How to…

Reverse Engineer
a Marketing
Funnel
A step-by-step guide
What’s inside?

Your Reverse Engineering Toolkit - Page 4

The Pirate Funnel - Page 5

STEP 1: Product / Offering Analysis - Page 6

STEP 2: Trend Analysis - Page 8

STEP 3: Dive into the website - Page 9

STEP 4: Backlinks and Beyond - Page 12

STEP 5: Where’s the traffic coming from? - Page 15

STEP 6: Content Analysis - Page 20

STEP 7: What ads are they running? - Page 22

STEP 8: UTM Analysis - Page 26

STEP 9: Website - Page 30

STEP 10: Email flows - Page 32

STEP 11: Social Proof - Page 32

STEP 12: Mapping out the user flow - Page 36

Why do you need to start reverse -
engineering campaigns?

As a marketer, you’ll regularly set up marketing campaigns for your products. You
probably have a tried-and-tested process in place for defining your target audience,
choosing your campaign goals, selecting budget and appropriate channels, creating
content, setting up all the technical aspects and actually executing your campaign.

But there’s always room for improvement, right?

Reverse engineering campaigns will give you a huge amount of data and insights
that you can then apply to your own campaigns!

The two main types of campaigns you’ll be analysing are:

Successful campaigns by your competitors

Ground-breaking campaigns by industry leaders

What insights can you get from reverse-engineering a campaign?

● Capitalise on the strengths of an industry leader

● Discover what ideas are successful and which ones fail
● Understand the landscape and how you can best position your own products
within it
● Set your product apart from the competition
● Keep tabs on the competition

Throughout this guide, we use the $4 billion exercise bike company

Peloton as an example as we go through the reverse-engineering
process, but the steps can be applied to any campaign of your
choosing!
Your Reverse Engineering Toolkit
Here are some excellent tools you can use to reverse engineer a marketing campaign ⚒

Buzzsumo - for identifying content with a high social

engagement

Wappalyzer - for discovering which technologies are

being used on a website

BuiltWith - similar to Wappalyzer - shows you the tech

that’s on a website, neatly organised into categories

Similarweb - for discovering traffic sources and

engagement

Funnel Flows - for visualising and designing a

marketing funnel/user flow

Social Blade - for analysing social media accounts and

data

SEMrush Competitor Analysis Dashboard - for

discovering backlinks, paid advertising and traffic
analytics

Google Trends - for general trend analysis over time

Google Alerts - for continual tracking after you’ve

analysed a campaign

Mobile Moxie - for seeing how landing pages work on

different mobile devices

Sentiment Viz - for Tweet Sentiment visualisation

vidIQ - find out how to get more views and subscribers

from videos
The Pirate Funnel

Pirate metrics is a helpful customer lifecycle framework invented by

Dave McClure and further developed by Growth Tribe with the addition
of ‘awareness’ to the top.

Use it to map out user journeys and life cycles.

STEP 1. Product / Offering Analysis

Before you can start to reverse-engineer your selected marketing campaign,

you need to be sure that you have a thorough understanding of a) the
product and b) the company itself.

If you’re used to doing competitor analysis, you’ll be familiar with the SWOT
analysis.

SWOT analysis means identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities

and Threats posed by a competitor.

You might find it useful to bear this in mind as you work through the reverse
engineering process.

● Strong capital position ● Branding could be better

● Low debt ● Products not differentiated
● Defensible intellectual property enough
● Best sales people ● Recent scandal from product
failure

● Use strong financial position to ● Competitors could leverage

make acquisition brand strength
● Acquire market share through ● Lack of differentiation could lead
branding to price war
● Hire more talent ● May lose talent
Question Time!

Answer these questions to help you get familiar with the

product before you start to reverse-engineer your
campaign.
The more research you do, the easier it will be to reverse-engineer!

1. Is the product high or low value? Normal, luxury or necessary?

a. For example, is the product a $32,000 car, or a $50 pair of shoes?

2. Is there an obvious target audience? Who would you expect to purchase this
product?
a. Using Peloton as an example, you might expect to see adverts designed
for busy middle-class homeowners who are into fitness and cutting-edge
technology.

