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Marketing · Action

Trace your last 300 applications before you buy more ads

Published Nov 13, 2026 · Last checked Nov 13, 2026 · Last changed Nov 13, 2026
The short answer

Before you raise the ad budget, follow your last 300 online applications to the end. Count how many were finished, how many were approved and how many were funded. Fix the step where the most people leave.

Verdict
ACT
For
Community charters. $100 million to $1 billion. Marketing lead, digital banking lead.
Cost and time
No cost. About four hours for the digital banking lead and the marketing lead.

Why

A marketer described a solar installer that got 10 to 20 inquiries a month. During one campaign it got about 3,300 a month. More inquiries put more load on the same follow-up steps. Her advice is to audit what happens after the form is sent. A study in Harvard Business Review tested 2,241 US companies with real inquiries. It found that 23% never answered. A credit union has the same step. A person starts an application for membership or a loan. An ad can only send more people into that same application.

What to do

  1. Pull the last 300 online applications from your application system. Include membership, deposit and loan applications.
  2. Mark where each one ended: started, the who-can-join step, the identity check, the funding step, approved, or funded.
  3. Count the people at each step. Find the step with the largest drop.
  4. For each loan application, write two times: when it came in, and when a person first contacted the applicant.
  5. Open a membership on your own phone, the way a new person would. Time it, and note each place you got stuck.
  6. Ask the fraud team how many of the 300 the identity check turned away.
  7. Fix the largest drop first. Then decide on the ad budget.
  8. Report one number to the board: funded accounts for each 100 applications started.

The rule to check

Use the reports your application system already gives. Do not add tracking code to login pages or application pages. Keep the export inside the credit union, and do not send the list to an agency with names in it.

What can go wrong

The largest drop may sit at the who-can-join step or the funding step. Those belong to digital banking and the core vendor, and a fix can take a quarter. Keep the ad budget where it is until the fix is live.

Sources

Plain text version