on their third or fourth funnel with us …

Brian Carter: Nice.

Zach Johnson: … and so it’s, for them, it was about speed of execution, and speed to their end objective, and goal ultimately, getting a [result 00:17:47]. That’s a great story. They were selling both an info product and coaching services in the world of, kind of, offline, teach people how to build and market to offline businesses.

Brian Carter: Nice. Are you learning anything, in general, from these guys? I mean, are you learning in general, or you got to have analytics, and just, you’re going to, every … It’s going to be different for everybody, or are you learning any lessons in general about business, from what you’re seeing?

Zach Johnson: I would say I’m learning that, you know, some different industries … I mean, I guess I’m learning that some different industries and … Need a month, maybe it’s a 6 months, 12 months, to go from a lead to a sale, right?

Brian Carter: Hmm. Yeah.

Zach Johnson: In B2C, you can go from, like, day 0, sale.

Brian Carter: Right.

Zach Johnson: That doesn’t necessarily mean that, you know … You can still, like, hold your, carry your marketing, your, basically, what we call your time to break even, and you can carry your marketing spend and go negative for 6 months, if you have a continuity offer. The more I get into these, the more attractive B2C offers look, in terms of, like, just B2C , speed to ROI, is something that I’m looking at.

Brian Carter: That makes sense.

Zach Johnson: I’ve always, I always love looking at other people’s marketing metrics, and we’re always going to be adding more and more dashboards, right? People look at different numbers all the time, and they’re optimizing different parts of their business, so with FunnelDash, the idea was to build a dashboard solution that would be pre-configured, right? You didn’t have to go in and be, like, “I need to tell you, dashboard tool, what I want to track,” and we wanted to kind of erase that and just say, “Hey, select from all our templates. The same way Infusionsoft brought you automation campaigns, or Digital Marketer brings you swipe email copy, ClickFunnels brings you template funnels, Leadpages brings you template landing pages.”

Brian Carter: Yeah.

Zach Johnson: We just want to bring …

Brian Carter: Brian Carter has template Facebook ads, you know, I mean …

Zach Johnson: There you go. We want to bring template dashboards.

Brian Carter: Yeah, nice.

Zach Johnson: We think that there can be a simple and easy way to have a dashboard in solution for marketers in the space, and we want to keep cranking away on that.

Brian Carter: Nice. Cool. What else did I not ask you about FunnelDash? Oh, you’ve got the Facebook part coming, there’s a Facebook ad component that’s coming soon …

Zach Johnson: Yeah, yeah, we’re sort of integrating directly from Facebook and Google ads. That’ll coming live, online in the next week.

Brian Carter: Right. What does that add to what it’s currently doing, or how it’s doing it now?

Zach Johnson: … Well, from Facebook, as opposed to, kind of, manually pulling that cost data. It’ll also, you know, segment out all your cost data for each and every traffic source , or like, traffic target audience, or ad campaign, and ad creative; so you can really get granular on what your cost is for different segments, and what your R is on, ROI is on certain segments.

Brian Carter: Awesome. Awesome. Cool, all right. Anything else? Anything I’m missing?

Zach Johnson: No, man, that’s, this is it, this is the FunnelDash, man. I mean, I’d love to, people can get a download of FunnelDash if they just go to go.funneldash.com/demo, and we’re , happy to kind of show them, give them an audit of their last, you know, 60, 90 days funnel metrics, and show them how FunnelDash is, can be, kind of, solving some of their blind spots …

Brian Carter: Yeah.

Zach Johnson: … and help them get set up with it. We also have a free score , a funnel scorecard tool that people can kind of type in, and get, you know, start playing around with some of their own funnel metrics. If they go to, I believe it’s funneldash.com/scorecard, will take you there. That’s a fun little fancy tool, so you can figure out what an email opt-in is worth for you.

Brian Carter: Yeah. It uses hamsters, as I remember, too.

Zach Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Brian Carter: It does, so cute.

Zach Johnson: Hamsters are nice, just running in little wheels.

Brian Carter: Yeah, and I recommend it, because, seriously, most clients that I work with, they’re like, they have Google Analytics, but it’s not fully set up, you know what I mean? Like, they’ll have, “Yeah, we have it,” that means they put the code on their site, but they may not have goals, or their Google Analytics goals are 3 years too old. I mean, you go to their goals report and nothing is tracking.

Zach Johnson: Yeah, that’s a problem.

Brian Carter: Almost nobody is using UTM parameters in their, the URLs they put in their Facebook posts, or in their Facebook ads, so …

Zach Johnson: Yeah, you’re not tracking.

Brian Carter: Yeah, so, if you …

Zach Johnson: You’re naked out there, you’re naked and it’s great  …

Brian Carter: You’re blind, yes, you’re like a homeless person. Your marketing is like a homeless person’s, so you need, if you go to FunnelDash, and you’re like, “Hey, I want this awesome dashboard,” you’re going to realize, “Oh, I haven’t done all this, now,” and you do all this, then you’ll have your 360 degree view of everything.

Zach Johnson: Yeah, we call it clarity control, man. It’s a beautiful thing.

Brian Carter: Clarity control, it sounds like something from the air force.

Zach Johnson: Yeah.

Brian Carter: Like, “Yes, we have clarity control.”

Zach Johnson: They invested in FunnelDash.

Brian Carter: Did they?

Zach Johnson: No.

Brian Carter: All right. Well, awesome. Thanks, Zach Johnson. Funneldash.com, correct?

Zach Johnson: You got it.

Brian Carter: Everybody go, check it out.

Zach Johnson: Thanks so much for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Brian Carter: Yeah, man. My pleasure.

Zach Johnson: It’s been awesome.

Brian Carter: Awesome.