Conversion drops

A conversion drop is rarely a single event. It is a number moving at the end of a funnel, several stages away from whatever actually caused it. The posts in this category work backwards from that number: how to confirm a drop is real rather than a tracking artefact, how to find the stage that lost the volume, and how to shorten the gap between noticing and knowing.

They are written for the people who get asked the question first, which is usually an account manager or a performance marketer rather than an analyst. Every piece assumes you have a dashboard and a deadline, not a data warehouse.

If you are in the middle of a drop right now, start with the 15 minute diagnosis post, then use the investigation checklist to make the process repeatable. If you are trying to understand a drop after the fact, the traffic versus conversion post and the list of common causes explain why the same symptom can come from very different places. The client update post covers the last step, which is explaining what happened in a way that keeps the client's trust while the fix is still in progress.