# Funnels

> Follow visitors through an ordered sequence of pages, goals and events, and see which step loses the most of them.

A funnel is an ordered sequence of steps on the way to a goal — saw pricing, reached checkout, bought. The report shows how many visits reached each step and, more usefully, how many stopped at each one.

Unlike a goal, a funnel needs nothing added to your site. Its steps are matched against visits you have already collected, so a funnel you create today reports on the past straight away.

## Creating a funnel

Open **Funnels** under Measurement and add one. Give it a name and two or more steps. Each step is one of:

| Step | Reached when | You set |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Page view** | A visitor reaches a page. | The path, and how to match it: equals, contains, starts with, ends with or regex. |
| **Goal** | One of your [goals](https://geoengage.app/docs/analytics/goals) is completed. | Which goal. |
| **Custom event** | Your code calls `GeoEngage.trackEvent()` with this name. | The event name. |

Most funnels are page steps with a goal at the end. You don't need a goal for a step that isn't a conversion — "visited /pricing" is a page step, not something to add to your goals list.

A funnel can have between 2 and 8 steps. Use the arrows to reorder them: the order is the funnel.

## How steps are counted

- Steps are counted **in order and within one visit**. A visit reaches step 3 only if it matched step 2 first, and step 1 before that.
- Matching is forward-only, but it isn't fragile. Someone who opens checkout, goes back to pricing, then returns to checkout has still completed both steps — the order is checked against what happened after the previous step, not against the first time each page was seen.
- Anything in between is ignored. A visit that wanders off to five other pages between two steps still counts, as long as it eventually gets there.
- Only **visits** are counted, the same definition every other report uses: a session with at least one page view.
- A visit that never matches step 1 isn't in the funnel at all. **Entered** is the number that reached step 1, and every step's percentage is a share of that — not of all traffic.

## Reading the report

**Entered** and **Completed** bracket the funnel: how many started it, and how many reached the last step. **Completion** is the share of entrants that finished.

Each step's bar is its share of the entrants, and the line between two steps says how many visits were lost there. The step that loses the most is marked as the **biggest loss** — by count rather than by percentage, because a step that halves twenty visits has a worse rate than one that loses nine hundred, and the second is the one to fix first.

Where a step names one exact page, **Personalize this page** opens the Rule Builder with a rule for that page, so the place people leave leads straight to the change you'd make there.

## Narrowing to a group

The filter bar narrows the whole funnel to one group of visitors — mobile, a country, a channel, new or returning. This is usually where the answer is: a checkout that works on desktop and collapses on mobile looks like a mild drop-off until you filter it.

## When a funnel reports zeroes

- **Nobody reached step 1.** Check the first step's definition, or widen the date range. A page step matching `equals` has to match the path exactly, without the query string — try `contains` instead.
- **A step points at a deleted goal.** That step can never be reached, and neither can any step after it, so the funnel shows a total collapse that comes from its own definition rather than from your site. The funnel page says so when this happens.
- **Two identical steps in a row.** The sequence moves on at the first match, so a repeated step waits for a second occurrence of the same thing. The editor won't let you save this.

## Funnels and goals

They answer different questions and are worth keeping separate:

- **[Goals](https://geoengage.app/docs/analytics/goals)** are what success means. They drive conversion rates, A/B test verdicts and personalization lift.
- **Funnels** are how people get there, and where they stop.

Deleting a funnel changes nothing that was collected — it is only a way of reading data you already have, and rebuilding it later gives you the same history back.

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Source: https://geoengage.app/docs/analytics/funnels