Funnel analysis is a method to visualize and measure how your users progress through a series of steps. You set up a sequence of events and track the the percentage of people that advance from each step to the next. Funnels are great for seeing where users are dropping out of your onboarding flow, or measuring the conversion rate from a free trial to paid plan.
Analyzing funnels is critical for improving
your conversion rates in situations like:
“We now have a much clearer sense of where our users are getting confused or dropping off, and we are continuously identifying new opportunities for improvement and growth.”
– Fareed Mosavat, Instacart
Conversion funnels track the flow of users along an important path in your product. Each step is a distinct user action. A user who completes all of the steps is counted as ‘converted’, so that your conversion rate is the percentage of users who enter the funnel (or, do the first step) that end up converting.
For example, if you’re measuring the onboarding flow for your app, you might track the following events:
Enter email address–>
Create password–>
Set preferences–>
Registration complete
If you’re an e-commerce company and want to set up conversion tracking for the purchase flow, your funnel might have these steps:
View item–>
Add to cart–>
Checkout–>
Enter payment information–>
Purchase complete
These are just a couple examples of mobile app or website funnel analysis — you can measure any sequence of actions in your product.
Funnels help you identify problem areas: you can see where the most users are dropping out before completing the last step. However, most analytics platforms stop here — you can see from your funnel metrics that you have a problem, but you can’t learn anything else about how to fix it.
All you can do is make some guesses — maybe your users are confused, or you’re asking for too much information up front.
Unlike analytics tools that only help you identify the issue but don’t allow you to figure out the why, Amplitude enables you to dig deeper into why some users convert, and others don’t.
Keepsafe allows users to privately save photos and files behind a locked PIN on their mobile devices. The team decided to implement a freemium model, testing different pricing models and 3 different price points. By comparing differences in conversion rate, retention, and overall engagement for each experimental group, Keepsafe found the price point that maximized their revenue.
Every company is different — you need the flexibility to measure your conversion rates in a way that’s meaningful to your business goals. With Amplitude, you have the freedom to custom-define and dig deep with your conversion funnel analysis.
At any step in a funnel, simply click to see what users who dropped off did instead. You can also create a cohort of those users with 1 click to dig deeper into the root cause of the drop-off. Are these users all on an older version of the app that’s crashing? A language problem? Are users from a certain ad source less likely to convert?
You can segment these users and study their other behaviors in Amplitude to drill down to the factors affecting conversion.
In addition, you can send targeted campaigns to these users through one of our mobile marketing partners like Appboy our Outbound.
Conversion funnels work great if you already know the steps a user needs to take, but it’s impossible to know ahead of time every single route a user will take in your product. People often don’t do exactly what we expect them to.
“We heavily use Amplitude’s Pathfinder to get in the heads of our users and understand how they navigate through the product, finding where they’re getting stuck or confused.”
– Anne Yeung, Analytics & Data Warehouse Team, Square
What if you’re missing out on important user behaviors that fall outside of your pre-defined paths?
Pathfinder provides user flows, allowing you to explore the actions your users take from any point in your app or website.
Pathfinder shows you what users do after a chosen start action, or leading up to a chosen end action. You can view paths on an individual event level, unique user level, or session level.
“Using Pathfinder, we distilled onboarding into a sequence of critical events. Doing further analysis on that path showed us that converted vs. non-converted users had a 2x difference in retention.”
– Alex Tew, Founder & CEO, Calm
Segment users by properties or behavioral cohorts and compare their paths using Pathfinder. Surface the different actions that retained and churned users take with only a few clicks. Then, encourage more users to take the best paths and start increasing your conversion, activation, and retention rates.
Instead of guessing at the best funnel steps to conversion, let your users show you what they’re doing.
Instacart’s biggest growth goal is to increase activation: in other words, increasing the the number of people who visit Instacart and then complete their first order.
With Amplitude, the Instacart team gets a complete picture of how users move through key sequences like first time user signup and placing an order. The growth team looks at which steps have the largest drop-offs and compare conversion rates across platforms to identify opportunities for improvement and growth.
By running dozens of experiments on things like landing page design and the order of the signup flow, Instacart improved their landing page to purchase conversion rate by 10% in just a few months.
Read more about how Instacart uses behavioral data for conversion rate optimization
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