Playbook: run the post-mortem before you archive the campaign

Playbook: run the post-mortem before you archive the campaign
Dead campaigns get archived and forgotten, which is exactly how the same mistake gets made in the next one. Spend an hour, get a lesson.
The order:
— Write down what you expected, in numbers, before you look at anything. If you cannot state the original assumption, you were not testing. You were hoping.
— Check the tracking first. Not the creative, not the audience. If measurement was broken, everything downstream is fiction and the post-mortem is over.
— Walk the funnel in order: impression to click, click to landing, landing to action, action to confirmed. Find the first stage that missed your assumption. That stage is the subject. Everything after it is noise.
— Ask what would have had to be true for that stage to work.
— Separate what you controlled from what you did not. Both matter, only one is a lesson.
— Write one paragraph you would be willing to show somebody else.
An autopsy nobody writes down is just a bad mood.