Funnel analysis, explained without the jargon

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Here is funnel analysis without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

The biggest drop-off is the best place to work. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

Segment by device before drawing conclusions. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What to do next

A leaky funnel wastes every pound of ad spend. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.