3. Is the product available globally, or only in specific locations?

a. If a product is only available in the US, but you later discover awareness
adverts targeted at a UK audience, you can assume that the company
you are examining is testing the waters of a new market.

4. What are the best things about this product?

a. Make a note of what you think the product’s USPs

5. What do you think the main barrier to purchase might be?

a. Using the Peleton use case as an example, barriers to purchase might
include: a big initial outlay of cash ($2,000), concerns about motivation,
people might already have a gym membership or simply disbelief that
there’s anything special about this particular product.

6. Who are their main competitors?

a. Make a list of the companies who you believe to be their biggest
competitors.

7. How long is the customer lifecycle?

a. Estimate how long it might take for a customer to make a purchase
STEP 2. Trend Analysis

Google Trends is a free service that provides useful data about how often a key
search term - or in this case a company’s name - has been searched for over a
set period of time.

In the below example, we dropped in the name “Peloton”, and compared it to

the generic search term “exercise bike”.

Over the last five years, worldwide search trends for “Peloton” have far
outstripped “exercise bike”.

This shows that the brand name has become far more widespread and
common than the type of product on offer. Effectively, Peloton dominates the
exercise bike market - and the trends are there to prove it!

Searching for trending patterns in company or product names will give you
insights into product cycles and patterns, and might help you to spot when
companies have started to ramp up their campaign activity.
STEP 3. Dive into the Website
This is where those tools come in handy! Head over to Built With, and drop in
the URL of the website you’re investigating. Built With will then pull up all of the
information it can find about the technologies that are on that page, neatly
grouped into the relevant categories.

When we dropped in “onepeloton.com”, Built With returned 100 different

technologies - from Drift, the chatbot provider, to Google Conversion Tracking.
Here are some of the categories that BuiltWith can find website
data on:

To get the data on your target website, drop the URL into the search bar, then
head over to the “Detailed Technology Profile” tab to see the full list.

You can’t access the “Meta-Data Profile” tab with the free version of the tool, but
the “Redirect Profile” tab will show you a list of all of the domains which redirect
to the main URL you submitted. This tab can provide a wealth of interesting
information about your target company!
Keep an eye out for:

● URLs with different country domains that could indicate that the company
is operating in other locations
● Potential sub-brands or sub-divisions
● Potential company takeovers

Likewise, checking out the “Relationship Profile” tab can show

you connected websites and pages that you may not have
realised existed, such as:

● Blogs
● Online shops or marketplaces
● Customer services
● Community hubs

Use Wappalyzer. This Chrome extension uncovers technology used on websites,

detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks,
analytics tools and more. It works in a similar way to Built With, and is a handy
free tool for speedy on-site analysis!
STEP 4. Backlinks and Beyond
What’s the point in looking for backlinks?

Backlinks are a good way to measure a company / marketing campaign’s

success.

If a website has lots of backlinks, that’s a sign that lots of people and
publications are talking about it. But it’s not all about the frequency of the
backlinks - quality is important too.

SEMrush has a Competitive Research Dashboard that with several useful tools
for examining backlinks.

Go to “Backlink Analytics” and drop the URL of your target website into the
search bar at the top of the page, and you’ll be able to view lots of useful data,
including:

- The total number of backlinks

- The total number of referring domains
- A chart showing the number of backlinks over time
- Backlink distribution by country
- The authority score of the domain you’re testing
These two are particularly interesting to look at:

- A chart showing new and lost backlinks

- Great for spotting patterns and trends.
- Was there a peak in new backlinks?
- Did backlinks suddenly drop off?
- Look for trends that might be worth investigating.
- The top anchors and top anchor terms
- These give us some good insights into the most frequently used
CTAs by backlinking domains. For example, Peloton’s top anchor is
“buy $3995”.

To check the quality of these backlinks, head over to the “Referring Domains”
tab.

From here you can use the “authority” column to order the list of backlinking
domains.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a way of measuring a website’s relevancy, size,

age and popularity. The more backlinks a website has from
domains with a high authority score, the more we can assume that
website is providing a valuable and legitimate service.

