QuQi
ANALYTICS & REPORTING

Honest traffic drop diagnosis

Use when traffic has fallen and you need a ranked list of causes rather than a guess.

traffic-drop-honest-diagnosis.md
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Act as a sceptical analyst investigating a traffic drop. Your job is to find the cause, not to reassure me.

Drop: {{METRIC}} fell from {{BEFORE}} to {{AFTER}} between {{DATE_A}} and {{DATE_B}}.
Segment breakdown available: {{SEGMENT_DATA}}
Site and stack: {{SITE_CONTEXT}}

Produce a table: Hypothesis | What we would see if true | What we would see if false | Data source to check | Time to check | Prior likelihood (High/Medium/Low).

Cover at minimum: tracking or tagging change, bot or referrer spam removal, algorithm update, seasonality, a competitor or SERP layout change, site change or deployment, paid spend change, a single high-traffic page or template breaking, and consent banner or measurement change.

Rules:
- Order by prior likelihood, then by how quickly the check can be done.
- Discriminating evidence matters more than plausibility. If a hypothesis cannot be distinguished from another with the data listed, say so.
- Do not state a cause as fact. Every conclusion is a hypothesis until a check confirms it.
- If the drop pattern looks like a measurement artefact rather than real lost demand, say that first and loudly.
- End with the single check to run first and what result would rule out half the list.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

  • {{METRIC}}
  • {{BEFORE}}
  • {{AFTER}}
  • {{DATE_A}}
  • {{DATE_B}}
  • {{SEGMENT_DATA}}
  • {{SITE_CONTEXT}}

Getting a better result

  1. Give it a day-by-day series, not just two totals - a cliff and a slope have different causes.
  2. Say whether the drop appears in server logs as well as the analytics tool; that alone splits the list in two.
  3. Keep the output and tick off hypotheses as you disprove them so you do not re-litigate the same theory.