Your conversion baseline

Three numbers, no dashboard

From Module 5 onward you'll be sending traffic at this page — content, search, email, ads. If you can't see visits and conversions, you will never know which of those modules worked for you, and Module 10 will have nothing to compare against.

So today you install measurement and write down a baseline. Three numbers only: visitors, conversions, and the rate between them. Resist dashboards. Every analytics tool will offer you forty charts; until these three numbers are trustworthy, the other thirty-seven are entertainment. This is Module 1's funnel discipline arriving at a single page.

What counts as a conversion event

Your tool must count the macro conversion from Lesson 4.1 — the form submitted, the slot booked, the purchase completed. Not pageviews. Pageviews measure arrival; your page's job is what happens after arrival.

The workhorse technique: the thank-you page. Send every completed form or booking to a /thanks page (Tally, Google Forms, Cal.com and every builder can redirect after submission), then count visits to that page as conversions. Simple, tool-agnostic, and it measures the actual moment of yes. Whatever you choose, write down exactly what is counted and how — "Tally submission, tracked via redirect to /thanks" — because a baseline whose definition drifts is not a baseline.

The tools, honestly

• Cloudflare Web Analytics — free, cookieless, no consent banner needed, deliberately basic. Basic is what you want this month. Needs a small script added to the page.
• Google Analytics 4 — free and powerful, but it sets cookies, which for EU visitors means a consent banner, and its learning curve is a hobby in itself. Park it until Module 10 unless you already run it.
• Plausible and similar — lovely, cookieless, EU-hosted, from about €9 a month at the time of writing. Recommended only once the page earns money.
• Platform-native stats — if your page lives in Shopify or WordPress, the built-in numbers cover this month fine. Ostara needs to install nothing: Shopify already counts sessions and orders.

And now the honest limit the tool lists skip: a script needs somewhere to go, and the free tiers of Carrd, Framer and Google Sites won't take custom code. Lesson 4.3 told you this was coming. It does not stop you measuring:

Measure at the form if you can't measure the page. Your form tool counts for free: Tally shows views and submissions, Cal.com counts bookings, Google Forms counts responses. Form views and submissions give you a real rate — of the form, not the page. That's a narrower window, and it's still a legitimate baseline, because the rule is not "measure everything"; it's measure the same thing, the same way, and write down which thing it is. Upgrade to page-level measurement when the page earns the ~€17–19/year builder tier — your baseline note simply records the switch.

Baseline before optimisation

Record two weeks of numbers before changing anything. Not because a fortnight is statistically magical — at your traffic it isn't — but because the discipline is: a dated "before", collected while you kept your hands off the page.

If your page went live this week, your baseline will be small or zero. That is not embarrassing; that's a starting line. The student with "9 visitors, 0 conversions" written down beats the business owner with three years of traffic and no numbers, because only one of them can ever prove improvement.

Low-traffic honesty

Under roughly 1,000 visitors a month, A/B testing is statistical theatre — the difference between headline A and headline B drowns in noise, whatever your testing tool's confidence badge claims. This Program will not pretend otherwise. Instead:

• Sequential changes. One change at a time; compare this month against last month; accept that it's evidence, not proof.
• Five-second tests with five real humans — the Lesson 3.3 method. At low traffic, five strangers reading your page out loud teach you more than a month of analytics.

The hypothesis habit

From today, every change to the page gets one line, written before the change: "I believe changing X will improve Y because Z." You learned the form in Module 1. The page gives it a permanent home, and Module 10 will harvest these lines as your experiment log. A change without a hypothesis is redecorating.

Storkflow's before-number

Lena wires it up. Her Framer page can't take a script on the free tier, and unlike most students she has a budget — so she moves to Framer's cheapest paid site plan (about €10 a month at the time of writing) and installs Cloudflare Web Analytics: no cookies, no consent banner, cleaner page. Trial starts are counted at the other end: signups arriving with her ?src=lp tag, visible in the product's own admin — the first source-tracking Storkflow has ever had.

Fourteen days, hands off. The Google Ads clicks now land on the page instead of the homepage; one newsletter mention to the 900-person list; one LinkedIn post. Baseline: 118 visitors, 4 trial starts, 3.4% — against the sitewide 2.2% from Module 1.

Is 3.4% a win? Careful. Four conversions is a coin toss; the honest reading is "plausibly better, too early to claim". Lena records it, resists announcing it, and logs hypothesis #1: "I believe moving the Van Dijk quote above the fold will lift trial starts, because visitors currently see no proof before the CTA."

Tomas runs the €0 version: Carrd free takes no script, so his baseline is Tally's own counts — 26 form views, 3 Check-up bookings in the first fortnight, page visitors honestly recorded as unknown. Three bookings that could not have happened a month ago, and a written "before". Both students are now measurably in business. Your turn.

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