Think of it as a stamp of approval.

How does this help when reverse engineering a campaign?

Looking at backlinks from trusted websites is a great way to identify possible

awareness opportunities for PR, sponsored posts or collaborations

If a competitor has created guest content for a site, why not

create something 1000x better or reach out and suggest a
partnership?
SEMRush also has a tool which allows you to see an advertiser’s Google
Display Ads and statistics - simply go to the Display Advertising tab in the
left-hand column.

Here’s what we found for Peloton:

STEP 5. Where’s the Traffic Coming From?

There are several tools out there to give you an idea of a website’s traffic
sources. We’re big fans of SEMrush and SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb is a great free tool to get you started on traffic analytics, but it does
have its limitations. For example, you won’t be able to specify a date range, and
much of the data it returns is only retrieved from desktop visits.

For a thorough traffic audit, paid tools are best, but we’ll show you how to
work with the free version of SimilarWeb - you can apply the same principles
to any tool you prefer.

To start researching traffic stats for your target website, drop the target URL
into the search bar at the top.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to see several basic reports. Have a look at
the following.

The traffic share from desktop and mobile

Is there a significant difference between desktop and mobile traffic? Is

mobile traffic above or below the industry average?
Mobile traffic % by industry. Source:
https://www.stonetemple.com/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-study/

In 2018, 52.2% of website traffic worldwide was

generated through mobile phones

If your target company has much more mobile or desktop traffic than their
industry average, you’ll want to do some research into why that might be.

- Have they failed to optimise for mobile?

- Do they offer a product that requires a desktop device to appreciate?
Total monthly visits
How many total monthly visits does the website have?

Bounce Rate
Remember, a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing. A site that perfectly
answers the searcher’s query might have a high bounce rate. But as we’re
reverse-engineering marketing campaigns, we’d expect to see low bounce
rates on successful websites.
Is the bounce rate of the website high or low?

Geography

SimilarWeb will show you the top 5 countries driving traffic to your selected
domain name.

Are the countries driving the most traffic the ones you expected to see? Are
there any surprising countries throw in? Has the traffic from any country
dramatically increased or decreased? This could be indicative of a
campaign budget shift, or a resource refocusing.
 Marketing Channels and Search Traffic

SimilarWeb’s Channels Overview will give you a good idea of the marketing areas
your company is focusing on.

A high amount of Direct traffic, such as in this screenshot of Peloton’s data, is often
caused by returning users who have bookmarked the website.

A high amount of traffic from Organic Search implies a really solid SEO strategy, and a
huge amount of people actively searching for the brand.

Take a look at traffic from other sources. Are the spending a lot on paid search and
display ads? Do they have a really strong organic social strategy?

The biggest traffic driving channels will be a good indicator of where to focus
your reverse-engineering efforts.
Social Traffic

SimilarWeb will also give you a breakdown of the best-performing social

channels. This is another great way to narrow down your search when you’re
reverse-engineering your campaign.

For example, if there’s no traffic being driven from YouTube, you can do a
quick check to see if this is because:

- They don’t have a YouTube channel

- They do have a YouTube channel, but they’re inactive on it
- They do have a YouTube channel, but they’re only creating terrible
content (it happens)

Go and investigate the best performing channels, and follow this checklist
to audit their organic content:

- What are they posting about?

- What content are they sharing?
- How often are they posting?
- How many followers do they have?
- How good are their engagement rates?
- What content performs well, and what doesn’t?
- Are they working with any influencers or partnerships?
STEP 6. Content Analysis

Buzzsumo is a great tool for discovering which related content is driving the
most engagement online. By dropping in the name of your target company,
you’ll be able to see the most-shared content across all of the main social
channels.

Here’s what happened when we dropped in the word “Peloton”

What can we see here?

The first result is an interview with John Foley, the CEO of Peloton, discussing
how raising the price of the Peloton bike actually led to an increase in the
number of sales. This piece of content has 200.7k engagements on
Facebook.

