Funnel - funnel
A funnel is a model that visualizes the steps a potential customer goes through from first contact with your webshop to a completed purchase. Each step in the funnel represents a phase where some visitors drop out.
What is a funnel?
A funnel is a marketing model that illustrates the customer journey as a funnel. Many enter at the top (visitors), but only a fraction emerge at the bottom (buyers). Each stage of the funnel represents an action, and at each stage, a portion of the visitors drops off.
Understanding your funnel is key to identifying where you’re losing potential customers and where you should focus your optimization efforts.
E-commerce funnel stages
Awareness
The customer becomes aware of your online store through a Google search, social media, ads, or word of mouth. Metrics: reach, impressions, traffic.
Interest
The customer visits your online store and begins browsing products. They are interested but haven’t made a decision yet. Metrics: page views, time on site, product views.
Consideration
The customer evaluates specific products, compares prices, and reads reviews. They may add products to their cart. Metrics: add-to-cart rate, wishlist additions.
Purchase
The customer completes checkout and pays. Metrics: conversion rate, average order value, number of orders.
Retention
The customer returns and makes another purchase. Metrics: repeat visits, repurchase rate, Customer Lifetime Value.
Measure your funnel
In Google Analytics 4, you can create a funnel report that shows the drop-off at each step:
- Visits → Product Views: How many visitors actually view a product? A low number may indicate navigation issues.
- Product View → Added to Cart: A low rate may mean that product pages aren’t compelling enough (poor images, missing information, price too high).
- Added to Cart → Checkout Started: Drop-off here may be due to unexpected shipping costs or a lack of payment options.
- Checkout Started → Purchase Completed: Abandonment during checkout may be due to too many steps, mandatory account creation, or technical errors.
Optimizing Your Funnel
Focus on the step with the highest drop-off rate—that’s where improvements will have the greatest impact:
- Top of the funnel (awareness): Increase traffic through SEO, ads, and content marketing. Make sure to attract the right target audience.
- Mid-funnel (interest/consideration): Improve product pages with better images, descriptions, and reviews. Offer filtering and search options that help customers find the right product.
- Bottom of the funnel (purchase): Simplify checkout, offer multiple payment methods, display shipping costs early on, and offer guest checkout.
- Post-purchase (retention): Send follow-up emails, offer loyalty programs, and provide product recommendations to drive repeat purchases.
Micro-funnels
In addition to the overall purchase funnel, you can analyze micro-funnels for specific flows:
- Newsletter funnel: Sign-up → Open → Click → Purchase
- Search funnel: Search → Results page → Product click → Purchase
- Ad funnel: Ad view → Click → Landing page → Purchase
How to Use Shoporama
Guides that demonstrate the concept in practice
Conversion rate - understand and improve your stats
Understand what your conversion rate means and how to use the statistics page in Shoporama to track your progress...
Abandoned baskets statistics - understand and reduce lost sales
See how many shopping carts are abandoned, what your recovery rate is and how reminder emails help you save lost...
We know online marketing in Shoporama
We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.