Glossary
What is a conversion incident?
A conversion incident is a sudden, measurable drop in a funnel's conversion performance that is treated like an operational incident: detected, investigated, and traced back to the change that caused it.
Definition
A conversion incident is a sudden, measurable drop in a funnel's conversion performance — leads, form submits, or conversion rate — that is treated the way engineering teams treat an outage: detected automatically, investigated against a timeline of changes, and closed with a cause.
The word incident is doing real work. It says the drop has a start time, a scope, an impact, and a likely cause — not just a bad number on a dashboard.
Why it matters
- Marketing teams usually find drops on a weekly report, days after the money stopped converting.
- Framing a drop as an incident forces the useful questions: when did it start, what changed just before, which client and funnel are affected, and what is it costing?
- It also changes the response. Incidents get a timeline and a written cause; "leads are down" gets a meeting.
How to detect it
- 1Compare each funnel stage against its own recent baseline rather than a fixed target.
- 2Require the movement to be sustained, not a single noisy hour.
- 3Attach the change history — ad edits, page edits, form edits, tracking changes — to the moment the drop started.
Example
Illustrative scenario: form submits fall by half at 2pm on a Tuesday, landing views hold, and a form field was edited at 1:50pm. That is a conversion incident with a start time, a scope (one funnel), and a prime suspect.
How Quarkad helps
Quarkad is built around this idea. It monitors funnel stages and the changes around them, and when performance drops against baseline it opens an incident with the changes that line up in time already ranked as likely causes.
Related terms and pages
Frequently asked questions
- Is a conversion incident the same as a bad week?
- No. A bad week is a slow decline you can see in a report. An incident is a distinct break with a start time and a cause you can point to — which is what makes it fixable.
- Who owns a conversion incident?
- Usually whoever owns the funnel: the agency account team or the in-house growth team. The point of framing it as an incident is that ownership and a written cause are expected, rather than optional.
Find the change behind the drop.
Quarkad monitors your funnels and the changes around them, then tells you which change lines up with the drop.