THE BOOK $5
GET THE BOOK
There are sixty steps between being genuinely good at something and having customers who know it. Most people do four or five and stop, usually the wrong four or five, and conclude that marketing does not work for what they do.
This is all sixty. In order. With our own numbers attached, including the ones that went badly.
No email required to read this page. Nothing to schedule, no call at the end of it. You buy the book, we send the book.
Everything between being genuinely good at something and having customers who know it.
The pitch is thirty leads in ninety days. The fee is five thousand a month. The guarantee is that if they miss the number, you do not pay the fee.
What the guarantee never covers is the thirty thousand dollars of your own money that went through the ad account while they were missing it. That is the part that actually hurts, and it is the part they leave with you. Ninety days later you have a spreadsheet of leads that were never going to buy, and a bill you argued about.
So you are asked to trust that they are good. Which is the one thing you cannot check before you pay.
A bad agency says them just as confidently as a good one, and usually with better slides. Case studies, logos, testimonials, a guarantee written carefully over their own invoice. None of it costs anything to say, which is exactly why none of it tells you anything.
So the only rational response is to assume the worst and pay as little as possible. Which is why the good ones cannot charge what they are worth, and why you keep meeting the other kind.
We wrote down the entire method and put it on sale for five dollars. Every step, in order, with the real numbers, including the tests we got wrong and the money we wasted finding out. You can read the whole thing before you decide whether we are any good. That is the point of it.
Every agency sells you the same thing. They know what works. They have a feel for it. The insight is the product, and you are asked to buy it before you can check it.
We spent years proving that insight does not survive contact with data, mostly by being wrong ourselves. A four percent click rate we were quietly pleased about produced zero sales. A page variant that lifted engagement by sixteen points sold fewer books. An ad set the platform scored at 0.06 was actually returning 1.55 in settled cash. Every time our intuition met our measurement, the measurement won.
What does work is unglamorous. Solid base principles, instrumented properly, tested in a structured way, at enough scale to tell signal from noise. That is not a marketing skill. It is a data science one, and it is why most agencies cannot do it. They are not measuring. They are guessing confidently and charging you a retainer for the confidence.
An agency that has never been wrong has never measured. We can show you eleven times we were wrong, because we had the instruments to catch it.
Onwards Analytics is a data and analytics firm. We run probability and behavioural analysis to work out the next best move, and we grade every decision against money that actually settled rather than what a platform reported about itself. Twenty years of doing that for large organisations, now pointed at the problem of getting you found.
BHP · RIO TINTO · KPMG · UBS · JPMORGAN · WOODSIDE · SOUTH32 · PERTH AIRPORT · MAIN ROADS · MURDOCH · LIONTOWN
Here is the full table of contents. If a step is on this list it is in the book, in enough detail to do it. Nothing is held back for an upsell, because a book that withholds the good part is just an advertisement that costs five dollars.
MARKED IN TEAL: THINGS THAT WENT WRONG, WITH THE NUMBERS.
Every number came off our own funnels. These are not confessions, they are the argument. Each one is a place where the obvious move was wrong and only measurement caught it. A vendor who only shows you wins is telling you something about their record keeping, not their record.
Click through rate on a set of ads that produced zero sales. The best looking number we ever posted.
Of visitors who never scrolled past the hero. We had written the good part further down.
Apparent load time on a page that actually loaded in half a second. Phantom sessions, about 30% of the total.
Attributable revenue on a live, well built funnel, because campaign parameters never reached the payment record.
Return the ad platform reported on a set that was actually doing 1.55 on settled cash. Three distortions, all stacking.
Average order value against a floor of $20 to $40. We spent a while treating it as a traffic problem.
Three repricings after that number, a reader now costs us less than a reader is worth on day one. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why we can carry your advertising instead of billing you for it.
People who are genuinely good at a narrow thing and are bad at being found for it. Consultants, specialist firms, advisors, operators with a real point of view and a long trust cycle. If your customers take months to decide and your best work arrives by referral, this is your problem.
Anyone looking for a shortcut. There is not one in here. Sixty steps is the honest number and most of them are unglamorous. If you want the version where three clever tactics fix it, that book is widely available and cheaper than this one.
Some people read this and go and build it. Genuinely, good. It works, and the book is complete enough to do it from.
Most people read it, recognise how much of it there is, and would rather keep doing the thing they are actually good at. For those people we run the whole machine. You show us what you do. We do the sixty steps in between. The build costs you nothing, you pay only for leads, and you keep the book, the website and every lead we produce.
There is no minimum term and nothing to cancel. If it stops working for you, leave, and take all of it with you. We would rather keep you by feeding your business than by writing a clause.
Because the book pays for the advertising that sells the book. That is the whole trick, it is step 3 and step 50, and it is why we do not need your money before we start. Anyone who needs a retainer before they will touch your account is telling you their front end does not work.
We are not describing that in theory. We built it on ourselves first, on a consulting business nobody had heard of. It lost money, we repriced it three times, and it now costs us less to acquire a reader than that reader is worth on the day they arrive. The whole record is in the book, including the part where it was not working.
Why is it only five dollars?
Because its job is not to make money. Its job is to prove we can do this, to the sort of person who will not take that on trust. The book pays for the ads that sell it, and that is exactly the mechanism the book teaches. If we charged ninety dollars for it we would be demonstrating a different business.
If you publish everything, why would anyone hire you?
Knowing the sixty steps and doing the sixty steps are not the same job. Most readers will do a handful and stop, which is not a criticism, it is what happens when you already have work to deliver. The ones who go and build it themselves were never going to hire anybody.
Is anything held back for an upsell?
No. Every step on the list above is in the book in enough detail to execute. There are add ons at checkout, and they are separate pieces of work, not chapters removed from the book.
Do you keep my leads?
No. Your leads are yours, along with the book and the website. We keep the machine that produces them and the front end revenue that funds the advertising, and we say so in writing.
Can I get a refund?
Yes, on the book and any add ons, for any reason or none. Ask and we refund it, and you keep everything. At this price arguing about it would cost us more than the refund.
Who wrote it?
Ryan Richardson and Dan Rodgers, of Onwards Analytics. We wrote the parts we each actually run, and every section says which of us is talking. It reads slightly differently in places because two people wrote it, which we decided was more honest than smoothing it out.
PDF, sent to whatever email you use at checkout, usually within a minute.
NINE PARTS · SIXTY STEPS · PDF
Two optional add ons. They are separate pieces of work, not chapters held back from the book.
Refundable on request · No email required to read this page · Nothing to schedule