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Pulsar Analytics

Following a journey with a funnel

A conversion rate tells you it is not working. A funnel tells you where.

In short

A funnel counts how many visitors clear each step of a journey, and where they drop out. You define the steps by page or by event, in the order in which they must happen.

Building a funnel

A funnel has two to six steps. Each one is either a page or an event. Order matters: a visitor is only counted at step three if they cleared steps one and two.

  1. 1 Open the Funnels page from the site tools.
  2. 2 Name the funnel in plain words, for example « Quote request ».
  3. 3 Add the steps in order, choosing a page or an event for each.
  4. 4 Save: the funnel is computed over the displayed period.

Reading drop-offs

The step that loses the most people is not always the one to fix. An eighty per cent drop between the home page and a product page is normal; a forty per cent drop between the basket and payment is not.

Compare each step against what you expect of it, not against the other steps.

Pitfalls when cutting the steps

  • Too many steps. Beyond five or six, each step carries too few people for the gap to mean anything.
  • An optional step. If a page can be skipped, it will show a drop-off that does not exist.
  • Too short a period. Over a few dozen visits, day-to-day variations have no value.

Read next

  • Reading your dashboard The dashboard reads from top to bottom: volume first, then where visitors come from, what they read, and what they do. Every row in a list is clickable and filters the whole page.
  • Setting goals A goal turns a measured event into a tracked conversion. Click the star next to an event in the dashboard, and it appears among your goals from then on, with its conversion rate.
  • Seeing where your visitors click A heatmap overlays your visitors' clicks and scrolling on a screenshot of the page. It is enabled page by page, on the addresses you choose.
  • Excluding your own visits Add your IP addresses to the account exclusions, and your visits stop being counted on all your sites. The exclusion applies at collection, so immediately and with no effect on history.
  • Why your figures differ from Google Analytics Pulsar almost always shows more visits than Google Analytics, often ten to forty per cent more. The main cause is blocking: extensions and recent browsers block Google Analytics far more often than Pulsar.

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