My alarm went off and I popped right up out of bed. After 24 hours of running traffic to my new offer, a 5-day, $5 challenge, and it was time to check my ad stats and see how things were going. I powered up my laptop and poured myself a cup of coffee as I waited for Facebook Ads Manager to load.

Thirty seconds later, my stomach sank. My funnel wasn’t converting. 

Not. Even. One.

Man that’s humbling to admit. NOBODY who works in the digital marketing industry wants to cop to having a dud of a campaign, but there you have it … and you know what? It happens to everyone from time to time, and now I had a choice to make. 

Would I pivot, or would I pout? And if I chose pivot, how was I going to figure out why my campaign wasn’t converting?

In this article I’m going to give you the five steps I use to diagnose campaign problems. These are the steps I recommend to my clients when their campaigns aren’t converting. Walking through these five steps will help you determine if they’re dealing with a copy and messaging problem or something else. 

And they’re the same steps I used this week to transform a dud campaign into a converting campaign in under 24 hours.

Check Your Integrations 

The first thing you need to do if you’re not getting conversions is go through your funnel and make sure everything is hooked up correctly. I’m not the greatest with integrations, so I always, always ask a funnel expert to review my funnels before going live. 

I didn’t think this was my problem, but I had been tinkering around in the funnel after my buddy Chris had gone through it for me. Double check your:

• BUTTONS. On pages with multiple call-to-action buttons, it’s easy to miss one. Test them all to make sure they’re performing the right action when clicked on.
• PIXEL. Without a properly installed pixel, Facebook will not be able to track conversions properly. You can tell this is happening if you go to your funnel stats and see conversions there but not in Ads Manager. Check to make sure each page of your funnel has the base pixel installed and the appropriate pixel event codes installed where needed.
• AD LINKS. Don’t forget to make sure your ads are sending traffic to the right link. Having even one letter or character off can mean your traffic ends up going nowhere.
• EMAIL. This one won’t necessarily affect conversions, but it’s worth checking anyway. Make sure the funnel is hooked up to your email provider and configured to add people to your list and send out auto response emails when someone opts in or buys.

Send Test Traffic

Once you know everything is hooked up correctly, it’s time to send some test traffic to make sure things are converting. To do this, go ahead and go through the funnel yourself, or ask a friend to test it for you. 

If it’s a paid offer, you can set your funnel to test mode and make a test purchase. Test all the funnel paths – purchase and no purchase. Just don’t forget to turn it back to live before you turn your traffic back on. 

Give Yourself a Minute

If everything above checks out, time to move on to the next checkpoint, and it involves diving into the offer itself. If it’s your own offer, this can hit hard. We have an emotional connection to the things we create. In my case, integrations were all hooked up correctly, and my ads were working and pushing traffic … but nobody was opting in. Cue all the doubt, frustration, and imposter syndrome!

Give yourself a minute to feel it. It’s okay to be disappointed about it, and stuffing it down only means the emotions will pop up later somewhere else. So phone a friend, your mom, or a member of your professional tribe and have a venting session about your campaign not converting. 

But keep it short. I gave myself a half-hour, then told myself to get back in the game because it was time to take the next step to figure out where the disconnect was. Because now that I knew what it WASN’T, I still had to figure out what it was, and there were three potential candidates:

• My Targeting
• My Messaging
• My Offer

In my case, I knew it wasn’t the targeting. I have a deep background in paid traffic, so I knew exactly who would want this offer. That meant it was either the offer itself or the messaging, and that felt personal. Time to bring in the big guns.

Get Someone Else’s Eyes On It

When you’re diagnosing something you created, sometimes you’re so close to it you can’t see where you’ve gone off the rails. You’re going to need someone else who has the ability to come in with an objective view of the situation and give you the straight skinny.

I went directly to my business coaches, Bart and Sunny. 

This was not easy for me. Even though yes, I pay them to tell me what’s wrong with my stuff, I still want them to think I know what I’m doing. I’m an Enneagram 2. I don’t like feeling like I’m disappointing people or showing weakness. But again, I pay them to tell me what’s wrong with my stuff, so I swallowed my pride and sent the Voxer message. 

“My funnel isn’t converting! Help!”

They were by my side within minutes, and before an hour had gone by, their outside perspective helped me gain the clarity to see that I had gone off the rails with my messaging in the funnel and ads because I was so close to the offer. 

Now that I knew what the problem was, I knew what needed to be done. I had a decision to make.

Make a Decision

I knew the offer was good. I’d tested it on dozens of high-ticket mastermind coaching students, and they raved about it. I also knew what I was going to teach over the five days of the challenge was going to help a lot of people. 

But in order to get people in the challenge, I was going to need to go into the funnel and ad copy and completely redo all the messaging. That was going to take a considerable amount of time, and the clock was ticking on the countdown to when the challenge was set to begin. I had two choices: 

• QUIT. I could ditch the whole idea, kiss my $150 in ad spend goodbye, and slink back to my corner trying to figure out how to draw people to my program and assuming a challenge was not the way.
• PIVOT. Or I could push off the launch a week to give myself some breathing room, redo my funnel and ads copy, and keep going.

My momma didn’t raise a quitter, so I chose to pivot. And when I decided, I went hard. Within 24 hours, I had the funnel rewritten, the ads redone and running, and the offer was converting! 

I’m so glad I pivoted. I was able to take the data from what didn’t work and create something that started converting immediately. I didn’t stay in the funk of failure, but used it to springboard to a better campaign. And this morning I woke up feeling confident and proud of myself for not giving in to the “maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing” voice in my head. 

More from Christa Nichols

Next week I’ll tell you what I did to the copy that took it from underachieving to converting. For now, want to get in on this campaign I’m talking about? You can see the converting funnel here at https://christanichols.com/5-step-fix. This challenge breaks down the 5-step process I use all the time to help boost client funnel conversions – and all I touch is the copy. (And when I finally got wise and used them on my OWN challenge funnel, the same thing happened for me. Duh.)