Day 50: Numbers, Losses, and the Next Funnel Fix

It’s Monday, October 20th — Day 50 of the challenge — and time for a proper mid-month check-in.

Today’s focus is all about the numbers:

October is shaping up compared to September, where the funnel is performing well, and where it’s clearly not.

Before we get into the breakdown, let’s address yesterday’s results — because they weren’t pretty.

Sunday came in at just $346 in total sales. That’s barely a third of what we’d been doing a few days earlier when we had back-to-back $1,000+ days.

The ad spend was £368 (around $494), meaning a $148 loss for the day — the largest since starting this entire journey.

No major changes were made to the ads or funnel, which makes it all the more frustrating. Sometimes it really does just come down to who

Facebook decides to show the ads to. It’s hard not to question the platform’s so-called “machine learning” when swings like this happen.

By mid-afternoon today (around 3 p.m.), sales had climbed to $300, so it’s still not looking like a big bounce back yet. But as always, the hope is that by day’s end we’ll be at least breaking even, if not back in profit.

So with that context, let’s dig into the numbers for the first half of

October compared to September.

Organic leads so far this month are sitting at around $257 in sales — about $18 down from last month at the halfway point, so effectively flat.

The main front-end offer has held steady too, which is good.

Where things have dropped sharply, though, is in the upsells and downsells.

These have seen a notable decline during the first half of October.

The most likely explanation is audience variation — some weeks you simply attract higher-quality buyers who are willing to invest more, while other weeks you don’t.

The upsell and downsell sequences have always been weaker parts of my funnel.

I’ve tried minor tweaks — new headlines, adjusted positioning — but it’s becoming clearer that they may need a more radical rethink.

Something structurally different rather than incremental.

Cart abandonment numbers have also dipped slightly, likely for the same reason: audience quality. Even with follow-up emails, fewer people are completing their purchases.

The correlation between weaker upsell take-up and lower cart recovery seems pretty strong.

The good news is on the backend.

The newer backend “spotlight” offers are performing better.

Each week, I’ve been adding a new offer into the automation sequence, and they’re starting to pay off. I plan to add another one this week and will walk through that process in the coming days.

Meanwhile, the new story-based landing page split test is still running, and I’ll let that continue for another week before drawing any conclusions.

Both the cart abandonment and upsell email sequences are functioning as expected, so there’s not much immediate room to improve there.

That leaves one key area I can focus on this week: the organic lead magnet.

Right now, it’s a free PDF guitar tab book, but the opt-in rate isn’t great.

There’s potential to improve that by testing new headlines, layouts, or even the perceived value of the freebie itself.

So tomorrow I’ll set up a split test on that front to see if we can boost conversions and get more leads feeding into the funnel.

With ten days left in the month, there’s still time to turn things around and close October strong.

By the end of the month, I’ll do a full review of everything tested — ads, landing pages, upsells, and email sequences — to show exactly what worked and what didn’t.

For now, fingers crossed for a rebound from yesterday’s slump.

I’ll be back tomorrow to talk through the new opt-in test and how I’m planning to recover some of these mid-month dips.