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 exit at the bottom (buyers). Each step in the funnel represents an action, and at each step, a portion of visitors drop out.
Understanding your funnel is key to identifying where you are losing potential customers and where you should focus your optimization efforts.
E-commerce funnel stages
Awareness (attention)
The customer becomes aware of your online store via Google search, social media, ads or word-of-mouth. Metrics: reach, impressions, traffic.
Interest (interest)
The customer visits your webshop and starts browsing products. They are interested but have not yet made up their mind. Metrics: page views, time on site, product views.
Consideration (consideration)
The customer evaluates specific products, compares prices and reads reviews. They may add products to the cart. Metrics: add-to-cart rate, wishlist additions.
Purchase (purchase)
The customer completes checkout and pays. Metrics: conversion rate, average order value, number of orders.
Retention
Customer returns and buys again. Metrics: return 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:
- Visit → Product view: How many visitors actually view a product? Low numbers may indicate navigation issues.
- Product view → Added to cart: Low rate can mean that product pages are not convincing (bad images, missing info, too high price).
- Added to cart → Checkout in progress: Dropouts here could be due to surprising shipping costs or missing payment methods.
- Started checkout → Completed purchase: Checkout abandonment can be caused by too many steps, forced account creation or technical errors.
Optimizing your funnel
Focus on the step with the highest abandonment rate - that's where you'll get the most impact from improvements:
- Top of funnel (awareness): Increase traffic via SEO, ads and content marketing. Make sure you attract the right audience.
- Mid-funnel (interest/consideration): Improve product pages with better images, descriptions and reviews. Offer filtering and search to help customers find the right product.
- Bottom of funnel (purchase): Simplify checkout, offer multiple payment methods, show shipping costs early and offer guest checkout.
- Post-purchase (retention): Send follow-up emails, offer loyalty programs and 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 → Buy
- Search funnel: Search → Results view → Product click → Buy
- Ad funnel: Ad view → Click → Landing page → Buy
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.