Conversion Funnel
The ordered set of steps a user passes through toward a goal, measured so you can see where people drop out.
Growth & MetricsA funnel is a measurement frame, not a design pattern: define the steps, count unique users at each, and the drop-offs tell you where to look. The discipline is in the definition — steps must be mutually exclusive and in a fixed order, or the percentages are meaningless. A funnel with an optional step in the middle is two funnels reported as one.
The biggest drop is rarely where the team assumes. Long forms get blamed while the real loss sits one step earlier, at a page that failed to explain why the form is worth filling. Fixing a funnel is usually a matter of moving effort later and value earlier, which is why funnel work and onboarding work end up being the same project.
In practice
A B2B site measured demo requests as a single conversion. Splitting it into pricing view → form open → form submit showed 70% of the loss happened before the form opened. Before: the team was shortening the form. After moving pricing above the fold and cutting one qualifying question, submissions rose 34%. The catch — lead quality dipped until the question came back as optional.
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You may ask
Frequently Asked Questions
How many steps should a funnel have?
As many as the user actually experiences, and no invented ones. Three to five observable steps is typical; beyond that the numbers get small and every step's confidence interval widens until comparisons stop meaning anything.
Why does my funnel show more users at step two than step one?
Almost always because the steps are not strictly ordered — users are arriving at step two directly from an email, an ad or a bookmark. Either restrict the funnel to sessions that started at step one, or accept it as an entry point and report it separately.
Related terms
All terms- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)The practice of systematically increasing the share of visitors who complete a desired action, using research and experiments rather than opinion.
- ActivationThe moment a new user first gets real value from a product — the step that turns a signup into someone who has a reason to come back.
- User FlowA diagram of the path a user takes through an interface to finish one task, including every decision point, branch and error state.
- A/B TestingA controlled experiment that shows two versions of the same screen to comparable groups of users to find out which one performs better.
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