How to use funnel analysis to identify issues and boost conversions

Visitors flow through your site every day, but somehow all that traffic often results in just a trickle of conversions, sales, and signups. With funnel analysis, you can spot where users leave your site so you can optimize the customer journey and increase conversions.

This chapter explains how funnel analysis can help you identify key traffic sources, spot high-exit pages, and make impactful improvements. You’ll also learn how to combine funnel reports with additional analytics insights, enabling you to send more traffic down your funnels to the pages that matter.

What is funnel analysis?

Funnel analysis is the process of mapping the flow of site visitors to a set of specific funnel steps that result in conversions or signups. Businesses use funnel analysis to trace the user journey throughout their website, optimize it, and see how many visitors end up in each stage of the funnel.

There are lots of different types of funnels—marketing funnels, sales funnels, click funnels, ecommerce conversion funnels more—but they all share a common trait: they all narrow toward the end, so the volume of visitors at the top is larger than the volume of visitors at the bottom.

Funnels (also called conversion funnels or sales funnels) are widely used across various marketing and sales functions because they help identify barriers that cause users to leave before reaching a conversion point.

For example, lots of people might visit the homepage of an ecommerce site, but only a few will eventually go on to see a ‘thank you’ page after purchase. In this example, a basic ecommerce funnel conversion path will look like this:

Homepage > category page > product page > cart > checkout > thank you page

Funnel analysis tracks user actions throughout the funnel and tells you how many visitors make it through each step, highlighting problems or areas for improvement in the customer journey to help increase conversion rates and revenue.

3 benefits of using funnel analysis on your website

It's often easy (and tempting) to work on too many parts of your site at once. Funnel analysis helps you understand and prioritize what needs tackling first. Here’s how.

📈 Before you get started: to get the most out of your funnel analysis, first make sure your funnels are set up for success. Use a customer journey map to outline the ideal customer journey and inform the steps of your funnel. Check out our chapter on how to create funnels for more.

1. Find the high-traffic, high-exit pages where people are leaving

Funnel analysis tools visualize the drop-off rate and conversion rate of your main pages, helping you understand when and where potential customers are leaving your website.

Funnel analysis shows the retention and drop-off of site traffic

Knowing where in the journey users drop off helps you to focus your optimization efforts on the biggest opportunities. To lean on the funnel metaphor: finding where users leave helps you plug holes in your funnel and send more traffic through it.

We’ve identified steps in our funnel that were confusing to our customers and caused them to abandon our product. We can easily identify screens that make them get lost and hesitate on what to do next, so then we can fix UX issues and continuously improve. Every small improvement increases conversions around 10 to 20 percent, which is really significant.

—Juan Fernandez, Head of Product at Audiense

2. Determine where high-quality visitors come from

Funnels aren’t only useful for finding issues that need fixing. They can also help you spot successes to double down on—for example, by revealing where your high-converting traffic comes from.

Using a funnel analysis capability from an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare (that’s us! 👋) will help you do this. For example, with Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis, you can compare different segments to see which ones are the most successful at converting.

Funnel analysis in Contentsquare showing comparisons across funnel views

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

They often say that comparison is the thief of joy—but not when it comes to funnel analysis. Comparing funnels in Contentsquare gives you crucial insights to optimize and tailor your funnel flows for different segments. Try comparing:

1. A/B test variants, to see which version has the greatest impact on conversion rates

2. Marketing campaign performance by traffic channels, so you can see where your campaign is driving the greatest return on investment (ROI)

3. New and returning users, so you can identify and nurture behaviors associated with conversion and loyalty

4. Devices, so you can spot any issues specific to desktop, mobile, or app

5. User attributes, such as location, to spot how different user cohorts progress through your funnel

6. Events, like ‘Saved to wishlist’, so you can see which actions and behaviors are linked with conversion or drop-off

3. Help team members and stakeholders make decisions

Funnels are a straightforward way to share where your online business is doing well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Funnel reports are an easy visual aid to use in stakeholder or team presentations—alongside your metrics and KPIs—to help you get buy-in for future optimization work and showcase successful projects. There’s nothing quite like seeing a big red ‘drop-off’ alert to inspire people to take action.

How to perform funnel analysis

At this point, it goes without saying that conversion funnels give you a clearer understanding of user behavior across your site—but you can supercharge your analysis by combining funnels with other complementary tools.

1. See what’s happening between events and pages

After identifying problematic high-exit pages and roadblocks in your conversion funnel, use experience insights to get a more in-depth look at what users are interacting with right before they drop off. Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay offer much-needed context.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps record and aggregate user clicks, mouse movements, and scrolls, showing which elements were clicked (or ignored) and how far down the page users scrolled.

The different types of heatmaps

Placing a heatmap on your high-exit pages helps you spot problematic elements, such as broken links or unseen call to actions (CTAs), that are causing users to drop off.

Session Replay 

Session replays offers renderings of individual user sessions on your website and offers more context to your heatmap insights.

A session replay in the Contentsquare dashboard

Focus on your high-exit pages and watch how people browse, scroll through content, and interact with buttons before they leave your website. Spotting any issues they encounter gives you the data needed to improve your UX design or resolve technical issues to help guide visitors deeper into your site.

🔥 If you’re using Contentsquare

Detected an unusually high drop-off rate in your Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis? Click on the button next to the number of users who dropped. 

This allows you to watch recordings of these specific user sessions, so you can understand exactly what happened at each step—and see what really prevented them from converting.

2. Find out what’s going on by surveying visitors on the page

Heatmaps and Session Replay data can give you a few hypotheses for UX improvements, site performance, or design changes. You can experiment with design changes through A/B testing at this stage (and use funnel comparisons to see how these improvements perform against your old flows), but there’s one key insight that’s still missing: feedback from your users.

Qualitative data from on-page surveys and feedback is an invaluable part of funnel analysis. Instead of making assumptions and guesses about why visitors bounce and don’t convert, you can simply talk to your users and let them tell you why.

Use surveys to get valuable qualitative feedback that informs your funnel analysis

Again, starting with your high-exit pages, set up a website survey with a couple of key questions to learn more:

• What’s missing from this page?

• What’s stopping you from continuing?

• What were you looking for?

• How can we help?

Asking the right open-ended questions allows your visitors to tell you how they feel, in their own words, so you can understand their needs and provide a better site experience.

Use funnel analysis to unlock more insights and improve conversions

By understanding how your funnels actually perform—and discovering how different flows compare to others—you can make data-driven, user-led improvements that result in real growth for your business.

FAQs about funnel analysis