When people tell me their funnel isn't working, they usually mean sales are down and they're not sure why. The honest answer is that a funnel rarely breaks all over at once. It's almost always one step quietly losing people, and everything downstream suffers for it. The skill is finding that one step instead of rebuilding everything.
A funnel that isn't converting usually has a single weak step, not a broken whole. Look at each step's number in turn, traffic, opt-ins, replies, calls booked, and the leak is the step where the drop is far bigger than it should be. Fix that one step before touching anything else.
Who this is for: Anyone with a funnel that's underperforming.
The word funnel does us a disservice here, because it makes the thing sound like a single object that either works or doesn't. It's really a chain of separate steps, and a chain fails at one link. When someone says their funnel isn't converting, what's usually true is that one step is losing far more people than it should, and because every step after it gets less to work with, the whole thing looks broken from the bottom.
So the first thing I do is resist the urge to rebuild. It's tempting, when sales are down, to redo the website, rewrite everything, start again. Most of the time that's a lot of work to fix a problem that lives in one place. If you can find the leak, you can often mend the whole funnel by changing one page or one email.
I understand the urge to blow it all up, I really do. When money's not coming in, doing something big feels like taking control. But a rebuild is months of work and a fresh set of unknowns, and if the leak was in one email, you've spent a season fixing everything except the thing that was actually broken. Diagnosis first, then the smallest fix that works. It's slower to start and far faster to a result.
Finding it just means looking at the steps separately, which most people never do. They watch the final number, sales, and treat everything above it as one blur. If you're not sure what the steps even are, it's worth reading what a marketing funnel actually is first, then coming back to this.
Here's the exact thing to look at. Write down the number of people at each step over the last month or two, from the top down. Roughly: how many landed on your page, how many left an email, how many engaged with your follow-up, how many booked, how many bought. You don't need perfect analytics. Even rough numbers show you the shape.
Then look at the drop between each step, not the totals. A funnel narrows everywhere, that's normal, so a raw number tells you little. What you're hunting for is the step where the drop is much steeper than the others. If ninety percent of visitors leave without opting in, that's your leak, even if the emails and the call are perfect. If people opt in happily but almost nobody opens the follow-up, the leak has moved to delivery, or to the emails themselves.
A quick example of what this looks like. Say a thousand people hit your page last month, three hundred opted in, and two booked a call. The opt-in step is healthy, thirty percent is a good number, so the page and the magnet are doing their job. The problem is glaring once you lay it out: three hundred interested people and only two calls. The leak is entirely in what happens after the opt-in, which means the fix is the follow-up, not the page you were about to rewrite.
This is why my funnel isn't converting isn't really a diagnosis. Converting where? The fix for a weak opt-in page has nothing in common with the fix for emails landing in spam. If a lot of your follow-up simply isn't being seen, that's a deliverability problem, not a copy problem, and it's more common than people think. Naming the step is most of the work.
After doing this a fair few times, the same leaks come up again and again. When you find your steep drop, it's usually one of these:
Notice how different the fixes are. Only one of these is about writing better copy. The others are about matching, timing, delivery and volume. That's why guessing rarely works, and why looking at the steps saves you from fixing the wrong thing. When you've named which of these it is, you've done the hard part, and the fix usually suggests itself.
One trap worth naming. Sometimes the funnel is fine and there just isn't enough going through it to judge. If forty people have entered the whole thing this month, you can't read anything into two sales versus zero. That's noise, not a trend. Before you conclude a step is broken, make sure enough people have passed through it to trust the number.
The flip side is also true, and it's the most expensive mistake in marketing: sending plenty of traffic through a leaky page. You're paying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. If your opt-in step is weak, more traffic just wastes more money. Fix the leak first, then turn up the volume. Doing it the other way round feels productive and quietly drains the budget.
There's a quieter version of the traffic trap too, which is the wrong kind of traffic rather than too little. If you're bringing in people who were never a fit, the whole funnel will look broken when really it's being fed the wrong fuel. Before you tear apart a step, ask whether the people entering it are the people you can actually help. A funnel can only convert the traffic it's given.
When you've found the leak, change one thing and watch. If the opt-in page is the problem, rewrite the headline and leave everything else alone for a couple of weeks. If the follow-up is the problem, add the emails that were missing. Resist the urge to overhaul five things at once, because then you'll never know what actually moved the number, and you'll be back here guessing next quarter.
Give each change enough time and enough people to show a real result. A day or two of data tells you nothing. A couple of weeks, or a couple of hundred people through the step, starts to.
Keep a simple note of what you changed and when, even just a line in a document. It sounds fussy, but three months from now you won't remember whether the jump in bookings came from the new headline or the extra email, and that memory is worth real money. The people who get good at funnels aren't cleverer, they just keep track and change one thing at a time.
If you've looked and still can't see where it's going, that's exactly what an outside pair of eyes is for. A funnel audit is usually the fastest way to find the leak, and it's the first thing we do for clients at Unbury before we change anything. You can also read what a healthy version of each step looks like across the marketing funnels guide.
Long enough for a meaningful number of people to pass through every step. For a small business that might be a month or two, not a week. Judging a funnel on a handful of visitors is guessing dressed up as data.
The step with the steepest drop, wherever it sits. But as a rule, don't add more traffic at the top while a step below is leaking, because you'll just lose more people faster and pay for the privilege.
If people open but don't act, delivery isn't your problem, the offer or the timing is. Often the ask is too big for how warm they are. Try a smaller next step, or make the case more clearly before you ask for the call.
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