Check · 30 minutes · 5 questions
“Conversion is up 6.4×. Revenue grew 40%. Abandoned carts down 65%.”
Ask for these first
In writing, before the meeting. The request is half the check: everything below is one line to supply if it exists.
These are the two things a supplier omits when the number is weaker than it sounds, and both are one line to supply if they exist.
If insteadThe reply describes the improvement again in different words instead of giving the two figures.
A rebuild, a price change, a new channel and a seasonal peak all move conversion. Attributing the whole move to the work is a claim about causation from an uncontrolled comparison.
If insteadSeveral things changed and the report attributes the result to one of them without saying why.
Conversion measured against sessions and conversion measured against people are different numbers, and a switch between them produces a large improvement with no change to the business.
If insteadThe two are described in different units, or the definition changed part-way through the period.
Attributed revenue is a model's opinion about which touchpoint deserves credit. Settled revenue is what the payment processor received. They differ, sometimes by a lot, and only one of them is money.
If insteadThe revenue in the report cannot be reconciled to the payment processor within a few per cent.
A real funnel is arithmetically closed: contacts, qualified, attended, paid, revenue. If the stages do not compose into the top-line claim, one stage is being measured differently from the others.
If insteadThe stages are not supplied, or supplying them is treated as an unusual request.
Our own home page and case record, in the BHM Store block
Three figures — conversion up 6.4×, abandoned carts down 65%, revenue up 40% — carried no base and, for two of the three, no period. Held to this check, we would have rejected them. The multiple was ambiguous as well as unbaselined: against that store's 2.3% starting rate, 17% is 7.4 times as much while the increase is 6.4 times, so the label said one thing and the arithmetic another. Three blocks below on the same page the cold-traffic record passes in full — AED 1,111.04 spent, 66 first contacts at AED 16.83, 6 attended at 9.1% of contacts, 4 paid at an average enrolment of AED 8,900, AED 35,600 received, March–April 2025 — every figure deriving from its neighbours.
SinceAugust 2026. The multiple is replaced by the pair it was computed from, 2.3% → 17%, which needs no interpretation. The abandoned-cart figure was withdrawn rather than restated, because no baseline or window for it exists to publish; the catalogue reconstruction that took its place — 8,500 SKUs — is checkable against the live store. The revenue figure stays with its period on the label. All of it remains the operator's analytics rather than our measurement, and the case record says so.
A supplier who cannot supply a base and a period has told you something, and it is not that they are disorganised. We do this for a living and the questions land differently when they come from outside.