Read the funnel by leak size
A CRO audit is a ranked list of where your funnel loses people, sized in dollars. Not a heuristic review of the homepage, a walk of every step from arrival to money, with the drop-off measured at each. On one campaign I audited, the single biggest preventable loss was 41 percent of prospects abandoning at the enter-your-name-and-email step. No opinion about the hero image survives contact with a number like that: the fix list writes itself once the leaks are sized.
The diagnostic split I use to sort every symptom: impressions without clicks means the angle is wrong, the promise in the search result does not match the want. Traffic without conversions means the offer or audience is wrong. Clicks that stall mid-funnel mean friction. Each has a different owner and a different fix, and an audit that does not separate them produces a to-do list of guesses.
The honesty layer most audits skip
Two disciplines separate a real audit from theatre. First, source every number. I once used a 30 percent enquiry-to-student conversion rate in a client's funnel model, then corrected it to 15 when I realised the figure had no traceable source. Halving a modelled number stings, but an audit built on an unsourced assumption is fiction with a spreadsheet. Second, distrust single-day movements: a conversion dip after an unnaturally good day is usually regression to the mean, not a breakage, and reacting to it burns credibility and engineering time.
The output should rank fixes by revenue unblocked, which usually means forms and offer clarity first, per the main CRO page, then page structure per landing page optimisation, then a testing queue per A/B testing for everything genuinely uncertain. If the audit finds the traffic itself is the problem, that is not failure, it is routing: the fix lives in the SEO audit instead, and the two together are how a growth experiment queue gets its priorities.
One more sanity discipline: when a metric moves, check the calendar before the funnel. Site releases, promo endings, traffic-mix changes from a big search shift, all masquerade as conversion problems. The audit that starts with what changed recently finishes days earlier than the one that starts with the homepage.
FAQ
What does a CRO audit include?
A measured walk of the full funnel with drop-off sized at every step, a diagnostic split between angle, offer and friction problems, and a fix list ranked by revenue unblocked. Heuristic page reviews without step data are opinion, not audit.
What is the most common CRO audit finding?
Form drop-off. On one audited campaign, 41 percent of prospects abandoned at the name-and-email step, the largest single preventable leak in the funnel. Field count and placement routinely beat any above-the-fold change.
How often should you audit conversion?
Fully, once or twice a year or after major funnel changes. Continuously, via a dashboard split by angle, offer and friction symptoms, so regressions surface in days. Beware single-day dips, which are usually regression to the mean.