Funnel Analysis
Reading a journey step by step to find where users drop and why.
Aggregate numbers tell you the product is leaking. A funnel tells you where.
A journey broken into steps
A funnel is a user journey split into ordered stages — visit, sign up, activate, purchase — with the count of users who reach each one. The shape it makes is the point: every step is narrower than the last, and the sharpest narrowings are where the product is losing people.
The value isn't the chart, it's the question it forces. A conversion rate of 4% is a fact you can't act on. A funnel showing that 70% of signups never complete onboarding is a fact you can.
Core insight
The step tells you where; it doesn't tell you why
The trap is stopping at the biggest drop and calling it the answer. A cliff between "added to cart" and "purchased" could be surprise shipping cost, a broken payment step, or a buyer who was only ever comparison-shopping. The funnel narrows the search; qualitative work and segmentation close it.
Segmenting the same funnel — by source, device, new vs returning — often reveals the drop lives in one slice, not the whole. A checkout that's fine on desktop and collapses on mobile reads as a mild average until you split it.
Use the funnel to find the biggest, earliest drop — then treat that step as a question to investigate, not a conclusion to act on.