Create and interpret a conversion funnel

A funnel answers whether steps happen in order during a measured visit. It is not a chart assembled from unrelated page totals. Stats4U keeps short-lived progress for defined funnels and stores daily step totals. The definition must exist before the journey can be measured.

Choose steps that express the actual journey

Start with a concrete question, such as whether an offer page leads to a contact page and then to a successfully processed enquiry. Confirm that all relevant pages use the same counter and that the application reports a genuine success event.

1. Open the owned counter in My counters, then Dashboard and tools and Funnels.
2. Enter a short funnel name in Name. Do not use customer names or enquiry contents.
3. Enter two to eight steps in Steps, one per line. Use page: followed by the relevant page path, or event: followed by an event name.

page:/offer
page:/contact
event:form-success-contact

1. Choose Add. The example paths must be replaced with the paths actually used by the website. Up to ten funnels can be defined for a counter.

Prepare the success event separately

The form-success-contact step depends on enabled form measurement and a success signal sent after confirmed application processing. A submission marker alone sends a different event. A funnel definition does not enable or implement a custom form’s success handler.

Test the ordered journey on an owned test installation. Also check a visit that opens the contact page without the offer page: it must not be interpreted as having completed the missing first step. An intervening page or unrelated action is allowed; the defined steps still need to occur in order.

Read starts, progress and drop-off

Select the report period after the funnel was created. Step counts show visits reaching each defined point in sequence. Completion compares completed visits with visits starting at the first step. Drop-off compares a step with its preceding step. A missing denominator is not evidence of a zero-percent success rate.

For an illustrative report only, suppose 100 visits start, 60 reach the second step and 15 complete the last step. Overall completion is 15/100 = 15%. The transition from the second to the last step is 15/60 = 25%. These percentages answer different questions and are not measurements from a real counter.

Respect the measurement boundary

A visit ends after thirty minutes of inactivity or at the day boundary in the counter’s timezone. A return on another day can become another visit. Reports therefore count visits, not unique people, and they do not combine progress across devices. Existing historical page and event totals cannot be converted into past ordered journeys.

Next step

Open the owned counter and define the journey before collecting its results.

Open My counters