A Conversion Funnel is the name given to the various steps and stages that visitors to your website must complete in order to purchase.

The model works best on e-commerce sites. Product pages typically get hundreds of views, mostly from people researching or just plain window shopping. Some of the people that view product pages add an item to their cart, some of those will continue to the checkout, and some of those will purchase. Some. But not all.

At each stage, people abandon their purchase; this is known as abandonment or “dropping out of the funnel”. The idea of funnel visualisation is that you can see where people are dropping out, and look at ways of improving the pages where people drop out so they’ll stay the distance and buy from you.

Google Analytics has a funnel visualisation feature, but its layout can be confusing. It’s also extremely linear, so if customers duck in and out of your conversion or sales process, the funnel won’t look terribly intuitive.

A lot of marketers are visual, creative people and it always helps to be able to express dynamic flow through a checkout process visually rather than in raw numbers. But if Google Analytics’ funnel visualisation can be confusing, wouldn’t it be great if we can have a simpler, clearer way of visualising funnels?

Step forth Paditrack, a free service that turns your funnels into clear, easy-to-understand diagrams. Paditrack lets you create custom funnels for various interactions on your site, without having to have funnels defined in Google Analytics. You just plug in the URL of the first step, the final step and any steps in between. Paditrack pulls in page views for each page, and converts this data into clear-as-crystal charts. 

You can even apply Advanced Segments to Paditrack’s funnels, which means you can create one funnel diagram for organic search, one for AdWords, one for social media, anything you like.

The key benefit (other than being free) is clarity: if you need to talk to people around your organisation about conversion funnels, they’ll intuitively understand a clear model much more easily.

ABOUT THE AUTHOUR
Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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