Nine Signs Your Funnel Is Leaking Money

Most conversion problems announce themselves in the data long before anyone names them. The nine signals below take about an hour to check, need no new tools, and between them will usually find at least one thing that has been costing money for a year.

1. Mobile converts at less than two-thirds of desktop

Some gap is normal. A large one is a finding. DRIP’s analysis of 486 million sessions across 117 brands found desktop converting 1.56 times higher than mobile while mobile carried 78% of traffic. If your gap is wider than that, the majority of your audience is on an experience nobody has been optimising.

2. Your cart abandonment is above your vertical, not above the average

The global average matters less than the vertical. Benchmark analysis puts grocery near 61%, mainstream DTC between 67% and 76%, B2B around 82%, and finance and travel between 81% and 91%. Compare yourself to the right band before concluding anything.

3. Shipping cost first appears at the payment step

The largest single documented cause of abandonment. Baymard’s research attributes 48% of abandonments to unexpected extra costs at checkout. If a customer cannot see the total until the final screen, you are manufacturing the surprise yourself.

4. Account creation is required to buy

Another 19% of abandonments, and it is entirely self-inflicted. Guest checkout with an account prompt after purchase gets you the account and the order.

5. Your checkout has more than about fifteen form fields

Baymard’s benchmarking finds the average checkout carrying 23.48 form fields against an ideal of 12 to 14. Count yours. Most teams are surprised.

6. Nothing has been tested after the payment step

The confirmation page is the highest-intent screen you own and almost nobody tests it. Post-purchase upsells cannot cost you the conversion you just earned, which makes them one of the few genuinely asymmetric opportunities available.

7. Your top landing page by volume is not your top page by revenue

A page can convert well and attract the wrong buyer. Sort by revenue per session rather than by conversion rate and the ranking often changes completely.

8. Your pages fail Core Web Vitals on mobile

Only around 42% of mobile sites pass all three. Google and Deloitte’s analysis of over 30 million mobile sessions associated a 0.1 second improvement in mobile load time with an 8.4% rise in retail conversion. This is usually cheaper to fix than anything on this list.

9. Nobody can tell you your revenue per visitor

If reporting stops at conversion rate, discount-driven wins look identical to real ones. ConversionTeam’s data across 1,055 audited tests shows a median control conversion rate of 4.6%, but the number that decides whether a change made you money is revenue per visitor, and it is the one most dashboards leave out.

A tenth signal worth adding

Nobody on the team has completed a real purchase on the live site in the last month. Not a test order through staging, a real one on a real phone with a real card. Teams that do this quarterly find things that appear in no dashboard, because dashboards only record the failures they were built to count.

What to do with the list

The size of what is usually sitting there

The biggest single result we have seen came from signal three. At a DTC supplements brand, a shipping threshold test produced two million dollars in profit. It was not a clever test. It addressed a documented, common, structural cause of lost orders, on high-traffic pages, with a mechanism that changed what people bought rather than whether they bought.

That is the pattern worth remembering. The large wins usually sit on the boring items in a list like this, not on the interesting ones.

Your next hour

Work down the nine in order. Write one line per signal: yes, no, or unknown. Every unknown is a measurement gap, and measurement gaps are cheaper to close than any test you could run.

We publish how the audit and roadmap sequence works at Parah Group.