Goals in Google Analytics - Part 2 - Funnels

 Now that we have understood what are different types of goals, lets something more about url destination goals - the funnels.

Funnels are usually used to understand how many users are performing the required journey and how many are dropping off in between and from which page.

Now, for example, you have an eCommerce Website and your goal is to track the user journey from adding a product into a cart to completing an order, you can do this using funnels.







 In this scenario, the page which appears when the order is complete will be your destination goal.

Now set the Funnel as On. Here you can define the entire journey you wish your users should perform as shown below.

 

 After saving goal, the goal appears in the goals screen. Now, once you start receiving data, you can check the journey users are performing in Reporting > Conversions > Funnel Visualization

 

 

Now lets understand as to how to make sense from this funnel report. You can see that 25 people arrived at the home page of the website as we had set it as the first page in our funnel setting. Now, My blog has many pages,out of which I had set funnel in such a way that users performing stated journey i.e. home page > Dallas in Snow > Home page > Living as a Student in US will be captured.

Coming back to the funnel report, out of 25 people only 5 people visited Dallas in Snow (Intended Page) and rest 20 people did not follow our expected journey.  Now again in second step after visiting Dallas in Snow Page, only 2 people went to home page while 3 people did not continue the expected journey. And in Third Step you can see that the remaining two people performed the proper journey till the end of the funnel.

Funnels are very useful to understand the visitor journey pattern and make improvements if people are exiting the expected journey in between. For e.g. If you have an eCommerce website and you are using a Funnel to track the order journey of users, and you notice that maximum people are exiting from shipment page, then there is something wrong with either the page, i.e. people might be facing difficulty in proceeding further with order completion or the shipment charges might be too high to buy the product. This information will definitely help us investigate the root cause of our loss of sales from our potential customers. Funnels if used properly can provide us with useful insights about our visitor behavior and thus help us in constructing our website and business policies in a more effective way.

Reference:

The Google Analytics Conversion Funnel Survival Guide. (n.p., n.p. n.p.). Retrieved from blog.kissmetrics.com: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/conversion-funnel-survival-guide/