We’ve also got an article from the New York Post, which profiles four of
Peloton’s instructors. These instructors are a core part of the product and
have become pseudo-celebrities in their own right.
And here’s what we see when we drop the domain name, “onepeleton.com”,
in:

Drop in your target company’s domain name, and you’ll be able to see an
analysis of the shareability of that company’s own content.

Here we can see that ⅘ of the top results are from Peleton’s blog. From this,
you can deep-dive into the content and do your own analysis on what
makes this content so shareable.

Here’s a checklist of questions to ask as you browse through your

Buzzsumo search results:

What type of content is performing best? Videos, interviews, articles,

how-to guides, Q&A - or the actual product itself?

What channels see the most social engagement? If you’re researching a

competitor’s content and there’s a huge amount of engagement on
Twitter, for example, then you need to think about creating content for
Twitter, because that’s where your target audience is hanging out.

Which publications are ranking at the top of the list? In a similar way to
examining backlinks, these publications are perfect targets for you to go
after for your own content.

Does the internal or external content rank higher? Is there more

engagement for newspaper features, reviews or PR pieces than for the
company’s own blog?
 STEP 7. What Ads Are They Running?

This is the core of your reverse-engineering audit. What ads are being run by your
target company?

Facebook

In July of 2018, facing a tonne of backlash for its alleged role in the 2016 US
Presidential Election and the 2016 EU Referendum, Facebook decided to release
an Ad Transparency Feature, inadvertently creating a new and powerful
competitive research tool.

To discover which ads your target company is running on Facebook, head over to
their Facebook page and select the “Info and Ads” section in the left-hand sidebar.

Once there, you’ll be able to choose from the countries where ads are currently
running.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to see all of the company’s ads that are
currently running in that country!

When reverse-engineered for Peloton, we found that they are running different
ads, with different creative & copy, depending on the location.
Awareness ads running in Canada were themed around exercising inside and
away from the snowy Canadian winter, which could be seen through the windows
in the images and videos.

The American adverts mentioned 0% finance schemes and heavily implied that a
lack of access to funds shouldn’t be a barrier to workout success.

The UK ads are very subtle in their personalisation: the rooms are distinctly
“British” in design, with “East London” cityscapes through the windows.

Canada ads:

USA ads:

London ads:
Twitter introduced a similar Ad Transparency Tool, which shows you all of
the ads that have been running over the last 7 days.

Head over to https://ads.twitter.com/transparency then add in the handle

of the account you want to check.
 Question Time!

Run through these questions as you examine the ad campaigns.

1. Which countries are they running ads in?

a. Are any of the countries surprising in any way?
b. Are they starting to break into new markets?
c. Have they stopped advertising in the companies they’re already established in?

2. Are there any differences between the ads that are being shown in different countries?
a. Are the visuals different?
b. Is the copy different?.

3. Are they focusing on one product or multiple products?

4. Are they running any seasonal campaigns?

5. Can you determine which audiences they are targeting?

a. For example, ASOS is running ads in the UK and the US to target students.

We can tell from

Topshop’s copy that
they’re targeting
potential customers
who haven’t interacted
with the brand online
before (image 1) and
1. 2. also with customers
who have shopped
online in the past but
haven’t been active
recently (image 2)
 STEP 8. UTM Analysis

Now, this is where you can really get your detective’s hat on and start to
investigate your target campaign in detail!

What’s a UTM?

UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Module parameters are used by marketers to

track how your users interact with your website. These parameters are
added on to the end of a URL.

These are the URL fields:

- Campaign Source: This tells us where the traffic has originated from,
such as paid social or email

- Campaign Medium: This tells us the medium of the advert, such as

specific social platforms, CPC or affiliate marketing campaigns

- Campaign Terms: This field is typically used for AdWords campaign

- Campaign Content: This field can help you to define different ads
that point to the same URL. For example, if you’re testing two
different types of creative on Facebook, you might have ‘Creative A’ or
‘Creative B’

- Campaign Name: This field allows you to differentiate between your

campaigns. For example, you might be running a ‘Valentine’s Day
2019’ campaign and a ‘Spring 2019’ campaign at the same time.

