What are funnels?
Funnels, put simply, are a series of steps your visitors take on your website and the data associated with those steps — how many visitors completed the step, and how many dropped out. This is very common in quantitative analytics as funnels show you where in a process you lose most of your visitors, otherwise known as a bottleneck.
However, funnels can be paired with recordings, allowing you to see exactly why your visitors have left your processes. In this way, funnels can be used as qualitative analytic tool.
Why do I need funnels for qualitative analytics?
Barriers on your pages (things like bugs or too-long forms or buttons that don’t do anything, etc.) can keep your visitors from becoming customers. But with most funnels, you’ll only see where your barriers are in your conversion process. You won’t see exactly what they are.
That’s why session recordings, when paired with funnels, give you the best context to find out why your visitors have left. Recordings will show you exactly what the barriers are in your funnel.
When you have a lot of data and not enough time to watch all your recordings, this is a way to watch the specific, important recordings that can improve your conversions. Funnels are a simplified way to filter for these very important bottlenecks and see the precise problem.
How do I set up funnels?
First of all, you need to set up events for the different stages of your funnel. Don’t know how to do that? Don’t worry! Just check out lessons five and six.
Once you’ve set up your events, you can create funnels with combinations of any kind of event. For example, you can create a funnel that tracks page views (URL events) and click events on different buttons throughout your shopping cart process.
Alright — you ready to create your first funnel?
Start by selecting the events that make up your funnel (1). Then, name your funnel accordingly (2), and save it (3).
That’s it! Because events data is tracked from the minute the Smartlook code is on your website, all data is collected retroactively. Which means your funnel will be visible immediately!
What can I see in my funnels?
Now you’ve got a beautiful new funnel. You can see a graph with the number of users that have made it through each step of the conversion funnel. You can also see the dropout rate between the steps (1, 2, 3). Your conversion rate is shown at the top of the graph (4).
And I can watch recordings of visitors who dropped out, too?
Yep! Just click the “Play Recording” button to see a playlist of filtered recordings from the visitors that dropped out between the steps of your funnel. You can see exactly what happened with, for example, those that abandoned their shopping cart right before checking out.
Customize the filters as you want (1), or even save them as segments for future convenience (2).
Any other features?
Once you’ve built a bunch of helpful funnels, you can use the dropdown menu to switch between all your funnels in one place.
On the right side, you can adjust the date range. The date range provides the window of time all the events of the funnel have been triggered.
The table below the graph shows you detailed statistics for your funnel. Click on any part of the funnel to see specific info for that step.
