Weekly GTM review · bold-reports

Headline

Paid search for Bold Reports was off for the whole period: $0 spend from 2026-10-15 to 2026-11-11, against $3,800.45 in the previous 28 days. Over the same period, demo + trial + contact-sales key events fell 34.05% (153 vs 232), mostly trial registrations (133 vs 207), and Search Console clicks fell 21.21%. Pricing-page views rose 16.87%, so interest held up but fewer visitors converted. No qualified (CRM) conversions were recorded in either period, so pipeline impact can't be measured from ads data.

Score

None. This checklist has no score, so overall_score stays null.

Top 3 actions

1. Decide on paid search and fix qualified-lead tracking first (W1.1, W1.2). Confirm whether the full pause since 2026-10-01 is intended. Before any relaunch, fix the CRM-to-Google Ads qualified-lead upload and apply the 2026-11-12 ads audit fixes. Owner: paid search lead with sales ops | Due: 2026-11-19.
2. Find the cause of the trial-registration drop (W2.2, W2.3). The home page held its sessions (3,213 vs 3,104) but its key events fell from 100 to 58, and /pricing/ had more sessions but fewer key events (2 vs 8). Check the /register flow, the new /pricing/on-premise and /pricing/embedded pages, and how much of the drop was paid traffic. Owner: web / growth lead | Due: 2026-11-19.
3. Win back search clicks on brand-comparison queries (W3.1, W3.2). Brand impressions rose 48.71% but brand CTR halved. New brand queries such as "bold reports alternatives" (818 impressions, position 1.68, 0 clicks) and "bold reports vs telerik reporting for embedded reporting" (265, 0 clicks) earn no clicks. Make sure a page answers each one well. Owner: SEO lead | Due: 2026-11-26.

Findings

Weekly GTM review: bold-reports, 28 days 2026-10-15 to 2026-11-11 (vs 2026-09-17 to 2026-10-14)

Run by: Claude | Data sources: google-ads, google-analytics, search-console, bing-webmaster (partial)

Headline

Ads were fully paused, trial registrations fell by about a third, and organic search clicks fell by a fifth, while pricing-page views rose. Fix tracking and the conversion path before buying traffic again.

Notable changes

• /aspnet-core/report-designer/ (GA4 Direct): 62,706 sessions vs 232,391, with 0 vs 1 key events. This looks like bot traffic and distorts total sessions (88,252 vs 262,726). Without this page, sessions were 25,546 vs 30,335.
• Referral: 6,720 sessions vs 1,902 (+253.31%), but key events fell from 44 to 33. The source wasn't broken down in this run.
• AI Assistant referrals: 305 sessions vs 238 (+28.15%), with 9 vs 12 key events.
• Brand search: clicks 515 vs 682 (-24.49%) while impressions rose to 3,865 from 2,599. Many new long, question-style brand queries show up at positions 1–4 with 0 clicks. These are possibly AI-mode or fan-out queries, but that isn't confirmed.
• Non-brand search: clicks 756 vs 895 and position 11.18 vs 9.65. Head terms "reports" (-19,597 impressions) and "reporting" (-11,500) lost the most. The top non-brand click query is "fake bill receipt" (115), which comes from the free tools and is off-ICP.
• Pricing: /pricing/ views 1,247 vs 1,067. New /pricing/on-premise (39) and /pricing/embedded (33) pages appeared, while the pricing_onprem_fs form submits fell to 9 from 36.

Top 3 actions

1. Decide on the paid pause and fix the qualified-lead upload before any relaunch | Owner: paid search lead + sales ops | Due: 2026-11-19
2. Diagnose the trial-registration drop on the home page, /register and /pricing/ | Owner: web / growth lead | Due: 2026-11-19
3. Earn clicks on brand-comparison queries ("bold reports alternatives", "vs telerik") | Owner: SEO lead | Due: 2026-11-26

Routing: item 1 → demand-gen/paid/ads-account-audit.md and demand-gen/paid/google-ads-strategy.md; items 2–3 → demand-gen/search/seo-geo-program.md.

