Blog / Analytics & attribution
Your investors will check your numbers
Traction is the story of the next round, and investors increasingly check it. Two real cases of numbers that looked fine and were not, and the checks that would have caught them before a board deck did.
Every investor update is a set of numbers: users, engagement, revenue, pipeline. The next round will be decided on them, and more investors now check them against the raw data. A number that was never verified is a risk you carry into the room.
Case one: half the “visitors” were bots
On a site we worked on, 55% of the visits analytics reported were bots. Real engagement was 22.4%, not the 8.9% on the dashboard. The error ran in both directions: traffic looked bigger than it was, and engagement looked worse. Either one, in a board deck, is a problem.
Case two: a close rate of 100% that was really 50%
In an AI sales product we built, a customer with more than one sales pipeline could see a close rate of 100% when the truth was 50%: deals outside the main pipeline went missing. Seven reports read that number, including the alerts and the weekly briefing. We caught it on test data and fixed it at the source, before the client relied on it.
Checks to run before the next update
- One definition per metric. Write down what “active user”, “lead” and “conversion” mean, once, and use them everywhere.
- Separate people from bots before anyone reads a dashboard.
- Check each key metric against a known answer: a small data set where you know what the number should be.
- Test the second of everything: a second pipeline, currency or team is where most metric bugs hide.
- Distrust perfect numbers. A 100% anything deserves a second look.
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The examples in this article come from real engagements. Client details withheld; every figure comes from the client’s own data.
Read the case study →