Funnels

A funnel answers one question: of the people who did the first thing, how many went on to do the next, and the next. Product analytics → Funnels builds one from the product events you already send. The same funnel can sit on a dashboard as a Funnel widget.

Prerequisites

Product events from any source: the Browser SDK, a span you already emit, or the Product events API. Page views and mobile screen views count too.

Build a funnel

1. Open Product analytics and pick the Funnels tab.
2. Add a step for each thing people do, in order. A funnel takes up to ten steps.
3. Read the result below. The funnel is in the URL, so the link you copy opens the same funnel.

Each step is one of three kinds:

A session step is how you start a funnel at a campaign: “arrived from the launch campaign, then signed up, then started a plan”.

Filter a step by a property

Turn on Filter by property to narrow an event step to events that carry a value: plan = "startup", or method = "google" AND source = "cli". Only = and AND are supported. The filter runs when you press Enter or stop typing.

The same event can be two steps with different filters, for example plan_started with plan = "startup" and later plan_started with plan = "scale".

Repeat a step

List the same event twice to ask who did it twice. product_viewed, product_viewed, add_to_cart counts people who looked at two products before adding one to the cart. One event never counts for two steps.

What a funnel counts

Count by picks who is counted:

Within is the conversion window: every step has to happen within that long after the first step. Pick a window that fits the funnel. A checkout fits an hour. Signup to a paid plan needs days.

A person can try more than once. If their first try runs out of time and a later one gets further, the later one is counted. Events in the same millisecond keep the order they were recorded in.

Read the result

• Entered and Conversion are compared with the same length of time before the selected range.
• Time to convert is the median time from the first step to the last, for the people who finished, and the time 90% of them finished within.
• Biggest drop names the step that loses the largest share of the people who reached the one before it.
• Drop-off draws a column per step: who reached it, and above it who left since the previous step. Hover a column for the time between steps and what the leavers did next. Bars draws one bar per step.
• The Steps table lists, per step, the count, the share of everyone who entered, the share of the previous step, how many dropped, the median and p90 time from the previous step, and the three most common things leavers did next.

“Leavers did next” is the first event of a person after the last step they reached. “Nothing after” means they sent no further event in the selected range.

Break it down

Break down by splits the funnel into groups and shows each group’s conversion next to everyone’s:

• where the session came from: referrer, UTM source, medium, campaign, country or site;
• an event property your events carry, such as plan or method.

A person is counted under the first value seen for them in the range. People with no value are grouped as (none). The table lists up to 20 groups, the ones most people entered first.

To look at one group only, use the filters on the left. They narrow the whole funnel to people with a matching session.

Server-side and mobile steps

A step can come from your backend. plan_started usually does, because the browser leaves for the payment page. Count by Person and send the same user_id you pass to identify() in the browser, so the server-side step joins the visit that led to it.

Mobile screen views are page steps: use the screen name as the path. For a funnel that starts before sign-in in a mobile app, count by Visitor and send the same visitor_id (your install id) on every event, before and after sign-in. Maple links a visitor to a user from browser sessions only.

Next steps

• Product events overview
• Product events API
• Build dashboards