What is a Funnel?
A Funnel is a series of actions that you expect your visitors to take as they progress through your website. For example, if you run an ecommerce store your primary goal may be for a visitor to make a purchase but there could be several key steps along the way:
- User arrives on website
- User visits product page
- Use adds a product to their cart
- User visits checkout page
- User completes purchase
These steps make up a relatively simple but very common funnel design with up to five steps. Every one of these steps is a moment where users can potentially exit your funnel. So while it is useful to track how many visitors make a purchase as a primary goal, it can also be useful to track progression through each step of the funnel.
This is where the Matomo Funnels feature comes in as it allows you to track your users progression through key conversion steps towards a goal. The example funnel report which has been simplified below shows that people can and do commonly fall off throughout the funnel. While there have been almost 20,000 visits to the website, only 1778 even made it to the product page. Following that, only 113 actually ended up making a purchase.
This level of funnel analysis can help you to understand exactly which steps your users are falling off at. Armed with this information, you can take steps to optimise the earlier steps of your funnel. The more people that make it through each step, the more people have a chance to convert at the latter stages.
Funnel tracking is available on Matomo Cloud and can be enabled with the Funnels plugin for Matomo On-Premise or Matomo for WordPress. However, you don’t need to embed any extra code on your website itself to track funnels. You only need to configure your funnel within Matomo.