The limit of "how many"
Hits and sessions are easy to track. They're also easy to misinterpret. A spike in traffic can feel like a win until you realize that step 3 is broken and most people never get past it. The number went up. The outcome didn't. You celebrated the wrong thing.
"How many?" is a starting point. It tells you something changed. It doesn't tell you where in the journey the change happened. Did more people start the flow? Did more people finish it? Did they get stuck in the middle? One number can't answer that. You need to see the flow. Step by step. Where do they stop?
Product decisions get made at the step level. If everyone drops at the payment form, you fix the payment form. If everyone drops at the pricing page, you fix the pricing page. If you only know "we had 10,000 hits," you don't know which step to fix. You're guessing. Drop-off by step turns guesswork into a target.
Why drop-off is the right question
It's specific. It points to a place in the product. When you fix that step, you can see if the number moves. That's the feedback loop that actually drives improvement. Fix a step, watch completion. Did it go up? You learn. Did it stay flat? You learn. Either way, you're not fixing in the dark.
Drop-off also forces you to instrument the flow. You can't see where people stop if you're not tracking step completion. So you add the events. You define the steps. You build the funnel. That exercise alone is valuable. It makes you explicit about what "success" looks like in the flow. A lot of teams have never defined it. Asking "where do they drop off?" forces the definition.
And once you have it, you have a metric that's tied to a decision. When completion at step 3 is low, you fix step 3. When it's high, you look at step 4. The question drives the action. "How many hits?" rarely does.
How to make it actionable
Instrument key flows. Onboarding. Signup to first value. Paywall. Whatever matters for your product. Track completion at each step. Watch the numbers. When a step has a big drop, that's your candidate for improvement.
Tie releases to the journal. When you ship a change to step 3, log it. When the weekly report lands and completion at step 3 is up, you see the change in the journal. Cause and effect. You know the fix worked. Without the journal, you see the number move and you wonder. With it, you see the number move and you see the deploy. That connection is what makes drop-off actionable. You don't just see where they stop. You see what happened when you tried to fix it.
Keep the flow simple. Three to five steps. If the flow has twenty steps, break it into smaller flows or focus on the steps that matter most. The goal is to have a small set of numbers that tell you where the leak is. Not a maze of micro-steps that nobody will look at.
What we built for that
AppFit is built for product questions: where do they drop off? Did that change work? No need for a data team in the middle. You set a focus. You pick the metrics that matter for the flow you care about. You get a weekly summary. When you ship a change, you log it. When the number moves, you see the cause. The loop closes in one place.
We're not replacing your event pipeline. We're giving you a place where the flow metric and the product journal live together. So "where do they drop off?" isn't a report you request. It's a number you watch every week, with the context of what you shipped right next to it.