So, how can we use UTMs to discover what types of campaigns companies are
running?

Let’s take a look at a few examples over the page.

Take this advert from the sidebar of Facebook. It’s from The Economist, offering
the viewer a 12-week subscription to The Economist for €20, plus a free notebook.
From this advert alone, we can tell that they’re specifically targeting people in
Europe - but not much else.

But a click through to the landing page and a glance at the URL reveals a lot
more information. Here’s what we can establish or assume from this advert:

https://subscription.economist.com/DA/PaidSocialCore/SMNB/Notebook-FB-IG?ut
m_source=Facebook-Instagram&utm_medium=PaidSocial&utm_campaign=Wa
rm&utm_content=CEMEA-RT-Hub+web-1v90d+1843&cid1=d/sn/FB_IG/n/n/n/paid/
n/n/FB_IG/n/sub/n/n&cid3=UM&dclid=CLaOuYeL1-ACFYE54Aodse8BVA

- Facebook-Instagram: This tells us that they’re running campaigns on both

Facebook and Instagram

- Paid Social: The medium is ‘Paid Social’ - as that is where we are seeing the
advert

- Warm: The campaign reference is "warm", which is probably about the

temperature of the lead. The person being shown this advert has interacted
with The Economist in the past, making them a "warm" lead instead of a
"cold" one. We can assume that they are also running separate campaigns for
"cold" and "qualified" leads’

- CEMEA: This field will identify the specific ads that are being run. This is
harder to decipher, but CEMEA probably stands for Central Europe, Middle
East and Africa

- 90d: This could be potential customers who visited the site in the last 90 days
Let’s take a look at another one! This is a great campaign for HelloFresh, the
meal kit delivery service:

At first glance, this advert isn’t affiliated with HelloFresh at all. In fact, it appears to be
a negative, independent review by the Lucky Attitude blog.

After clicking through, there’s a brief article by ‘Tanya’, who seems pleasantly
surprised by the quality of the service. There’s a link at the bottom to get 50% off, and
an advertorial disclaimer. Let’s see what else we can deduce from the UTMs.

https://luckyattitude.co.uk/hellofresh-big-uk/?shortname=HFUK&linkmapLP=%7Bscr
ipt.hf_link_intl_map_lp.UK..landing%7D&utm_campaign=GeistM_FB_A_CoupleSue_L
uckyAttitude_RTs&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=geistm&utm_content=Gei
stM_FB_A_CoupleSue_LuckyAttitude_RTs_11&utm_term=RTs&c=GEISTMFB8A&fbclid
=IwAR3gJnqr8WBibb3b4hEMsaxlYK8poyPPIDa1-N4ThiPpOUFyqxXQmn8JzRA

The campaign name, which mentions the Lucky Attitude Blog, also mentions
something called 'GeistM'. A quick Google search reveals this to be a New
York-based marketing agency, and a quick glance at the "clients" section of their
website confirms that they've worked with HelloFresh!
Let’s look at one final example: This Twitter ad for Royal Dutch Airlines.

This is the Twitter advert: This is why Twitter says I’m being targeted:

And this is the landing page:

Here’s what we might be able to tell from the UTM:

https://www.klm.com/destinations/nl/nl/search?continent=ASIA&origin=AMS&originType=
AIRPORT&pos=NL&WT.mc_id=C_NL_SocialCampaign_Twitter_SocialCommerce_Asia_Pro
specting_null&WT.tsrc=SocialCampaign

- Continent=ASIA: This promotion is clearly targeted at getting people to buy

flights to Asia

- Origin=AMS: They want flights to be taken from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

- OriginType=AIRPORT: Being an airline, it looks like they’re tailoring their

campaigns to specific airports

- SocialCampaign_Twitter_SocialCommerce_Asia_Prospecting: This is the

campaign name: Twitter Social Commerce Asia Prospecting. From this, we can
gather that they’re casting a reasonably wide net - the phrase “prospecting” is a
bit of a giveaway that they’re running campaigns on social platforms other than
Twitter
STEP 9. Website
It’s time to do an audit of your target company’s website!

Here’s what to look for:

● What’s the main CTA?

