For around 2 weeks I’ve had the opportunity to “play around” with the increasingly popular Funnelytics platform.
I bought a lifetime account (which I’ve now cancelled – more on the why later) via Russel Brunson’s Traffic Secrets book promo, for $397.
First of all, Funnelytics is a funnel mapping tool.
It lets you draw out a marketing sales funnel visually with icons representing various pages, traffic sources and actions (like clicks, form submits etc).
The true strength of Funnelytics however, and it’s the reason why I got it in the first place, is in its ability to track visitors…
…As they go through your pages and analyze your funnel performance using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Things like how many people went from step a to step b, how many purchased et al…
…In real time.
And it does that.
They use UTM parameters to track sources.
This is good and it’s in line with modern tracking these days especially after Google (and Facebook) decided that they don’t like redirect tracking links.
Note: I am not going to go over all the features of the software. Or the many added value stuff like ready made funnels from other marketers etc which you can add to your canvas with a few clicks.
(And there are many more good things they offer like trainings etc).
This is not a review that will have my affiliate link to buy Funnelytics.
I am only going to focus on what I liked and didn’t like from a personal point of view.
You can read all the features, pricing etc at the home site here (NOT an affiliate link)
So I am only going to cover the points I liked about the software and the stuff I didn’t like (and why I cancelled my lifetime subscription).
WHAT I LIKED …A LOT
Funnel Mapping Feature
I am very visual. So I loved that I could see my funnel steps drawn out.
Traffic Flows
I also loved their feature where it shows you “live” traffic as it happens to flow through the funnel pages.
Unknown Traffic sources
I also very much liked the fact that the software captures traffic (sources) that you may not have drawn out in your funnel map and give you the ability to add it if you see lots of traffic from a source you didn’t expect to see it.
(Tech note: They use a javacript code that you add in the head section of all your pages. This is similar to Google Analytics and that basically allows the software to know if a traffic source is mapped or not).
People Tracking
This is a very cool feature.
It gives the ability to map an email address to someone that has opted in to your funnel and track what they’ve done and purchased.
They start tracking the user before they optin and when they do, the software “knows” who that person is (from their IP address and email address) and attributes the actions they took to their email address. This shows that user with email done this and bought that etc.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
Tracking updates felt slow to me.
Every time I changed something I had to refresh to give me up to date accurate stats. It took like 10-20 seconds to do that. I guess it’s OK once you’ve got things set up. But I certainly didn’t like that personally.
There is no tracking attribution.
What that means for a software that does tracking is that you’ve no way to see the initial source of the conversion.
For example, say I receive traffic from Google Ads. So my utm source would be google-ads and Funnelytics will track that fine as traffic coming from Google-Ads.
Say later this person opts into my list and later I send an email from my list to send people to the same funnel.
If someone purchases something from the email I send (and I’ve had the utm source as email for example) funnelytics will show that conversion came from that email.
But there will be no connection to that initial lead source.
And to me that’s a big issue.
Frond End Tracking Only
You can only track front end events and actions.
Clickfunnels Implementation.
This is actually the best implementation I’ve seen from a “tracking” solution when it comes to tracking Clickfunnel pages and actions.
But it’s got limitations.
The difficulty most tracking solutions have with Clickfunnels comes from the fact that Clickfunnels pages are actually javascript submits and not actual page submits.
If you’re not sure what the above means don’t worry about it. I only mentioned it to explain why many tracking software have issues tracking Clickfunnel pages properly.
So the guys over at Funnelytics have gone to extreme lengths to enable their users to be able to track Clickfunnels pages and actions.
They’ve had to setup an event code specifically for Clickfunnels users.
This is for the right reasons. Lots of people use Clickfunnels.
Plus Russel Brunson himself promotes this (remember I got my account via Russel’s offer).
However if you’re not using ONLY clickfunnels, that specific implementation tracking can break.
For example say you’re using a Clickfunnels optin page but you’re integrating with html form for your connection to your autoresponder – As opposed to using actionetics which is the Clickfunnels internal autoresponder solution.
The software will not be able to track complete form actions.
Pricing
When I first got to know Funnelytics they’ve had a pricing structure where you could get a pro account on a monthly basis for $99 per month.
Note: The pro account is needed to be able to use what I think their best feature which is the analytics/tracking feature.
That account had unlimited tracking events. You could track basically unlimited number of people and events.
And for what the software does, I think it’s worth it.
Just before I decided to purchase they changed their pricing structure so that if you wanted to use the tracking feature you could only get a yearly account for $790 up front.
On top of that you could only track a certain number of events for that amount (120k trackable events). If you exceed that they’d put you on the next pricing, which that means (at least at the time of writing this) + $200.
The justification of this price according to the site is that they want to be able to focus their (my understanding is) limited support resources to less people.
In all honesty am not sure how to read that justification.
It could be that since Russel started endorsing the software, they’ve hit their monetary goals and they thought “…well if someone wants this, that’s the price. Take it or leave it. We don’t care anymore”
You know demand raises prices so to speak. (But remember we are talking about a software here)
It could be that the thinking is “We’ve got lots of clients and we think the platform won’t be able to handle all those so we increased the price to deter many more people from buying”.
Or they do not have enough support stuff to handle clients’ requests aka the software can get very complicated and they expect lots and lots of support requests.
Again these are my interpretations of that pricing model change from monthly to yearly only.
And I have to say none of the above makes me feel nice about where the software/company heading or how they think their business model overall.
For me however the main reason I cancelled my lifetime account just 2 weeks after I got it was mainly due to slow stats and additional steps and time required to implement some basic features (like form completions etc).
Having said that, I don’t dismiss the value of the software nor that I won’t give it another go some time in the future.
UPDATE July 20: I’ve decided to give funnelytics another go. Now that I know the limitations I can work around the good points and benefits only. So far, so good.
P.S (You can always thank me with some coffee☕)…
Kostas “The Omnifarious” Papadakis