Day 94: Diagnosing The Profit Dip Across Two Funnels

Yesterday was another disappointing one on the numbers front: $535 in sales against £396 in ad spend, which translated to roughly a $10 “profit” on paper.

In reality, once I factor in hosting, tools, and other fixed costs, it was almost certainly a losing day.

Today started at $152 by 9 a.m., so there’s still a lot of the day left, but the broader trend makes it clear that I can’t keep drifting like this. Something has to change.

Rather than panic, I’m stepping back and letting the numbers guide my thinking.

Yesterday I looked at the big three-month picture and saw the profit line lagging behind the sales line.

Today I’ve zoomed into November to compare the two funnels side by side: the original Riffs funnel and the newer beginner funnel.

Interestingly, both are converting at around 3% – which is fairly healthy for cold traffic – but their profitability profiles are very different.

The aim of today’s work is simple: understand where the dip is coming from and identify the handful of levers that will actually move the needle.

Today is diagnosis.

Tomorrow will be prescription – a concrete plan for the next one to two weeks to start reversing the trend and get profit back in line with where it needs to be.

What You’ll See

• A quick recap of yesterday’s $535 day and near break-even result
• November comparison between the Riffs funnel and the new beginner funnel
• Both funnels converting at around 3% from cold traffic
• Higher front-end price on the new funnel ($37 vs $27) with conversion holding
• Overview of ad budget: roughly £10k vs £1.2k and why revenue still diverged
• Order bump take rates on both funnels and where the new one is weaker
• Upsell/downsells performing better in the new beginner funnel
• Abandoned cart rate around 59% on both funnels
• Huge impact of having a cart abandonment sequence on only the first funnel
• CPM comparison: ~£5.77 on Riffs vs ~£21 on the new funnel
• Identification of three key leverage areas to fix in December

Strategy Breakdown

The first important insight is that both funnels are converting at roughly the same rate: around 3%.

For cold traffic, that’s actually a reassuring number. It tells me that the basic offer, the landing pages, and the messaging are working well enough to get a good proportion of visitors to buy.

So the core funnel mechanics are not broken.

On top of that, the new beginner funnel is built around a higher initial price point: $37 versus $27 on the original Riffs offer.

With conversion rates effectively the same, that $10 extra upfront makes a meaningful difference to average order value.

It suggests the market is comfortable with the higher entry price and that I might even have scope to test a move from $37 to $47 later on, once things have stabilised.

But when I look past the front end into the economics, the cracks appear. The order bump is the first example.

Both funnels use a bump in the $17–18 range, but the classic Riffs funnel has a noticeably higher bump take rate.

The new funnel’s 33% bump uptake isn’t disastrous, but it’s clearly leaving money on the table.

Whether that’s a copy issue, positioning, or the offer itself, it’s a lever I can deliberately work on.

Even a modest increase in bump acceptance would push AOV up a few dollars without changing ad costs.

Upsells and downsells tell a different story. Here, the new beginner funnel actually performs better, with a higher percentage of front-end buyers taking at least one additional product.

That’s encouraging, especially given the funnel is still relatively young.

It shows that once people are in, they are receptive to stacking more value – a good sign for longer term LTV.

The real hole appears when I look at cart abandonment. Both funnels have a similar abandoned checkout rate of around 59%.

Initially that felt high, but industry benchmarks suggest 70%+ is common, so 59% is actually relatively healthy.

The difference is what happens next.

The Riffs funnel has a full cart abandonment email sequence in place and, last month, this sequence recovered a significant amount of revenue.

The new funnel, by contrast, has no cart abandonment follow-up at all. Every abandoned checkout is currently lost.

That gap alone is a major reason November’s profit dipped when the second funnel came online.

Then there’s the advertising side, where the biggest structural problem sits: CPM.

In November, the Riffs campaign delivered at around £5.77 per thousand impressions.

The new beginner funnel, though, ran at roughly £21 CPM. That’s more than four times the cost of traffic. So even though the new funnel has a higher price and a decent AOV, it is fighting through extremely expensive impressions.

That is why, despite only a 3.5x difference in ad budget, the revenue gap between the funnels is huge.

Traffic cost is doing the heavy damage here.

The frustrating part is that CPM isn’t something I can directly “turn down.”

However, the campaign has only just exited the learning phase and now sits in active mode.

That should, in theory, allow Meta to stabilise delivery and find cheaper pockets of traffic over time.

My role is to help it by adding more creative (especially video), increasing variety, and giving the algorithm more angles to work with.

If I can pull the CPM even halfway towards the Riffs funnel’s level, this second funnel becomes a very different animal.

Focus

My focus today is on diagnosing the core economic differences between the two funnels—conversion rate, AOV, bump and upsell behaviour, cart abandonment, and especially CPM—so that tomorrow I can build a targeted action plan that actually addresses the root causes of the profit dip.

Insight

Profit problems rarely come from a single dramatic failure; they usually come from several small leaks all working together.

In my case, the front end is basically fine: conversion rates are solid and the new funnel’s price point is strong.

The real damage is being done by expensive traffic, weaker bump performance, and missing backend recovery (like cart abandonment emails).

When you feel tempted to react emotionally to a bad month, this is where numbers become your anchor.

They don’t care about mood swings; they quietly tell you where to look.

The lesson is to respect both sides of the equation: what you earn per customer and what you pay to acquire that customer.

A healthy funnel doesn’t just convert – it converts efficiently at the traffic prices you’re paying.

December’s job is to start closing that gap.

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Follow my daily journey to $240K as I build, test, and scale profitable funnels.

If you would like to learn how to create powerful Facebook Ads, check out my Course: https://www.jonathanhowkins.com/the-course

And if you're looking for a platform to build your sales funnel, the one I use and recommend is Systeme.io. You can set up and start making sales with their free account:

https://systeme.io/?sa=sa005182666557b5ccf999dfc8d9877207dc47da35

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