The Complete Guide to Templates
A guided tour of the templates DTC teams use to run audits, prioritise experiments, track KPIs and forecast revenue — what each one is for, and when to reach for it.
Templates
Pre-built docs and frameworks — audits, backlogs, dashboards, forecasts — that turn a fuzzy CRO question into a structured workflow.
Templates are the reusable scaffolding behind a working CRO and analytics practice. Instead of starting every site audit, experiment plan or quarterly review from a blank page, a good template encodes the questions worth asking, the columns worth filling in, and the thresholds worth flagging — so the work gets done the same way twice in a row.
On this page you'll find the full set of templates we publish for online stores: CRO and funnel audits, an experiment backlog and reporting format, KPI dashboards, revenue forecasts and growth models. Each one is a downloadable doc and a primer on the topic it covers.
Most CRO teams don't lose to better-resourced competitors. They lose to their own inconsistency — a different audit format every quarter, an experiment log that lives in three Notion pages and a Slack thread, dashboards that contradict each other.
Templates fix that by making the default path the right path. When the next site review is half-filled before anyone opens it, and the experiment backlog already has columns for hypothesis, primary metric, and expected lift, the work compounds instead of resetting.
The templates below are the ones we see drive the most leverage for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento stores between €1M and €15M revenue. Each is opinionated — there's a way to fill it in, and the structure nudges you toward decisions, not just data collection.
Audit templates: finding the leaks
Audit templates are the entry point. Before you optimise anything, you need a defensible map of what's broken, what's working, and what's invisible — and an audit is where that map gets drawn.
The CRO Audit Template walks the full storefront experience — landing pages, category pages, product detail, cart, checkout — scoring each step against heuristics like clarity, friction, trust signals and mobile behaviour. The Ecommerce Audit Template goes wider, covering merchandising, lifecycle email, paid landing experience and post-purchase, so you don't fix the PDP and miss a broken abandoned-cart flow.
The Funnel Audit Template is narrower and quantitative: it takes your GA4 funnel report and forces you to label each drop-off with a hypothesis. Where the CRO audit asks "is this page good?", the funnel audit asks "where is the money leaking, and why?" — those are different questions and they need different worksheets.
Run audits on a cadence, not a crisis
The highest-ROI use of an audit template is quarterly, not when traffic suddenly drops. Scheduling a CRO audit every 90 days means you catch regression issues (a checkout change, a new app's script slowing the PDP) while the cause is still recent — and you build a longitudinal record of what's improved.
Experimentation templates: from backlog to learning
Once an audit produces hypotheses, you need somewhere to put them. This is where most CRO programs stall: ideas pile up in a slack channel, get prioritised by whoever shouts loudest, and never get reviewed after they ship.
The Experiment Backlog Template gives every hypothesis the same fields — problem statement, proposed change, primary KPI, guardrail metrics, expected effect size, traffic required, and an ICE or PXL score. The discipline of writing the row is half the value: vague ideas can't be scored, so they get sharpened before they reach the queue.
The Experiment Reporting Template handles the other end. For every test you ship, it captures the variant designs, sample size reached, p-value or Bayesian probability, segment splits, and — critically — the "so what" decision: rollout, iterate, or kill. Together these two templates make experimentation a system instead of a series of one-off projects.
Test velocity vs. backlog discipline
KPI dashboards: one source of truth
If audits find leaks and experiments fix them, dashboards tell you whether any of it is working. The trap is having too many — a marketing dashboard, a finance dashboard, a Shopify dashboard, all with subtly different numbers.
The KPI Dashboard Template solves that by defining a single weekly scorecard: revenue, sessions, conversion rate, AOV, contribution margin, CAC, repeat rate, and 1-2 vertical-specific metrics (return rate for apparel, subscription churn for consumables). Every number has one definition and one owner.
What makes it useful isn't the metric list — most teams already have one. It's the format: each KPI shows current week, four-week average, and a colour band against a target. That's enough structure to make the Monday review a five-minute scan instead of an hour of "wait, why is that different from the deck?"
Which template to reach for, by job-to-be-done
| Job to be done | Primary template | Time to fill | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnose a sudden conversion drop | Funnel Audit Template | 2-3 hours | Reactive |
| Plan the next quarter's tests | Experiment Backlog Template | 4-6 hours | Quarterly |
| Onboard a new CRO hire | CRO Audit Template | 1 day | Once per hire |
| Weekly leadership review | KPI Dashboard Template | 30 min/week | Weekly |
| Board / investor update | Revenue Forecast Template | Half day | Monthly |
| Post-test decision log | Experiment Reporting Template | 45 min/test | Per test |
| Full storefront review | Ecommerce Audit Template | 1-2 days | Quarterly |
The cadence column matters as much as the template itself. A CRO audit run twice a year delivers maybe 70% of its value; the same audit template run quarterly catches regressions early and builds a year-over-year record that's worth more than any single review.
