The Funnel Report in GA4 – How to Visualise and Increase Revenue and Conversion

So now that we have an understanding of the what, where’s and why’s of the funnel report, let’s dig into some specific use cases.

We’ll explore:

• Ecommerce
• B2B Saas
• Third Sector / Charity
• Email Marketing
• Onboarding process

I’m sure as we go through these you’ll find that the examples used will have uses in other areas and other niches.

These examples are not an exhaustive list and that it’s important to think about your own journeys on your own sites to understand how an exploration report in GA4 can help.

E-commerce

If you have an e-commerce site, knowing and understanding the checkout process is vital. If you can pinpoint areas where your potential customers are dropping out of the checkout process then you can make effective changes. These changes could get the e-till ringing more and help to improve the bottom line.

Whether you have e-commerce set up by Shopify, or Woocommerce (other platforms do exist) or you’ve set up e-commerce tracking with the support from a developer – the events and process should be fairly standard for GA4 tracking.

If you’re looking to understand the events that should be sent for e-commerce tracking, you can read this document from Google here.

The steps you can create are all event-based and would take the form below:

• Step 1: Name: Add to Cart, Event equals Add To Cart
• Step 2: Name: Being Checkout, Event equals Begin Checkout
• Step 3: Name: Add Shipping Info, Event equals Add Shipping Info
• Step 4: Name: Add Payment Info, Event equals Add payment Info
• Step 5: Name: Purchase, Event equals Purchase

You may also find it valuable to add events such as viiew_item_list or select_item at the start of the process.

Note if you are using Shopify, then the Add Payment Info is not a standard event that is sent using the native GA4 connector.

With this funnel set up you can ask:

• Are you losing people at the add shipping or payment info section – and what does that mean?
• Could you find ways to reduce the number of fields required to be filled out?
• Are the payment options available too narrow? Could you add alternative financing if applicable e.g. Klarna or ClearPay?
• Does the free shipping requirement turn people off?

All of these things could be the reason that you are finding a higher abandonment rate at the add payment or add shipping section.

B2B SaaS

Although a Software as a Service (SaaS) organisation might not have a checkout option (although, if you do, you should still follow the process above), there are key journeys that users take that are really important for you to know and understand.

One of these could be a Request a Demo contact form, or a Contact Us page that is your main lead generation form. Both of these could then lead to a thank you page.

The steps you can create may not be as explicit as the checkout process above but might follow the journey below:

• Step 1: Name: Landing Page, Landing page equals {the name of the landing page for your main service/services}
• Step 2: Name: CTA Click, Event equals CTA click {an event you’ve created for tracking the click of your CTAs)
• Step 3: Name: Request a Demo page, Page view equals the Request a Demo page
• Step 4: Name: Thank you page, Page view equals the Thank you page

This would absolutely shift and change depending upon the particular journey for your SaaS business, but you should be able to see clear examples of abandonment across the funnel.

If you are finding people are abandoning at the landing page:

• Is your copy compelling enough, does it clearly provide the solution they are looking for?
• Are the Call to Actions clear enough?
• Are you providing too many opportunities to go on different journeys?
• Are there too many opportunities to click elsewhere?

How about at the Request A Demo contact page?

• Do you ask too many questions? Like, is it really important at this stage to know how many employees they have?
• Are the next steps not clear to the user?
  Are you utilising case studies or user reviews illuminated well enough?
• All of these things will help to illuminate where you are losing your users – and crucially, how you can make a difference.

Third Sector Charity

Charities and the Third Sector are always on the lookout for additional resources to support their vital work. And seemingly, these days, the challenge is greater.

But how good would it be if you were able to understand where you are losing potential donors and supporters? Just a small improvement in conversion rate, for example, could see a big shift in revenue.

Totally hypothetical – If an average donation was £100, and you saw 2 donations a day with a conversion rate of 2% (so 2 in every 100). If you improved that conversion rate to 3%, that would be an additional £36500 – just by being able to improve the conversion rate.

And you could do that by understanding the donation journey:

• Step 1: Name: Landing Page, Landing page equals {the name of the landing page for your main service/services}
• Step 2: Name: CTA Click, Event equals CTA click {an event you’ve created for tracking the click of your CTAs)
• Step 3: Name: Donation page, Page view equals the donation page
• Step 4: Name: Add Payment Info, Event equals add payment info
• Step 5: Name: Purchase, Event equals Purchase

You can see here that I’ve utilised some of the e-commerce tracking – and why not, it’s still an online business.

If you’re finding people leave at the landing page stage, they might find your content not compelling enough, or maybe you haven’t explained what the funds will be used for.

And on the donation page – are you fully reiterating the value of the donation – and what it’s going towards?

At the donation page – again, are you asking for too much information? Or if the information is required, are you explaining why?

Lots of people leaving at the landing page stage? Well, as compelling as the copy is, are you targeting it correctly? You may well be running social or paid ads that are driving plenty of users, but if the targeting is wrong on the ad, then you’re gonna have a bad time.

These are just some of the reasons why you could see some challenges with your donation process – and knowing where those kinks and creases are, could make a huge difference to the organisation – and the people it supports.

Email Readers

Another really useful way of using the Funnel report in the exploration section of GA4 is to understand where you are losing your email subscribers.

If you have asked something of your email subscribers e.g. donate, buy this product, read this page etc, then you should be able to track their progress (and see where they are dropping off).

A typical funnel might look like this:

A segment of Session default channel grouping exactly matches Email

• Step 1: Name: Landing Page, Landing page equals {the name of the landing page for your main service/services}
• Step 2: Name: Scroll, Event name equals Scroll, Page view equals the name of the landing page
• Step 3: Name: Page 2, Page view equals next page of the journey (you could then continue this theme until you complete the journey)
• Step 4: Name: Event Form (this could take the form of the ask you requested in the email).

I included the scroll event so that you can see how far the user gets down the page, it could be an illustration of how the page is reading.

You might find that there is a lot of abandonment at the landing page first step, which might illuminate the task as confusing, or not clear. Ultimately, the content on the page might not reflect what is said in the email or isn’t answering the problems.

If you are finding that your users are getting all the way through to the contact form (or similar endpoint) but then abandoning, then are you asking too many questions? Are you not highlighting the positives again by highlighting the positives again with feedback from your existing customers?

If you know that your email subscribers are large drivers of revenue and support for you, then ensuring that you’re maximising every opportunity by analysing their journey is key.

Onboarding process

Do you have paid clients who need to answer a few more questions? Forum members that you need more info from? Then the onboarding process that you outline in a funnel exploration can really help understand that journey.

An onboarding process can be many things to many people. It could be:

• An HR software company looking to gather business information
• An online forum wanting to gather personal information
• A financial or insurance company looking to tailor their support

I don’t want to be so prescriptive by highlighting specific steps because an onboarding process will be as unique as the product that is being sold.

However, you should understand each step of your onboarding process and create that in your funnel.

This process could be fairly easy if each part of the process is a different page – allowing you to track the onboarding process page by page. But, if the set up is different, you might want to utilise support from a developer or use tag manager, so that each step is tracked by an event, and then you can set that up in the funnel report.

You could even use the time constraint functionality within the steps process. This way you could suggest that each step takes a certain amount of time, and if you are finding that isn’t happening, then maybe there’s a question or functionality that is stumping your customers.

This funnel exploration should really illuminate areas of improvement – if you’re finding abandonment rate is high for one particular step, then you’ll know where those bottlenecks are.