Building your first funnel: a sign-up flow, step by step

Funnels are the easiest analysis to start with and the easiest to get wrong. Easy to start because the idea is obvious at a glance: a group of people moves down, fewer at each step. Easy to get wrong because, the first time, everyone wants every step in it.

This walk-through uses a made-up SaaS product to go from "I want to see sign-up conversion" to "I know what to fix". All numbers are examples.

Write down the question first

Don't start from "which steps are there?" Start from "what do I want to know?" For example:

Of the people who visit the pricing page, how many end up signed up — and at which step do we lose the most?

The question sets the start (pricing page) and the end (signed up). The steps in between only need to cover the important forks.

Pick three to five steps

This product's sign-up runs: pricing page → click "Start free trial" → enter email and password → verify email → open the product.

The first funnel uses those five:

1. Page: /pricing
2. Event: click_start_trial
3. Event: sign_up_submit (form submitted)
4. Event: email_verified
5. Event: first_login

Some choices worth explaining:

• Use success events, not click events, for the key points. Step 3 records the submitted form and step 4 the successful verification, not "clicked resend email". The gap between clicking and succeeding is valuable information in itself.
• No optional steps like "viewed the features page". Not everyone passes through it, and including it turns the funnel into "people who saw the features page and signed up" — a different question.
• If you don't have these events yet, let autocapture record the button clicks first and promote the key ones to proper events once you're sure.

Set the window to the real decision time

The window is how long people have from the first step to finish.

Most people complete a sign-up in one visit, but email verification waits for the email to arrive and some click it the next day. So the window here is one day.

At 30 minutes you'd miss next-day verifiers and step 4 would look far worse than it is. At 30 days you'd sweep in people who looked at pricing two weeks ago and signed up today for unrelated reasons, inflating conversion.

Reading the result

Here's the last 30 days (sample data):

9% overall. At first glance the biggest loss is step one — only 30% go from pricing to the trial button. But that step is people weighing things up; many only came to check the price, and 30% isn't bad.

What's odd is step 4. Of the people who submitted the form, only 54% verified their email, with a median wait of four hours. Someone who has filled in the form has made their intention clear, and almost half still didn't make it.

Digging in: why verification loses half

With a suspicious step identified, do three things.

1. Break it down

Split by email domain type (this needs a property on the sign-up event with the email's domain — just the domain, never the full address):

(Sample data)

Company addresses verify far less often. A reasonable guess: verification emails are being filtered into spam by corporate mail rules, or rejected outright.

2. Look at the timing

A four-hour median means most people didn't click straight away; they saw the email much later. Together with the split above, delivery looks even more likely.

3. Watch what the people who left did

Save "submitted but didn't verify" as a segment and open a few session replays. If many sit on the "check your inbox" page for a while and click "resend" several times, you can be fairly sure.

Once you know why

The problem has gone from "sign-up conversion is low" to something very specific: "people with company email don't receive the verification message". The options are clear: check the sending domain's authentication, switch to a sender with better deliverability, add a "didn't get it? use another address" link on the waiting page, or let people into the product first and verify later.

After the change, run the same funnel again two weeks later and compare step 4 across the two periods. Use the conversion calculator to check that the improvement is significant and not a week of noise.

A few lessons

• One funnel answers one question. For another question, build another funnel rather than adding steps to this one.
• Funnels tell you where, not why. Why comes from breakdowns, timing, replays and talking to users.
• Losses at the first step are rarely the point. Pay most attention to losses after intent is clear — every one of those people was nearly yours.

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