Proposed changes needing approval

See "Proposed changes (need approval)" below. None applied.

Checklist items

Remember to add these results to the team's shared results log (location TBD).

Not checked

• Bing non-brand clicks and query movers (W3.1, W3.2): get_query_stats returned 1,367,714 characters, which couldn't be processed without a shell. get_rank_and_traffic_stats raised a serialization error, but the error text included daily site-wide rows for 2026-10-05 to 2026-11-10. These give 1,204 clicks and 73,494 impressions for 2026-10-15 to 2026-11-10. The previous period was truncated, so there is no comparison.
• W3.3 coverage errors, manual actions and Core Web Vitals: the connected Search Console tools have no reports for these. Only the sitemaps were checked (0 errors, 0 warnings). Bing crawl issues (404,839 characters) were too large to process.
• W4.1 and W4.2 AI visibility: no AI answer monitoring data exists for Bold Reports yet. Both 2026-10 runs failed because openrouter wasn't connected.
• Microsoft Ads: not connected for this run.
• CRM (BoldSales): not connected, so qualified opportunities from all channels weren't checked.
• Disapprovals (W1.4) were not re-queried. The evidence comes from the same-day ads audit run plus the change history in this run.
• GSC query movers compare only the top 100 non-brand queries by clicks in each period, not the full query set. The full export (over 1 MB) was too large to process.
• Period: the checklist default is last Mon–Sun week vs the week before. pbmaintain supplied a 28-day range, and this run used it. The 4-week-average comparison was not done separately.

Proposed changes (need approval)

None of these has been applied.

1. Google Ads account 7669175401: all campaigns paused → confirm the pause is intended. If relaunching, apply the proposed changes in run 20261112-1547_google-ads-audit_bold-reports_4c1d first. Reason: W1.1. Approver: paid search lead.
2. CRM → Google Ads offline qualified-lead upload: failing with expired events and 0 QUALIFIED_LEAD conversions → fix the connector so it sends only qualified leads within the click window, then verify the uploads. Reason: W1.2. Approver: sales ops.
3. GA4 property 311512500: /aspnet-core/report-designer/ direct traffic looks like bots → once the analytics owner confirms the source, add a filter or exclusion for it. Reason: W2.1. Approver: web analytics owner.

Data sources

• Google Ads (google-ads MCP, run_gaql, read-only): customer 7669175401 (boldreports.com), USD. Queried campaign performance for both periods, enabled campaigns, conversions by action and change_event. The account was identified from the same-day ads audit run.
• Google Analytics 4 (google-analytics MCP, run_report_tool): property 311512500 "Bold Reports - GA4". Pulled channels, events, top landing pages by key events and /pricing* page views. The key-events metric is defined as Reports Trial Registration Complete + demo_fs + contact_fs.
• Google Search Console (search-console MCP, search-analytics, list-sitemaps): https://www.boldreports.com/. The brand split uses queryFilter with the regex bold\s*reports?|boldreport; the regexFilter parameter was ignored by the server. Query-filtered totals exclude anonymized queries.
• Bing Webmaster (bing-webmaster MCP): partial, see "Not checked".
• AI monitoring: reports/publish/bold-reports/ai-answer-monitoring/20261112-1647_ai-answer-monitoring_bold-reports_ccaa/.
• Raw exports in raw/: google-ads_campaigns_previous.csv, google-ads_current_and_conversions.json, ga4_channels.csv, ga4_events.csv, ga4_landing_pages.csv, ga4_pricing_views.csv, gsc_totals.json, gsc_query_movers.csv and bing_daily_traffic_current.csv. Landing-page rows with verification tokens, emails or lead UUIDs in the URL were removed.
• Choices made without an operator: used the supplied 28-day range; used role owners rather than names; used due dates one or two weeks from the run date; left run.json overall_score as null because the checklist is unscored.