Before you spend on more clicks, fix the funnel you already have.
Reading time: 6–7 minutes
Dashboards lie. Traffic climbs, campaigns launch, features roll out. On the surface, everything appears to be fine. Yet underneath those tidy charts, most funnels are quietly losing value. Prospective customers get close to a first win, then drift away. Budgets evaporate. Teams work late and wonder why nothing sticks.
Here’s the uncomfortable reality: most growth problems aren’t about attracting more people. They’re about keeping the people you already have. Leaks waste money, energy, and attention. They also erode trust, which is the foundation of any sustainable brand.
The good news? You can locate your biggest losses. No specialist software. No complicated models. Just a practical audit that respects users’ time and turns waste into progress.
1) Choose a North Star that measures real value
Funnels fail when they chase shiny but hollow outcomes. Page views, impressions, and raw sign-ups look impressive yet say little about whether anyone benefited.
Start by finishing this sentence:
We succeed when __________ because users __________.
Pick a North Star where business results and user well-being overlap. Two simple examples:
- We succeed when people publish their first project because they feel genuine creative ownership.
- We succeed when new customers connect their bank account because they can see real financial insight.
💡 A clear North Star forces honest trade-offs. It keeps the team focused on value, not theatre. It also exposes where value slips away.
A broad, external sense-check helps here. A typical landing page conversion hovers around the mid-single digits across industries. Consider 6.6% a rough median baseline, not a target [1].
2) Capture your funnel as it actually behaves
Create a 30-day snapshot. Accuracy can improve later. Direction is what matters now.
| Stage | Metric | Last 30 days | Conversion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acquisition | Qualified sessions | — | —% |
| Activation | Sign-up → first value moment | — | —% |
| Retention | Week-4 still active | — | —% |
| Revenue | Trial → Paid (if relevant) | — | —% |
If you can’t fill a row, that’s not a failure. It’s a finding. Add the gap to your instrumentation list and move on. You can only fix what you can see.
3) Put numbers on the losses
At each stage, ask two simple questions:
- How many people fall away here?
- What does that loss cost us in money, time, or trust?
A quick illustration:
- 10,000 qualified visits
- 15% activation
- Roughly 8,500 people don’t reach the first value
If an average customer is worth £100 over their lifetime, that equates to £850,000 of potential monthly value left on the table. More importantly, thousands of people gave you attention and left without benefit. That damages credibility and drains morale.
Fixing leakage isn’t just commercial hygiene. It’s an ethical practice.
4) Pick three focused changes that help users as well as the business
Resist the urge to fix everything. Choose three precise hypotheses you can ship now. Use a clean format:
“If we ______ then ______ because ______.”
Add one ethical filter: does this reduce friction and increase clarity for the user, not just bump a number for the quarter?
Practical experiments to start with:
a) Build trust early. If we place three client logos and one short, authentic testimonial above the fold, more people will proceed because visible proof reduces uncertainty [2]. Why it’s ethical: genuine transparency, not pressure tactics.
b) Shorten the form. If we reduce the sign-up form from seven fields to four, completion will rise because unnecessary fields create drop-off [3]. Why it’s ethical: respect for people’s time and privacy.
c) Match the message. If the landing page headline echoes the wording in our best-performing ad, more visitors will convert because expectations are met rather than disappointed [3]. Why it’s ethical: consistency avoids bait-and-switch dynamics.
d) Guide activation on Day 0. If we send a plain-text quick-start email immediately after sign-up, more users will complete setup because we meet them while motivation is high [4]. Why it’s ethical: we help people realise value promptly, without tricks.
5) Prioritise without overthinking
Use the ICE method. Score each idea from 1 to 10 for:
- Impact: How much could it move the North Star
- Confidence: How strong the evidence is
- Ease: How quickly it can be shipped
Multiply Impact by Confidence and divide by Ease. The highest scores go first. If ideas touch very different audience sizes, add Reach and use RICE. Don’t let scoring become a performance.
6) Create one page everyone reads
Forget a dozen dashboards. Build a single page that guides decisions:
- Top: your North Star and the current number
- Middle: three funnel metrics with a simple status colour for each
- Bottom: three active experiments with owner, target, and review date
This becomes the weekly agenda. No data theatre. No guessing. For product teams, external benchmarks are useful context rather than commandments. Amplitude’s public benchmark hub is a handy reference for activation and retention patterns by product type [7].
7) Run the ethics check before you ship
For every change, ask three questions:
- Does this save the user’s time?
- Does this make the journey clearer?
- Does this respect attention as finite, not free?
If the answer is no, you’re not fixing a leak. You’re relocating waste. In 2025, trust remains a central growth lever. The Edelman Trust Barometer shows how trust dynamics influence behaviour across markets and sectors [5]. A funnel that protects trust reduces long-term costs.
To maintain that trust, measure the right behaviours. Generic metrics won’t tell you if people actually reached value. Track the specific micro-events that mark progress, then use them to guide design decisions [6].
8) A concrete example you can adapt
North Star: Weekly Activated Users
30-day snapshot:
- Qualified sessions: 10,000
- Activation: 15%
- Week-4 retained: 25%
Largest loss: 8,500 visitors don’t reach first value
Three active experiments:
- Client logo strip under the hero. Target: +3 percentage points activation. Stop if bounce rises above 65%. Owner: Marketing.
- Four-field sign-up form. Target: +2 percentage points activation. Stop if error rate doubles. Owner: Product.
- Day-0 quick-start email. Target: +2 percentage points activation. Stop if unsubscribe exceeds 2%. Owner: Lifecycle.
Review date: two weeks from today. Decide to ship, iterate, or stop.
Why this matters
Patch the obvious holes and you’ll need less traffic to grow. Spend drops. Churn eases. Teams stop firefighting and start improving the product. Most importantly, customers experience value faster and with less friction. That’s what ethical growth looks like in practice: fewer broken promises, more durable relationships.
Start your list for this week
□ Fill the 30-day table with your best available numbers
□ Select two experiments and write short test cards
□ Book a 30-minute review in 14 days to decide
□ Assign named owners for each test
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References
[1] Unbounce. “What is the average landing page conversion rate?” Q4 2024 median of 6.6% across industries.
[2] Unbounce. “Conversion Benchmark Report 2024.” Insights drawn from 57M conversions and 41K landing pages, including the role of clarity and proof.
[3] Baymard Institute. “Checkout Optimisation: 5 Ways to Minimise Form Fields.” Also see Unbounce “Landing Page Best Practices” section on message match.
[4] Braze. “Why Email Marketing Is Important for Your Cross-Channel Strategy.”
[5] Edelman. “2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. Global Report.”
[6] Nielsen Norman Group. “Unlock Powerful UX Insights with Custom Events in Analytics.”
[7] Amplitude. “Benchmark Your Digital Product Performance.”