Revenue forecast and growth models
Forecasting templates are where CRO meets finance. The Revenue Forecast Template projects monthly revenue from inputs you can actually defend — sessions by channel, channel-level conversion rate, AOV by segment, and repeat purchase curves — instead of a top-line growth percentage pulled from last year's plan.
The Growth Model Templates go deeper, building out unit economics by acquisition cohort: blended CAC, contribution margin per order, payback period, and LTV at 6/12/24 months. For a store deciding whether to push paid social harder or invest in lifecycle, this is the worksheet that turns the argument into arithmetic.
Both connect upward to Revenue Intelligence as a practice and downward to the KPI dashboard — the forecast sets the target, the dashboard tracks against it, and the experiment backlog supplies the levers. When those three templates share definitions, planning gets dramatically less painful.
A forecast nobody updates is worse than no forecast
The most common failure mode with forecast templates is treating them as a one-time artefact. Set a monthly 30-minute slot to re-baseline against actuals — if you let the forecast drift for a quarter, you'll spend more time reconciling it than rebuilding it from scratch.
How the templates fit together
Used in isolation, each template is useful. Used together, they form a closed loop: audits surface hypotheses, the backlog prioritises them, experiments test them, reporting captures the learning, dashboards track the aggregate effect, and forecasts project it forward. Every step writes into the next.
That's why we recommend adopting two or three templates first — usually the CRO Audit, Experiment Backlog and KPI Dashboard — before bringing in the rest. A team that runs those three well will get more value than one that downloads all eight and fills none of them in past week two.
Each child page links to a downloadable version of the template plus the longer methodology behind it: what each column means, how to score it, and what the typical pitfalls are. Start with whichever one matches the question keeping you up tonight.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Every template linked from this page is free to download in Google Sheets, Notion, or Excel format. You don't need a Metricuno account to use them, though several integrate cleanly with the platform if you do.
If your conversion rate is the worry, start with the CRO Audit Template. If you already audit but tests aren't shipping, start with the Experiment Backlog Template. If leadership keeps asking for numbers, start with the KPI Dashboard Template. One template, fully adopted, beats five sitting half-filled.
Yes. The templates are platform-agnostic — they reference funnel stages and KPIs that exist on any major e-commerce stack. Where a template asks for data (sessions, conversion rate, AOV), the source can be GA4, Shopify Analytics, or your warehouse.
A checklist tells you what to look at. An audit template tells you what to look at, how to score it, and what to do with the score. The CRO Audit and Ecommerce Audit Templates both produce a ranked list of issues with severity and effort estimates — that's the input to the experiment backlog.
Absolutely — they're designed to be edited. The opinionated structure is the starting point, not a contract. Most teams add 2-3 vertical-specific KPIs to the dashboard (return rate, subscription churn, AOV by category) and tune the audit heuristics for their checkout flow.
Plan for one focused day for a first pass on a single store, then 2-3 hours per quarter to refresh it. The first audit takes longer because you're also calibrating the scoring; subsequent runs are faster because you only re-score what's changed.
The CRO Audit is qualitative-first: it walks the storefront and scores experience heuristics. The Funnel Audit is quantitative-first: it takes the GA4 or Shopify funnel report and forces a hypothesis for each step's drop-off. Most teams run both — the CRO audit surfaces what to fix, the funnel audit confirms where to fix it first.
No — the templates include device-split columns where it matters (audit scoring, dashboard KPIs, experiment reporting). Given mobile is usually 70%+ of sessions for online stores, treating it as a separate audit risks the desktop version becoming the de facto one. Better to score both in the same row.
The Experiment Backlog and Experiment Reporting templates are the direct connection. Audit findings become rows in the backlog, scored hypotheses become tests, and the reporting template captures the outcome and decision. If you run A/B tests in Metricuno, the backlog and reporting templates sync automatically.
Yes, and many do. The audit and dashboard templates are particularly useful for agency onboarding — a standard CRO audit format means every new client gets the same baseline assessment, and the KPI dashboard becomes the recurring deliverable instead of a custom report each month.
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