The Priority Call: Auditing YETI's Checkout Drop-off Data

Marketing Academy · Field Work●Conversion Rate Optimization

MiniAudit· 25 minutes

YETI Holdings

Objective: Given a mapped 5-step checkout funnel with drop-off percentages and raw user counts, apply the lesson's data-plus-effort framework to identify the single highest-priority friction point to fix first.

You're the CRO analyst at YETI ahead of a holiday traffic push. Paid traffic is up 40% quarter over quarter but checkout conversion hasn't moved, so leadership wants to know exactly where the funnel is leaking before spend increases further.

Pull the drop-off numbers, rank by absolute users lost (not just percentage), then score the top candidate on severity versus ease of fixing before recommending what ships first.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets

FreeSort funnel data by absolute drop-off and build the severity/effort scoring grid

Free, no account friction, and every marketer already has access

The process

2 steps

Step 01 of 02

Pull Drop-off Data

The lesson's Step 2 says to sort funnel steps by absolute number of exits, not just percentage, because a step losing 5,000 users at 30% matters more than one losing 50 users at 60%.

This 5-step checkout funnel has one step with a middling 24% drop-off but the highest raw user loss of any step. Which step gets flagged first?

Google Sheets— Import the funnel export, freeze the header row, add a column for absolute users lost.

Procedure

Import checkout-funnel-export.csv and freeze row 1
Add a column: users_lost = entered - completed for each step
Sort descending by users_lost, not by drop-off percentage
Flag the top row as the priority candidate for Step 2's deeper investigation

Sample output

Step               Entered   Completed   Drop-off %   Users Lost
Cart Review         18,400     16,100        12.5%         2,300
Shipping Info        16,100     11,600        27.9%         4,500
Payment Info         11,600      8,800        24.1%         2,800
Review & Confirm      8,800      8,100         8.0%           700
Order Confirmation    8,100      7,950         1.9%           150

Healthy

The team flags Shipping Info first, it has the second-highest percentage but the largest raw user loss by far (4,500).

Unhealthy

The team flags Payment Info first because 24.1% sounds more alarming in a slide than 27.9% attached to a step nobody scrutinized.

What this means

Percentage alone hides scale. A step that loses fewer people at a higher rate can still matter less in absolute revenue terms than a bigger step with a lower rate.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
The funnel report is sorted by drop-off percentage by default	Re-sort by absolute users lost before presenting priorities to stakeholders	5 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Step 02 of 02

Prioritize by Impact and Effort

The lesson's Step 6 scores each friction point on severity and ease of fixing, then plots them on a 2x2 grid: high severity/easy fix ships immediately.

Shipping Info's drop-off is traced to a required 'Company Name' field that confuses users into entering it in the wrong place, and a shipping cost that only appears one screen later. Which fix ships first?

Google Sheets— Same sheet, add severity (1-5) and effort (1-5) columns, then plot a quadrant chart.

Procedure

Score each candidate fix on severity: how many users it affects
Score each candidate fix on effort: 1 (copy/config change) to 5 (backend rebuild)
Removing the optional Company Name field scores severity 4, effort 1
Surfacing shipping cost earlier scores severity 4, effort 3 (requires a pricing API call earlier in the flow)

Sample output

Fix                              Severity   Effort   Quadrant
Remove Company Name field            4          1      Do now
Surface shipping cost earlier         4          3      Schedule
Add trust badges near payment         2          1      Batch
Redesign shipping form layout         2          4      Skip for now

Healthy

Remove the Company Name field this sprint, it's the highest-severity, lowest-effort item on the grid. Schedule the shipping-cost fix for the next sprint since it needs engineering time.

Unhealthy

Starting with the shipping form redesign because it 'looks the most broken,' while the one-line field removal sits in the backlog untouched.

What this means

The 2x2 grid exists specifically to stop teams from chasing the most visually broken thing instead of the fix with the best return for the effort spent.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
Multiple friction fixes are proposed with no clear order	Score each on severity and effort, ship the high-severity/low-effort ones first	30 min

EitherYou or a developer can handle this, depending on your access.

Final deliverable

A prioritized friction fix list with severity and effort scores, plus a written recommendation for what ships this sprint versus what gets scheduled.

See a reference example

Sample output

Rent the Runway, checkout funnel priority call (excerpt)

DO NOW: Remove the mandatory 'Referral Code' field default-showing an error state (severity 4, effort 1)
SCHEDULE: Add a persistent order-total summary sidebar (severity 3, effort 3)
SKIP: Rebuild the size-selector UI (severity 2, effort 5)

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Sorts the funnel by absolute users lost, not percentage alone
Correctly scores at least one fix as high-severity/low-effort and recommends it first