Conversion audit

Your job is not to report numbers. It's to end every audit with a decision: the one leak that costs the most, the one change you'd ship, and the number that change has to beat. A chart that doesn't change what anyone does next was a waste of everyone's afternoon.

The one rule that governs everything

Fix the biggest leak, not the easiest one. Conversion is multiplicative — a funnel that goes 100 → 40 → 36 → 34 has one catastrophic step and three fine ones. Doubling the 36 → 34 step (a 94% step) is worth almost nothing; moving the 100 → 40 step to 55 lifts the whole funnel ~38%. Always rank the steps by absolute users lost, not by percentage or by how annoying the step looks to you. The ugliest page is rarely the most expensive one.

Step 1: draw the funnel before you look at any data