What a funnel audit is, what we measure, and what you get whether or not you hire us

A funnel audit is a measured map of every step between a visitor arriving on your site and paying you or asking you to, showing how many people you lose at each step and why. Its purpose is to stop you guessing: most owners have a theory about why the site does not convert, and most theories are wrong, because the biggest leak is usually somewhere unglamorous. Here is what is actually in one of ours, so you can judge whether it is worth $750 — and hold anyone else’s version to the same standard.

Step one: is the measurement telling the truth?

Most funnels are measured wrongly before they are measured at all. Analytics installed twice, so every visitor counts as two. Form submissions not tracked as conversions. The “thank you” page counted even when nobody submitted. The phone number clickable but untracked. Chat conversations invisible. Before we look at a single number, we check the tracking, because a conclusion drawn from wrong data costs more than no conclusion. Fixing the tracking is often the first deliverable.

Step two: the map

Every path a visitor can take, drawn out. Where they arrive (which pages, from which sources). Where they go next. Where the “ask” is on each page. For a store: product view, add to cart, checkout start, shipping step, payment step, order. For a service business: service page, contact or booking page, form start, form complete, call booked. Each transition is a step where people leave.

Step three: where the people go

For each step, how many arrived and how many continued, over a real period — a month at least. This produces the picture most owners have never seen: perhaps 60% of visitors leave the homepage without clicking anything, perhaps the service pages convert fine but the contact page loses three quarters of the people who reach it, perhaps checkout collapses at the shipping step. Segmented by device, because mobile and desktop usually tell different stories, and by source, because ad traffic and search traffic behave differently.

Step four: why

Numbers tell you where; they do not tell you why. For the two or three biggest leaks we look at the page the way a visitor does: on a phone, cold, timing how long it takes to show anything, reading what it asks for, checking whether the promise from the previous step is kept. Recordings and heatmaps where they exist. The answers are usually specific: a form with nine fields, a shipping cost that appears from nowhere, a slow page, a button below the fold, no proof anywhere near the ask.

Step five: the ranked fix list

Every fix we propose gets an estimate of what it is likely to recover, based on how many people are lost at that step and how much each of them is worth, so the list is in money order rather than effort order. Some fixes are an afternoon; some are a redesign. You can see before spending anything which are worth doing first, and roughly what each is worth.

What you get either way

The map, the numbers, the ranked list, and the corrected tracking. Whether you then hire us to do the fixes, do them yourself, or take the list to someone else, the audit is yours. If you start a fix sprint with us within thirty days — the agreed fixes implemented with before-and-after measurement, from $1,500 — the $750 audit fee is credited against it. Ongoing optimisation, one test or improvement shipped and measured every month, is $499 a month.