Diagnose: marketing funnel analysis, stage by stage.
The measures are read in pairs, from the impression through to the qualified enquiry, until one pair names the constraint.
A number on its own cannot name a cause.
A weak fortnight has several possible causes and one report. Cost per enquiry rises and the media account is rebuilt, when what changed was the page. Enquiries fall and the budget is lifted, when the enquiries that did arrive were never answered. Diagnosis is the discipline of not acting on the first number that moved.
Every measure is read beside the one before it and the one after it. A gap between a pair is where the constraint is, and the pair names it precisely enough that only one thing needs changing.
The pairs, and what a gap between them means.
- CTR / CVR Strong click-through, weak conversion A message-to-page problem. The ad promised something the page does not open with, and it is answered on the page rather than in the media account.
- CVR / LQR Strong conversion, weak qualification An audience or an offer problem. The page is persuading the wrong people, and it is persuading them well, which is why the volume looks healthy.
- LQR / STL Weak qualification beside a slow speed to lead Rarely a lead quality problem. Enquiries went cold before anyone was in a position to judge them, and the fix sits in the handover, not in the campaign.
- CPE / CPQE Falling cost per enquiry, rising cost per qualified enquiry The campaign is buying cheaper enquiries that are worth less. The saving is not real, and the media optimisation that produced it is working against the pipeline.
The funnel is read in one direction, once.
The section runs from the impression to the qualified enquiry: impressions, clicks, sessions, enquiries, answered enquiries, qualified enquiries. Each step is read as a share of the step above it, so the drop that matters is visible as a shape rather than as a table of unrelated figures.
Only one constraint is named at a time. Where two pairs both look weak, the earlier one is named first, because a stage cannot be fixed while the stage feeding it is broken.
A diagnosis says which measure is holding the result and what would have to change for it to move. It does not say by how much. A figure attached to a prediction is a forecast, and a forecast is not a diagnosis.
Diagnose hands on the change to make.
- THE LOOP How we measure The framework the three stages belong to: what is counted, what each measure means and what each one decides.
- 01 Measure What is recorded before spend starts, and how a source is attributed.
- 03 Optimise One change at a time, against the measure that named the constraint.
Diagnosis is the second stage of the operating loop. What follows it is optimising the conversion.
Trust-led marketing for an evolving era.
Three forces are reshaping how buyers research, evaluate and make high-value decisions.
