Journal · 30 June 2025
When default funnels mislead
A vendor funnel is a sketch of ordered events. Accounting requires a definition of a person, a time, and what happens when the same thumb tries twice.
Default funnels exist because empty charts look unprofessional. The platform picks a plausible sequence — viewed, started, completed — and draws a slope. The slope is not lying about the events it received. It is silent about the events it merged, the identities it guessed, and the retries it treated as new intent.
In grocery delivery we saw a registration funnel that celebrated volume. The OTP step fired on every resend. The default funnel counted resends as additional people entering the step. Growth looked like a personality. The SMS gateway was unwell. Funnel Integrity rebuilt the path with a unique user key and a ten-minute dedupe. The slope became boring. The vendor invoice became interesting.
Ordered steps also hide people who complete by another road: a deep link, a restored session, a customer-support grant. Defaults rarely include those roads unless you name them. The house prefers a conversion definition written in a sentence — “a household that placed a first paid order within fourteen days of install, ignoring failed payments that later succeeded” — and then a query that implements the sentence. If the UI cannot express the sentence, abandon the UI for that number.
None of this is a call to delete your analytics platform. Browse with it. Do not close the books with it. The moment a number is used to hire, fire, or buy traffic, it needs a ledger you could reconstruct on a whiteboard without the logo in the corner.