○ Is it above the fold? What does the copy say?

What does ‘above the fold’ mean?

Above the fold means the part of the website that is visible without needing to
scroll. All good CTAs should be placed above the fold - this increased CTRs and
conversions. Make it as easy as possible for people for people to convert.

● Are there social media icons for easy sharing?

● Is there additional content alongside the product content, such as a
blog or a forum?
● Is there a prompt or CTA to sign up for a newsletter or email?
● How long does it take to reach the ‘WOW’ moment?
○ Is it even possible to reach the ‘WOW’ moment at this stage?

What’s the ‘WOW’ moment?

The WOW moment is the activation moment when someone visiting a

website sees and understands the real value of the product.

● Is the site optimised for mobile?

○ Is the CTA still above the fold on mobile?
○ Do they use different copy or creative on the desktop and mobile
versions?

We tested this for Peloton with Mobile Moxie, a tool which lets you see how
a website looks on a variety of different mobile devices.
From here, we can see that there are two CTAs visible above the fold, even on the
mobile version of Peloton’s website, and a pop-up with a lead capture form that
appears after a few seconds. That’s a lot of opportunity for users to interact with
the page.

Your Website to-do list (depending on which functions the landing

page has!)

- Hit the main CTA and follow the user journey through
- Watch videos
- Find pricing pages
- Look for user reviews

- Interact with chatbots

- Follow their social media channels

- Sign up to mailing lists and newsletters

- Make a user account

- Put a product in your basket and abandon it (you’re looking for follow-up
emails prompting you to complete your purchase.)
STEP 10. Email Flows
Don't’ forget about email lead nurture flows! Just because they aren’t on the
website doesn’t mean that emails aren’t important.

The ROI for email marketing is roughly twice that of other

digital channels.

Here’s what to look for:

● What is the first email you receive after signing up like?

○ What does it prompt you to do?
● How soon after the first email do you receive a second?
○ What does this one prompt you to do?
● How frequently do other emails come in?
○ What type of personalisation do they use?

STEP 11. Social Proof

Social Proof is one of the trickier parts of a campaign to analyse, but it’s
incredibly important. People who are actively and positively discussing a
brand on social media are natural brand ambassadors, and are perfect for
the referral stage of a campaign.

Here are some of the main types of social proof:

● Product reviews
○ 88% of us trust online reviews as much as personal
recommendations
● Testimonials
● Brand mentions on social media
● User-generated content
● Social communities

At this point, you should already know which areas to focus on based on your
research into social channel traffic drivers.
We used Social Blade to get insights into Peloton’s social media platforms.
Here’s what we discovered about their Instagram profile:

Followers: 273,994
Media uploads: 1798
Average likes: 3,372
Average comments: 70
Engagement rate: 1.26%

Use Social Blade to build a thorough picture of your target company’s social
media strategy.
Here’s what you should be looking for when analysing social proof:

Try sentiment analysis tools such as Sentiment Viz, which analyses the
sentiment behind Tweets that include a keyword of your choosing. Here’s
what happened when we ran “Peloton” through the tool.

There’s a wide range of sentiment analysis tabs to look at, but the Tag Cloud
and Affinity tabs are particularly interesting.

Check out reviews. Are there any common themes in the reviews?

For example, are users frequently praising the customer service team, or
complaining about poor quality?

You can use these point to assess where you might improve upon your own
product, based on what users value.

If there are complaints, how are they dealt with by the social media teams?
You can also use the VidIQ tool to analyse the quality of a company’s
YouTube channel:

VidIQ looks at:

● Video views
● Video duration
● Like rations
● Comments
● Total views
● Average daily views
● The channel’s country
● Subscriber rates
● Video tags
● Channel tags

Try it out on some of your target company’s YouTube videos!

STEP 12. Mapping Out The User Flow

Once you’ve gathered all of your data, it’s time to start mapping out a user
flow!

We used Funnelytics to help us collate all of our data into an

easy-to-visualise user flow.

Here’s our version for Peloton:

Now you’re ready to start reverse-engineering

your own marketing funnels!
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