Business & growth
What is a conversion funnel?
A conversion funnel is the sequence of stages a potential customer passes through on the way to buying, with fewer people remaining at each step.
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Technical definition
Funnels are described at two levels. The marketing funnel covers awareness, consideration, and decision, spanning channels and time. The on-site funnel covers a measurable sequence of steps, such as product page, cart, checkout, purchase, and is the one analytics platforms report on directly.
The useful output is the drop-off rate between consecutive steps. A funnel report shows how many people entered each stage and what share continued, which locates the step where the largest number of people leave.
In plain terms
A hundred people visit. Forty look at a product. Twelve add it to a cart. Four buy.
Writing those numbers down tells you which step to work on, which is almost never the one you would have guessed.
Why it matters
Without a funnel, improvement effort goes wherever attention happens to fall, usually the homepage, because that is what people look at. With one, the work goes where the loss is.
The practical version for a small business is four or five steps, not a diagram. Count visits, count people who reach the key page, count people who start the enquiry or the order, count people who finish. The biggest percentage drop is your first job. A funnel losing seventy percent of people between cart and checkout does not need better ads, it needs a shorter checkout, and no amount of traffic work will make up the difference.
