Your Funnel Isn’t Broken. It’s Leaking.
A funnel almost never breaks all at once, it leaks one boring point at a time. Here is how to find the leak in twenty minutes, and why Meta’s tracking and pricing changes make it more expensive to ignore.
A brand we took on had been passed between three agencies before us. Nobody had done anything wrong exactly. The site just quietly leaked. Slow on mobile. People with access needs left behind. Not built for the AI tools that now read pages on people’s behalf. Two weeks of boring, careful attention later: performance went from 51 to 76, accessibility from 88 to 100, and AI readiness from two checks out of three to three out of three. SEO held at 100 the whole way through. The traffic was never the problem. What happened after the click was.
Your funnel isn’t broken. It’s leaking.
A funnel is not a diagram or a piece of software. It is the handful of plain steps between someone hearing about you and someone paying you, and it almost never breaks all at once. It leaks, one boring point at a time. A headline that talks about you instead of them. A form with two fields too many. A button buried below the fold on the phone most of your visitors are using. Fix that, and the fix is usually smaller and less exciting than you would expect.
Two changes landed at Meta this month that make this sharper. They are switching off the setting that let people opt out of being tracked across the web, so retargeting pools get bigger and cleaner from July. And from 1 July they started charging location-based fees in a first batch of countries, so every click costs that bit more before it even reaches your site. Neither of those is the leak. Both make the leak more expensive to ignore.
Your one job this week
On your phone, do what you ask customers to do. Click your own ad or bio link. Buy your own smallest thing. Time yourself, and note every place you hesitate, even for a second. That hesitation is the leak. You will find it inside twenty minutes.
The week in brief
- Meta’s tracking reset: the cross-site opt-out is being switched off, so more people land back in retargeting pools from July, but only if the page they hit doesn’t hand them straight back.
- Meta’s new location fees: ad costs rise from 1 July in a first batch of countries. Every click into a leaking page just got more expensive.
- Google’s June spam update wrapped: thin, templated pages are exactly what it targets. One more reason a landing page needs to read like a real answer, not a funnel-software template.
- Instagram’s redesigned profile grid: a small change, but it shifts what looks trustworthy before a cold visitor even clicks through, the top of a funnel most people never think to check.