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Funnels suit processes with a fixed order — sign-up, checkout, starting a trial. They show how many people are left at each step and where the biggest loss happens.
Where: Product analytics › Behavior › Analysis, with the analysis type set to Funnel.
1. Choose the steps
A funnel has 2 to 20 steps. Each step can be:
- One or more event names (any of them counts), such as "clicked Sign up".
- A page path, with wildcards, such as
/checkout/*.
Each step can also have its own filter — for example, step three only when payment method is card.
Start with three to five steps. With too many, every step looks acceptable on its own and the real problem is spread thin.
2. Set the conversion window
The window is how long people have, from the first step, to finish for it to count. Default 7 days; set in minutes, hours or days, up to 180 days.
As a rule of thumb:
- Sign-up flows: 30 minutes to a day. People who come back later are usually making a different decision.
- E-commerce checkout: one to seven days.
- B2B trial to paid: 30 days or more.
Too short underestimates conversion; too long sweeps in unrelated behaviour.
3. Choose the order rule
- Ordered (default) — steps happen in order, with other actions allowed in between.
- Strict — no events from other funnel steps between two steps.
- Any order — every step happens within the window, in any order.
Ordered is right most of the time.
4. Read the result
For each step you get people, total conversion from step one, step conversion from the previous step, people lost, and the median time from the previous step. The step that loses the most is highlighted — start there.
Then:
- Break it down by device, channel, country and so on, to see whether one kind of user drops at that step. If only mobile users abandon the payment page, the form is probably hard to use on a phone.
- Look at time. A long median time on one step means people hesitate or get stuck there.
- Follow the people who left. Click the lost count to save them as a segment, then see in path analysis what they did last, or watch a few session replays.
Things to keep in mind
- People, not attempts. Someone who enters the funnel several times counts once.
- The last step may fall after the date range. The query extends the end by one window, so someone who enters on the last day of the month and finishes early next month still counts.
- Breakdowns show up to 10 groups, the 10 with the most entries.
- There is no "compare to previous period" for funnels; to compare before and after a redesign, run the two periods separately.
Plans
Free saves 3 funnels, Pro 20, VIP 1 and above unlimited.
Related
- Reading retention analysis — whether people who finish the funnel are still around days later.
- Conversion calculator — whether a change in conversion rate after a redesign is real.