Before you invest in funnel analysis

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Before you spend anything on funnel analysis, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The biggest drop-off is the best place to work
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Segment by device before drawing conclusions. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A leaky funnel wastes every pound of ad spend. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about funnel analysis before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The biggest drop-off is the best place to work — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.