Analytics Goal Conversion Funnel Examples

"In marketing, a conversion occurs when a prospective customer takes the marketer's intended action" -- Wikipedia

The purpose of funnels is to demonstrate user behaviors that lead to conversions, or lead customers away from them.

A Conversion funnel is a means of corralling customers through a channel you design by making their choices of NOT going through each of your options unpleasant or impossible.

Conversion funnels are used to test the paths that we lay out as either Beneficial, or Destructive.

A Beneficial funnel demonstrates the happy path through the UX in our website.

A Destructive path is one that takes users away from true conversion, and shows where they are exiting our funnel.

Funnels should be short and sweet for the desired conversion: e.g. new user signup, purchase, existing versus newly signed up users/customers, customers coming from other websites to yours (by keyword search, display ad, or by referral traffic).

Funnels display the way you WANT customers to complete a conversion, or how they actually ARE completing or not completing conversions.

Google Analytics provides an easy way to create "funnels" that is calls "goals" (current version).

Goals consist of beginning and end urls (or uri's actually within your site), and sub-uri's in between the beginning and ends of the funnel.

When the goal/funnel is created, it provides not just a graphical report, but a fully functional test of the actual user flow that is indicated by the funnel

Funnels can have values, and usually these are attributed to the eCommerce value of the conversion goal, or a fixed value that the user assigns.

Warning: once you create a "goal" in Google Analytics, it's there for life. They can be renamed and edited, but never deleted. If they are edited, the previous conversions are NOT removed, so reporting becomes "interesting" unless the date ranges requested consider the date of last edit.

GA introduced Multi-Channel Funnels last year for the standard free edition. They allow multiple attribution point to be tracked and are a great improvement over single track goal funnels.

GA Premium comes with an Attribution Marketing engine which acts like a turbo-charged version of marketing funnels, allowing companies to track inbound attribution away from the website or mobile app. This powerful feature requires the implementation of goal funnels, events, and it's suggested that eCommerce tracking is implemented.

Each step in a funnel needs to translate to a URL or to a Choice within a page, that leads to another page or pages of options.

Below are examples of Goal / Conversion Funnels from several sources. I included them to offer graphical examples from a wide variety of disciplines to give all of us many types of example graphics to use in presentations.

Graphical examples of conversion funnels:

1. One